DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

In today’s SF Chronicle, reader Rajvinder Kaur offers this boneheaded suggestion for saving energy: “Start using disposable stuff even at home so that you use the dishwasher infrequently.” (I mean no offense to Kaur; perhaps he was misquoted.)

I invite the Chronicle, which printed Kaur’s suggestion without editorial comment, to take Kaur on a tour of the landfills in Alameda county, which are packing away about 2M tons of solid waste per year, to see (and smell) the results of this energy-saving “stragedy.” Tip: wear a biohazard suit.

Maybe I’m dumb, but I can’t fathom how disposable tableware could possibly save energy. Let’s do a quick analysis:

• to buy disposable goods you have to drive to the supermarket, burning gas, oil, and rubber, spraying toxic chemicals throughout your neighborhood
• disposable goods are generally packaged in plastic, which you have to discard. (read on to find out what happens to plastic refuse)
• paper plates and cups can be recycled, assuming a truck comes through your neighborhood to haul away the paper, and then big machines shred and crush and bleach the paper, creating more vast clouds of toxic chemicals, including dioxin
• plastic plates, forks, knives, cups, etc., are often made of petroleum products, and when you throw them into the trash they have to be hauled to the landfill, where they decompose slowly for 100 to 500 years
• Styrofoam plates and cups have to be hauled to the landfill, where they’ll sit unchanged for over a million years, because Styrofoam never decomposes

In contrast, Kaur could take a non-disposable plate and glass from the cupboard, a non-disposable knife and fork from the drawer, and wash them all off when he’s done, with about a quart of water. Let them air-dry. Total waste: none. Total petroleum consumed while hauling waste: none. Total energy expended: whatever it took to make a quart of warm water.

I respect anyone who tries to reduce energy consumption — especially when my power is out. But to conclude that the best way to save energy is to use disposable goods is to be clueless to the big picture, in which the planet is slowly choking under the weight of its own waste. The casual disregard for what happens after discarding “disposable” goods is irksome; it’s as if there’s no world outside one’s own property lines.

To put a positive spin on this rant, I’ll list some ways to save energy which don’t come at the cost of the health of neighbors and future generations.

• Instead of watching television for hours per day, try reading a book. Share the (fluorescent) light with a friend, kids, spouse.
• Unplug your TV when not in use, to save the “phantom power”
• run only full loads of laundry through your washing machine
• vote to approve construction of the local nuke plant, so long as they bury the radioactive waste in some other county (just kidding)

See also: great tips for saving household energy, great resources for becoming waste conscious and energy efficient

Damn, just when I stopped eating meat, I find a source for boneless human rump roast. Next time someone exclaims, “My ass!,” I can say something witty like “yup, $52/pound” to the confusion of all. (Thanks to Dack for the ManBeef pointer. That is one of the most gross sites I’ve seen this year.)

I’ve never consumed human flesh, but I do know what burning feet smell like. I can’t say the aroma made my mouth water, although maybe that’s just cultural conditioning at work. Or maybe “instep steaks” don’t smell the same as the stew of corns, bunions, and tinea pedis that was roasting at the firewalk.

After writing a piece on firewalking, I had an interesting email exchange with a physicist named Bernard Leikind who has not only walked on fire, but also put forward some theories on why people can walk on 1200+ degree coals without reducing their feet to charred, crackling stumps.

According to Leikind, two factors prevent most of the risk of getting burned during a firewalk: heat conductivity and heat capacity. He summarizes it this way:

Embers have a relatively low thermal conductivity and a relatively low heat capacity. Your foot has a relatively high heat capacity and a moderate thermal conductivity. What this means is that the embers don’t have much energy to give to your foot, and they are not good at getting what they have into your foot, and your foot can absorb a lot without heating up too much.

No one does firewalks across red hot glowing aluminum frying pans, which have high thermal conductivity and high heat capacity, even though they are no hotter than similarly colored embers.

It’s true that there is no ready documentation of people doing “frying pan walks.” But there is at least one documented example of firewalking across hot metal, on Tolly Burkan’s firewalking website. What’s odd and somewhat unsettling about this incident is that Bernard Leikind was there, as was a film crew for the Discovery Channel, and yet the two accounts of the episode are radically different:

• Leikind says Burkan put the metal racks in the fire; Burkan says it was Leikind’s doing.
  
• Burkan says the grill was “glowing red;” Leikind says they were “not very hot” and goes on to deny that they were glowing.
  
• Leikind says they “probably did not” sear the raw steaks they put on the racks; Burkan says they did, “instantly.”

I hate it when facts are in dispute, especially when there is photographic (video) evidence of the facts, e.g. whether or not the racks were glowing red, whether they seared the steaks, whether they were deformed by people’s weight in a way that suggests the metal was softened. At some point, perhaps I’ll locate the Discovery Channel’s video of the event and see for myself which of the two representations I’ve heard is more accurate.

In the meantime, I’ve drawn my own conclusions, which I will leave to your imagination.

While you’re wondering, you might ask yourself if you would ever walk barefoot across 1200° coals. I know from personal experience that this will do less damage to you than the milk you poured on your breakfast cereal, but it doesn’t matter what I know… it matters only, and entirely, what you know.

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I am no fan of advertising, especially dishonest advertising, so I enjoyed Joel Spolsky’s analysis of a recent Earthlink campaign that intends to deceive.

Dan Gillmor of the SJ Merc was also amused, and coerced Earthlink’s VP of Brand Marketing to respond: Our Direct Mail Doesn’t Lie

I’m with Dan (and Joel) on this one; I only attend to such junk mail for as long as it takes to shred it.