San Francisco Approves Policy to Boost Local Foods

San Francisco has just adopted the nation’s first county local food policy that will ensure access to more healthy, sustainable food and reduce greenhouse gas emissions related to food transportation.

San Francisco’s Mayor, Gavin Newsom, issued an executive directive ordering all county departments to survey the land under their control in order to create an inventory of land that can support community gardens. All city-purchased food for city meetings, schools, jails or homeless shelters must be grown locally with sustainable farming practices. Food vendors with city permits must also meet these requirements.

“The stark reality is that hunger, food insecurity, and poor nutrition are pressing health issues, even in a city as rich and vibrant as San Francisco,” said Mayor Newsom in a prepared statement Wednesday. “From the alleviation of hunger, to the need to support local and sustainable agricultural practices, these recommendations form a comprehensive and strategic approach to addressing pressing needs in all sectors of the food system.”

When asked how the cash-strapped city would pay for higher-quality organic food, which may carry a price premium, county officials said the potential savings are two-fold. Food purchased locally saves money through reduced shipping distances and costs, which also trims greenhouse gas emissions. Healthier food may also save the city money on healthcare in the long run: “The city spends a lot of money treating people for diabetes, obesity, heart disease,” said Joe Arellano, spokeman to the mayor. By promoting healthier food and better eating habits, “we can reduce costs on the back end.”

While the new directive only applies to county departments, individuals and businesses can still take action. From growing food in their backyards to visiting farmers’ markets, individuals can still ensure their food is locally sourced. Businesses can also institute policies to source all foods for events locally. To learn more about local foods, consult your local Eco-Consultant or purchase access to Ask Green Irene, a comprehensive green knowledge database with a lot more information.

San Francisco Approves Ambitious Recycling Law

Commentary: While Green Irene fully supports government efforts to reduce waste and greenhouse gas emissions, you can also play a key role in reducing waste by using the Green Irene Composter, which allows you to compost your  food waste. Green Irene has an indoor and an outdoor composter conveniently designed for you to easily compost your food. The end product, deemed “gardener’s gold,” is highly nutritious soil that can help you grow garden plants. You can purchase the composters at ShopGreenIrene. To learn more about recycling and composting in general, contact your Local Eco-Consultant today!

Throwing orange peels, coffee grounds and grease-stained pizza boxes in the trash will be against the law in San Francisco, and could even lead to a fine.

The Board of Supervisors voted 9-2 Tuesday to approve Mayor Gavin Newsom’s proposal for the most comprehensive mandatory composting and recycling law in the country. It’s an aggressive push to cut greenhouse gas emissions and have the city sending nothing to landfills or incinerators by 2020.

“San Francisco has the best recycling and composting programs in the nation,” Newsom said, praising the board’s vote on a plan that some residents had decried as heavy-handed and impractical. “We can build on our success.”

The ordinance is expected to take effect this fall.

The legislation calls for every residence and business in the city to have three separate color-coded bins for waste: blue for recycling, green for compost and black for trash.

Failing to properly sort your refuse could result in a fine after several warnings, but Newsom and other officials say fines will only be levied in the most egregious cases.

Fines for almost all residential customers and many small businesses – anyone who generates less than a cubic yard of refuse a week – are initially capped at $100. Businesses that don’t have proper bins face escalating fines up to $500.

There is a moratorium on fines until at least July 2011 for tenants and owners of multifamily buildings or multitenant commercial properties to get people used to composting. Buildings where recycling carts won’t fit can get a waiver.

“In any scenario there will be repeated notices and phone calls before we even start talking about fines,” said Jared Blumenfeld, head of the city’s Department of the Environment. “We don’t want to fine people.”

The proposal, hailed as an effective way to cut about two-thirds of the 618,000 tons of waste the city sent to landfill in 2007, drew resistance from some apartment building owners when details emerged about a year ago. And some residents were upset over the possibility of inspectors checking their garbage.

The ordinance calls for garbage collectors to leave tags on containers when they spot incorrectly sorted material, but those collectors are only going to view what’s on top of the container and have no intention of going through them, said Robert Reed, a spokesman for San Francisco collectors Sunset Scavenger Co. and Golden Gate Disposal & Recycling Co., subsidiaries of Recology, formerly Norcal Waste Systems.

“Our role is to pick up the garbage and to make recycling as easy and convenient as possible for our customers,” Reed said. “Our collection drivers will not become enforcers.”

City officials would levy any fines, and the legislation doesn’t provide funding for new trash inspectors.

“It doesn’t create trash police,” Blumenfeld said.

Excerpted from the San Francisco Chronicle. Continue Reading.

Understanding Your Home’s Energy Usage

This post was written by Green Irene Eco-Consultant Jeff Horowitz, of Los Angeles, California. Click here to visit his site.

In order to accomplish significant progress in the fight against climate change, we must develop a deeper awareness of and appreciation for the environment.  Part of this awareness and appreciation comes from educating people about the impacts that their daily choices have on the environment; there is perhaps no better place to start than learning about your home’s energy usage.

The reality is that most people have very little connection to how much energy they use. Practicing these simple steps will significantly improve your understanding of energy use and the connection between your light switch and global climate change.

The first thing to do in your quest to understand your energy usage is locate your electric meter.  Most meters are in the rear or side of a house or building, but if you can’t find it, give your utility a call and they should be able to tell you where yours is located.

