Mushroom Walk

September had 20+ days of at least a trace amount of rain here in Virginia, which means our mushroom population enjoyed a renaissance. Tucker loves to find mushrooms and show me (it is always urgent that I drop whatever I am doing to look). I proactively addressed the situation by taking the camera and searching for every mushroom I could find with him in the yard. We got a lot. (Note, this was a couple weeks ago, the crutches have put a damper on these kind of activities for the moment!)

Why I am Stopping Using Cloth Diapers

I just explained how I made cloth diapers work for us. And now I'll explain why I'm ditching them.

Cloth diapers aren't bad, but disposables are definitely easier. The parts I dislike the most are:
1) Dealing with solids on cloth diapers when babies get older (there's a big gross factor)
2) Putting the diapers into the wash (yuck!)
3) Taking the time to stuff the inserts into the diapers after they're dry
4) I don't appreciate the cloth diaper aesthetic; they are bulkier to wear so it makes my babies look like pears.
5) The bulky diapers makes my kids grow out of their clothes faster.
6) Disposables do a better job of wicking water away from a baby's skin. Cloth diapers have cotton inserts which obviously are not the best at wicking and their skin just seems wetter when I change them using cloth diapers (result: more diaper rash)

I'm willing to put up with minor inconvenience for a good reason, but when I sat down to calculate my cost savings today from cloth diapers, I was simply appalled.
When I had been thinking about cloth diapers, I had only been thinking about the time cost, not the monetary cost of laundering. It turns out there is a not insignificant monetary cost associated with the laundering process.

Cost of disposables:
I don't use name brand disposables. I've found that the very best diapers you can buy are Pampers, but that Target, Costco and Walmart all have good store brand alternatives. The worst disposables in my opinion are Luvs or Huggies. The cost of disposables in sizes 2 and 3 (which should take us through between 14-18 months) is 14.5 cents a diaper.

The cost of laundering cloth diapers based on our electric rate of $0.08 per kwhr:
8-11 cents a load for detergent
7-11 cents a load for electricity for our well pump to pump the water
25-55 cents for one hot wash and four cold washes
30-40 cents for the dryer electricity

If I average it all out and divide by the average number of diapers in one of my loads (between 8 and 9), the cost for us to wash a cloth diaper is approximately 11.5 cents. This is a whopping savings of 3 cents a diaper from disposables, or 65 cents a week and $34 a year. (If you had to factor in the cost of buying the cloth diapers the equation would become ridiculous, since each reusable diaper costs about $20, though I got my stash on Craigslist for a lot less.)

When the diapers are bigger, the per diaper cost of disposables increases to about 19 cents, and the per diaper savings skyrockets to 8 cents, yielding a savings of $1.67 a week or $87 a year.

I just want to tell you that my time is worth a lot more than that to me.

Of course, this whole post so far is ignoring the environmental trade off between cloth and disposables. With cloth you're not putting the chemicals that are in disposables next to baby's skin. That's great--but not so great if you're giving them diaper rash by keeping them wet.

The big environmental problem with disposables is the space they take up in landfills. Definitely a significant negative. But a thorough life cycle analysis of the issue in the UK has discounted the landfill aspect of disposables, and found that the manufacture of them had bigger environmental impacts. Even so, the study found that given recent reductions in the energy required to make a disposable diaper, the carbon impact (ie energy use) of disposables is actually less than with reusables if you use hot wash water and if you use a dryer (both of which I do). Check out the UK environmental agency's very thorough report on the subject (scroll to the end for their conclusions): http://randd.defra.gov.uk/Document.aspx?Document=WR0705_7589_FRP.pdf

It'd take more than that UK report to convince me that disposables can be better for the environment (depending on how you wash reusables). But it's interesting that the issue is debatable.

Regardless, this is my take on the situation: bye, bye cloth diapers.

Addendum: I think cloth diapers can make sense, if, like my friend Alison said in the comments below, you have big loads of diapers--two kids in diapers at once, and use them 100% of the time, and have a lot of the diapers so that you do loads as infrequently as possible. Big loads, cold water, line drying: that's what makes them work.

Using cloth diapers

I don't like spending money on diapers. They just go into the trash and you have to buy big boxes again and again for a couple years. In Tucker's second year I bought a batch of BumGenius cloth diapers from Craigslist and started using them. BumGenius diapers are a one-size fits all diaper (so you don't have to buy cloth diapers of different sizes as your child grows), and get among the best reviews of cloth diapers. They definitely cut down on the amount of disposables we bought, and diapering with cloth isn't as awful a process as it sounds. I just started using them again with Molly (there are more important things I was doing in her first couple months... like sleeping).

