What About a Fridge With No Freezer?

Hey Mr. Green,

I love your column in Sierra, but I felt cheated by your answer to the question about refrigerators in the July/August issue.  Since a few manufacturers make fridge-only models, why didn't you let us know if they are indeed more efficient than the combo fridge-freezers that are most common? It would seem easier to buy one of these outright than to transform a freezer into a veggie cooler.

--Janis in Gambier, Ohio

Yours is a very valid complaint. I got so infatuated with the exquisitely Rube Goldbergian maneuver of converting a freezer to a fridge that I completely ignored the obvious: If you don’t want or need a freezer, you can indeed procure a refrigerator without a freezing compartment. In general, freezer-free models take somewhat less power than combination models of comparable size.

Speaking of size, small remains beautiful. Big units usually require more power than small ones. Hence, in purchasing any kind of refrigerator, you should consider what size you need. Do we truly have to have a 25- or 30- cubic-foot behemoth that eats more than 700 kilowatt-hours per year, or could we get by with a modest 16-footer that requires only 400 kWh?

Also, ask yourself if you need all that function – the ice maker and other gadgetry costs more and uses more energy. Some folks could probably even downsize to the 3.1 cubic-foot Fisher & Paykel fridge-only model with the lowest power demands of all, 145 kWh a year – without diminishing their quality of life.

To explore the possibilities among 1,876 Energy Star-qualified refrigerators and freezers and pinpoint the best one for you, click here to go to a site that lets you create lists of any given combination of types, sizes, brands, and Energy Star ratings. (Energy Star-qualified models are at least 20% more efficient than already required by federal policy.)

To narrow your search to the most energy-efficient fridge-only models, click here.

How to Recycle Propane Canisters for Camp Stoves?

Hey Mr. Green,

I have been trying to find out how best to dispose of or recycle the small propane canisters that we use for our camp stove (the green ones a bit fatter than the size of a jar of pasta sauce). Even our local hardware store didn't seem to know. Do you know?

–Donna in San Francisco

Until very recently, it was impossible to recycle those old canisters for the simple reason that nobody wanted to risk having the gas left in them blowing up or starting a fire. But now—good news for campers—you can heat up the pasta sauce at your campsite and enjoy it even more. Coleman, a major manufacturer of canisters, has introduced a "Green Key" canister. The green key that comes with the canister allows you to make sure all the remaining gas is expelled, thereby averting disaster and making it safe to recycle. To find the nearest recycler that takes them, go earth911.com, follow their instructions, typing in "steel" and your ZIP code.

Numbers to Get Others on the Bandwagon

Hey Mr. Green,

If you carpool to work, recycle and compost, ride a bike often instead of taking a car, turn off lights and electronic devices, don’t leave the water running when brushing your teeth, use reusable cups and plates instead of disposable ones, buy local organic products, and buy energy-efficient appliances, how do you tally that in trees saved or wildlife saved? I need to show the employees at my organization how much a few small actions can change the world for the better. I would like to use figures or stats to do so. Can you help?

–Ellen in Denver, Colorado

That’s a mighty tall and comprehensive order, but here goes: Regarding trees and paper, each person in the United States uses around 660 pounds of paper a year. Assuming the oft-cited 17 trees per ton of paper, this translates into about 1.2 billion trees that could be saved if everybody recycled. Of course, a lot of trees are already being saved because 57 percent of paper is already being recycled.
To be fair, I should point out that there are contrarians who claim recycling actually reduces the total number of trees because it increases paper supply, thereby reducing the economic incentive to plant more trees for pulp.

Regarding energy reduction, the average per-capita carbon dioxide emission in the United States is more than 20 tons per year. If your colleagues cut their energy use in half, which is easily doable by following your advice, they would make a huge reduction in this dreary exhalation, this sigh of a tired and clueless economy. Take the example of cars alone. We now burn about 140 billion gallons of gasoline in our cars per year. If everybody cut their automobile use in half by carpooling and biking, that’s at least 70 billion gallons saved, or 700 million carbon tons kept out of the air.

They’d also save a lot of money. The average car goes about 12,000 miles per year. If it gets 25 miles per gallon, that’s $1,440 at $3 per gallon. If people can get by without a car, they save much, much more, from $5,500 to $9,100 per year, since the cost of owning and operating a vehicle is 55 cents per mile for a small sedan driven 10,000 miles, and 91 cents a mile for an four-wheel-drive SUV.

The number of trees and creatures saved from this reduction is hard to determine, since we don’t yet know what effect global warming will have on populations of flora and fauna. But it sure would cut roadkill rates in half, which by some estimates nails about 1 million deer, 1 million small mammals, and probably many more birds than that (I can’t comment on reptile-and-amphibian mashing, as these are underrepresented in our mammal-centric studies.) Maybe the animal-rights guys should lay off the hunters and focus their efforts on Bambi-slamming cars instead.

As for buying organic, that will obviously reduce pollution because organic products don’t use chemical poisons or fertilizers. This is a very welcome development for wildlife, though it’s hard to get an estimate on how much of it would be saved by detoxifying our agriculture. But when you consider that hundreds of millions of pounds of pesticides are dumped on corn and soybeans alone, and that organic farming reduces this to zero, the benefits are obvious.