Our cloth diapering process:
We have a plastic storage bin by the changing table that accepts used diapers. If the baby is eating solids, any solids in the diaper need to be brushed off into toilet. If the baby is not eating solids, just put the diaper right into the storage bin. We haven't had a problem with odors because the lid seals tight, but you could put baking soda in there.

We have 10 cloth diapers, which takes me about 3 days to use, and is about 60% of our total diapering. I never use them for the first two diapers of the day, so that I don't have to deal with cloth diapers during our morning excursions... plus, the childcare workers in the gym get confused when they see a cloth diaper. :)

The wash process:
Front loading washing machines are great for a lot of things, but washing cloth diapers is not one of them. The problem is that they are so efficient with water, and cloth diapers are one of the few things that really do need a lot of water to get clean. It's not hard to get the diapers clean in a front loader, but it just takes more cycles.

Cycle 1:
Rinse/drain diapers to get the most offending stuff off (no detergent)

Cycle 2:
Heavy wash with hot water and cold rinse (detergent)

Cycle 3:
Heavy wash with cold water and cold rinse (no detergent)

It may seem counter intuitive, but a big reason a cloth diaper might smell of ammonia is if too much detergent is used. Too much detergent locks in the smell. That's why it's so critical to have the third cycle with no detergent. I've researched whether washing cloth diapers in a washing machine is sanitary, and the consensus seems to be yes and that bleaching the machine is not necessary. But I still feel better having that third cycle so that my washing machine seems more clean for the next load.

The other important part of cloth diapers is getting them completely dry. Because the inserts in the diaper are thick cotton, they often take more time than a normal load and they need to be done on high.

The laundering process sounds really involved, but now that I have it figured out, it isn't bad (we're around the house a lot in the afternoons and evenings which makes it easy to babysit the washing machine).

My tractor men

Austin rented a tractor this week to plant a native grass meadow in our floodplain. This is exactly what he does for work, so it's neat to have a demonstration site in our own backyard. The cost of the planting is covered with our enrollment in the Conservation Reserve Program which is trying to take marginal floodplain land out of production and restore it for wildlife habitat and to protect water quality.

Maybe you're wondering what grasses are considered native and why it's so desireable to plant them. The types of grasses we planted include gamma grass, indian grass, little bluestem, big bluestem, and switchgrass. They're good for wildlife habitat because they form clumps, so birds like quail can easily run around between plants while protected. They also have extraordinarily deep root systems so they're especially helpful for stabilizing erosion-prone areas.

Because I have the inside scoop on these things (ie I'm married to the contractor), I know that you can also slip in wildflower seeds into the grass mix. So not only are we going to have native grasses, but we'll also have a sprinkling in of everything from coreopsis and black eyed susans to gallardia, false indigo and partridge pea.




Here's a video of Tucker enjoying the tractor... I took one of Austin doing our field, but it is refusing to load up.

Recycling, Part 2

It is pretty difficult to actually find concrete information about which products have the most and least environmental gain from recycling.

The two clear winners for household recycling are:
Aluminum cans
Cardboard

Glass recycling can be either environmentally positive or negative, depending on the application. If glass is made into new glass bottles, that is a positive environmental transaction. But, a lot of recycled glass is of low quality and can only be crushed to use as road fill and other similar applications, which is a net environmental negative.

And I gather that #1 and #2 plastics are much less energy-intensive to recycle than #5.

So... all that is to say, reducing and reusing are much better environmental choices than recycling. Thankfully, as the recycling technology improves, the environmental benefit increases.

Recycling, Part 1

I've had some requests to talk more specifically about recycling, and what makes sense and what doesn't.

The basic idea is that when you are deciding what should be recycled, you have to take a bunch of things into account:
1) how much raw materials are required to make the product in the first place?
2) how much energy is required to make the product in the first place?
3) what (if any) are the industrial by-products of the virgin product's manufacture?
4) how much landfill space would this product take up?

And then, for a recycled product you need to ask:
1) how much energy does it take to convert the product back into a usable form?
2) how efficient is the collection process?
3) how easily does the product get contaminated in the recycling process?
4) are there uses for the recycled product?

You get the idea about all the questions that go into recycling (I'm sure many more could be added to these lists).

The answers to some of these questions depends on where you live. If your locality gets power from coal-fired power plants grandfathered into the Clean Air Act, the extra energy required for recycling could have way more of a negative impact environmentally than if you're in a community that is purchasing energy from a better source.

Also, when you are comparing the environmental effects of recycling versus garbage disposal, you're really comparing a bundle of different types of effects and you are then in a position of comparing apples and oranges. So you need to balance the energy cost of recycling versus the landfill space issues and the raw material issues of virgin products.

So, even in recycling it becomes a values dilemma... what do you care about more, landfills or energy consumption?

Here's a real world example:
"Yet Stonyfield sells yogurt in containers that aren’t recyclable – for a surprisingly green reason. Instead of using recyclable High Density Polyethylene (HDPE; #2 plastic) for its containers, Stonyfield uses hard-to-recycle Polypropylene (#5). The company’s life cycle analysis study indicated that the vast majority of a plastic container’s environmental impact occurs in the manufacture and transportation stages, and polypropylene's structure produces a container with thinner and lighter walls that still hold the same volume of yogurt. The seemingly intuitive notion that recycling always is best for the environment turned out not to be true. Indeed, Stonyfield discovered a fact that would shock many a would-be recycler: Because wide-mouthed HDPE containers like yogurt pots have a higher melting point than more common HDPE products like milk containers, trash haulers usually route those yogurt pots not to recycling facilities but to trash dumps, and only accept them as recyclable to reduce consumer confusion. Had Stonyfield not conducted an LCA [Life Cycle Analysis], it would not have been able to make its informed decision to prioritize genuine waste reduction over recycling practices that only seemed ‘green’."
Source: http://www.awarenessintoaction.com/whitepapers/Life-Cycle-Analysis-Data-Environmental-Business-sustainability.html

To be continued....

Going green

When I went to my 10 year high school reunion and an acquaintance discovered I was in the environmental field, she said "that's so cool! My company just went green last week!" I smiled politely, of course, but really I am more than a bit tired of the current amount of green wash going on. I'm all for environmental sustainability, I even think corporate "design for environment" type programs really neat and sometimes truly innovative. But how does a company "go green" on a certain day? It's not about switching to recycled paper and putting out recycling bins.... Also, every decision has some externality, some environmental consequence, and those consequences aren't always black or white. Take recycling, for example. There are some things that are so inefficient to recycle in terms of energy that it is actually better NOT to recycle a product. Environmental sustainability is truly complex, and a lifestyle, a philosophy, and a process.

Anyway, Austin and I recently installed our forested riparian buffer. The trees are just wee little plugs right now, inside the green tree tubes, but hopefully in not too long it'll look more impressive. Austin is still going to plant the native grasses, and has plans to restore a wetland, bucket by bucket, in the ditched area in the center of our floodplain.

Landscaping for chickens

There are some google searches that just don't pan out no matter how you type them in.

"Landscaping for chickens"
"Poulty-resistant landscape"
"Gardening with chickens"

Apparently, there are not that many other people out there writing and thinking about how to design a yard to be compatible with their favorite flock of free-ranging birds.

What is the compatibility problem, you ask? Well, chickens love to scratch and peck. Nothing is more delightful to a chicken than to kick mulch all around, looking for the insects and grubs hiding in it. How do you have flower beds that look halfway decent, when they are attacked daily by poultry?

One answer, of course, is to contain the poultry. We actually do have our chickens fenced in, but they have taken to flying over the fence to enjoy the freedom of the whole property (except for the one hen that is too bottom-heavy to make the flight). I tried clipping their feathers last summer, and that does work, at least temporarily, till the feathers grow back.

But the thing is, we have a tick problem. A big tick problem (I'll spare you the details, because ticks are gross). And chickens are just about the best non-chemical antidote for ticks (actually, truth be told, guinea hens are even better at tick control but they are loud enough to annoy the neighbors). I would prefer to have messy flower beds, and not lyme disease.

So... the chickens are not going to be banned. Now what?

My tentative answer: intentionally messy landscaping. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Right? I was even thinking of transplanting the evergreen yucca from around our property to anchor one "flower" bed (that's the plant in the picture above), or planting switchgrass and pretending it's an ornamental grass. I could also go the wildflower route, and as an extra bonus any weeds that crop up can be considered volunteer native wildflowers.

Of course, my mom the gardener arrives today, and it's possible she will convince me to go a more traditional route of bulbs and shrubs.