Generally speaking, buying local reduces the energy involved in shipping food long distances, but this is very difficult to quantify because of differences in the efficiency of local farmers’ vehicles and the amount they haul per trip. But in many cases, it probably takes less energy to move a tomato 20 miles instead of 2,000.

An Oily Situation

Hey Mr. Green,
What’s the best way to dispose of expired vegetable and olive oils?  I have a couple of bottles that are more than two years old and it doesn't seem like a good idea to pour them down the drain, but they are full so I don't want to put them in the garbage either. –Terri in Glenview, Illinois

From a plumbing perspective (as a side note, I think plumbing is one of the greatest accomplishments in human history), it's always a bad idea to pour oil down the drain. From a composting perspective, I'd hate to see even a drop your old oil added to the staggering 29 million tons of food waste that ends up in the landfill each year. 

"Reduce, reuse, recycle" is the old eco-adage, and “reuse” would apply in your situation. Vegetable oils make good protectants and lubricants, so you can deploy them to polish furniture or silverware, oil squeaky hinges, protect and preserve metal and wood on garden and other tools, oil shoes and kids' baseball gloves and wooden bats, and lube some mechanical devices, though bicycle purists don't recommend it and I'm not sure these oils have the right properties for maintaining guns.

You can even use some vegetable oils to make soap and beauty products. Olive oil in particular has been used for skin and hair protection since ancient times. When those biblical prophets say, “thou annointest me," they're talking olive, not soy, canola, or corn. However, I wouldn't go rubbing on old, rancid oil, or using it for any of the numerous personal-lubricant purposes that you may have heard of. Even if all of these uses were safe--and I'm not sure they are--the odor might well preclude the desired results.

Finally, you could find out whether you can recycle cooking oils as biodiesel by checking that great recycling resource, Earth911.com. Actually, I just checked it for you. The nearest place that takes cooking oil is about 40 miles from your town, in Crest Hill. But it's obviously not worth a special trip.

Are the Big Guys Better at Planting?

Hey Mr. Green,
I’ve seen several recent articles urging people to grow their own vegetables. As a home gardener, I know how much better tasting this produce can be. I also know that many gardeners spend too much on fancy soil and overfeed their plants, wiping out the economic and ecological savings. Being from California, my main concern is water, so I wonder: Do 1,000 home gardeners growing one vegetable plant each use more or less water than one professional farmer growing 1,000 of that same vegetable plant? --Richard in Palo Alto, California

It depends. Varying factors include soil type, local weather, and cultivation and irrigation practices. If the commercial producer uses earth ditches, the amount of water available to the plant can range from 25 to 80 percent of the total water pumped to the field. Other methods, such as drip irrigation, can be up to 100 percent efficient.

If home gardeners apply only as much water as necessary, or use a drip-irrigation system properly, they can be just as water-wise as the most conscientious commercial grower. Or even more so: Garden guru John Jeavons, who did a good bit of garden research right in your town, reports that his “biointensive” gardening methods require less than half the water than conventional production. If, however, home gardeners mindlessly dump excess water—bad for most plants anyhow—they might squander more water than the most reckless commercial grower.

As for fancy fertilizers, and pesticides, in general, you don't need ‘em. I get tomato yields comparable to those of California's commercial growers just by using home-brewed compost and drip irrigation.
Regardless of irrigation needs, I recommend putting in enough vegetable plants to last until next growing season. Rip up some lawn and produce enough to dry, can, freeze, and enjoy through winter. Nothing traps solar energy quite so ingeniously as plants, and a packet of seeds is the most recession-proof investment you can make. It will yield at least a 1,000 percent return.

Thinking Outside (and Inside) the Car

Many environmentally minded folks prefer to buy meat and produce from local farmers, for a number of good reasons. Dealing directly with the grower makes it easier to encourage and support farming practices that conserve the soil, require fewer chemical fertilizers and pesticides, or are completely organic. Also, probably less energy is consumed overall than when food is shipped several thousand miles.

Unfortunately, for many shoppers “local” isn’t all that local. Quite often the nearest farmers market is 25 or 30 miles away. So, readers have been asking if a weekly trip is justified, or if they’re undoing the benefits of local food by driving so far. Not to mention that $4- or $5-a-gallon gas might make virtuous food unaffordable for some consumers. 

To deal with this, the more Spartan among you have pledged to make the trip by bicycle instead of car to conserve energy. I wholeheartedly support this combination of a triathlon training program and a shopping trip, but there are two less strenuous solutions:

1. Take fewer trips--and buy a large volume of whatever is in season. Then can, dry, freeze, or preserve what you can’t eat fresh.
2. Carpool. Well, duh. A no-brainer I never even thought of; it was a reader’s idea. Yep, even those of us who don’t own cars are still locked into the idea of solo driving to the store and to work.

So if you bring several people with you (who would otherwise drive separate cars), the fuel problem becomes much less significant. Have a festive trip. Catch up on gossip, argue politics, discuss methodologies of produce preservation, and take a break from e-mail and text messaging to experience the joys and sorrows of personal communication! And while you expound on the advantages of Slow Food, be sure to drive slow to save more gas.