Next, you’ll want to do a fair amount of experimentation. I suggest getting your kids, spouse, or roommate to help you with this.  Stand beside your meter and observe its movement for a couple of minutes.  Your meter will either be an older analog meter or a newer digital one. If you have an older analog meter, you will see a little wheel that spins around at a continuous rate indicating that electricity (kilowatt hours) is being used.  If you have a digital meter, you will see some numbers adding up.  This directly represents the power that you are currently using.

You’ll then want to go inside and turn off everything in the house.  I mean EVERYTHING.  Turn off the lights, unplug your phantom power loads (which of course you can do with Green Irene’s Energy-Saving Power Strip with Remote), turn off the heater or AC, unplug the answering machine, and even your fridge. Now go back outside and look at your meter. What you’ll notice, if you’ve turned off everything in the house, is barely any movement on the meter because you aren’t pulling much, if any, juice at all.

Once you’ve done that, head back inside and turn EVERYTHING on!  All lights, space heaters, AC, and appliances, and plug in those chargers. Then head back to the meter and you’ll notice it counting up/turning at a very fast pace. Watch it for a minute or two – or until you can’t bear it anymore – and then head in and turn everything back off.

Understanding this connection between your home’s energy usage and your meter will create a mental device that you can use when thinking about energy and cost savings.  You’ll begin asking yourself important questions you never once thought you would: Is the wheel turning fast or slow? Are the numbers shooting up or barely moving?

Try and find out where your energy actually comes from, and more importantly, what effect that energy has on the environment.  For instance, it turns out that Southern California’s fuel mix is much greener compared to the rest of the United States. Dirty coal represents only 11.9% of the fuel mix to generate electricity in Southern California, whereas it constitutes almost 50% of the nation’s mix.  However, according to Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s 2008 Power Content Label, a whooping 44% of the power in our area comes from coal, significantly higher than the state’s average.  Even more alarming, other sources of energy i.e. renewables such as wind, solar, geothermal, biomass, all of which play a small part in making the juice that turns on our lights, makes up only 8% of the utilities fuel mix.  There is much room for improvement!  Knowing these facts empowers you, the consumer, to demand the LA Department of Water and Power to decrease its reliance on coal by increasing its renewable portfolio and also to be more conscious of your own energy usage habits.

At the end of the day, what’s important is connecting yourself to what you are doing, what you are a part of, and chances are, you’ll want to do better. So much energy is being wasted simply because we do not know we are doing it. Educate yourself and you’ll not only feel better about wasting less, but you’ll save money at the same time.

As an eco-consultant, my goal is to help inspire, educate, and empower homeowners to live more sustainable and empowered lifestyles. Energy conservation is an area where you have the greatest potential to impact the planet and your wallet. By understanding the importance of your energy usage habits, I can help you get started today in taking small steps towards energy efficiency and a giant step towards going green!

Jeff Horowitz
http://www.greenirene.com/jeffla

Photo credit: MrBeck, Flickr. Used with permission under a Creative Commons license.

California Association Backs 20% Water Use Reduction

Commentary: Green Irene offers products and services that can help your home or office begin reducing its water use immediately. Our Green Home and Green Office Makeovers are your first step to assessing what you can do to reduce your water use and your overall footprint. You can find a Local Green Irene Eco-Consultant right away to schedule an appointment. Green Irene also carries various products at ShopGreenIrene that can help your home or office begin reducing water use right away. Finally, Green Irene’s greenbase contains many tips and techniques that can also help you reduce water use and help California or any other state meet water use reduction goals. Learn more today by contacting your Local Green Irene Eco-Consultant.

The Association of California Water Agencies (ACWA) has formally adopted policy principles supporting the goal of reducing per capita water use by 20 percent statewide by 2020 and committing the association to aggressively support water conservation and water use efficiency as part of a comprehensive solution to the state’s water challenges.

The principles, adopted on March 30 by ACWA’s Board of Directors, express strong support for achieving the 20 percent aggregate reduction in water use statewide in a manner that recognizes local conditions. The conservation and water use efficiency principles give urban and agricultural water agencies flexibility to implement programs that work for their service areas.

The principles are intended to expand on ACWA’s 2005 water policy document, “No Time to Waste: A Blueprint for California Water,” and guide the association as it considers legislative and regulatory proposals on conservation.

“With these principles, we are significantly raising the bar on conservation as an industry,” ACWA Executive Director Timothy Quinn said. “We are making a strong statement in support of achieving real reductions in water use statewide. We want to own the goal but ensure local flexibility to get there. We are committed to working with the legislature, state agencies, and other stakeholders to create a policy framework and sound technical foundation to do that.”

The principles state ACWA’s support for measuring, reporting, and monitoring water use statewide as a way of providing accountability and transparency toward meeting conservation goals. They also state ACWA’s support for the use of volumetric pricing wherever appropriate for urban and agricultural water supplies to encourage conservation and efficiency.

The ACWA Board also adopted a formal policy statement on proposals related to Delta Vision. The statement expresses support for the physical solutions laid out by the Delta Vision Blue Ribbon Task Force and the cabinet-level Delta Vision Committee and commits ACWA to work cooperatively to develop an effective governance approach to the Delta.

ACWA is a statewide association of public agencies whose 450 members are responsible for about 90 percent of the water delivered in California. For more information, visit www.acwa.com.

Excerpted from Water and Wastewater Use.

Rosamaria Caballero Stafford
Co-Founder and the Original Green Irene

Seeing The Light To Energy Savings…

Ever wonder how you could live without light? As a resident of this planet called Earth, I feel extremely lucky to have the Sun, it provides me with an enormous amount of light that I need for living. Wait, we all need light for a variety of purposes.

In general we need light to see; but also to grow crops, power our society, and even keep us happy! (Have you ever met anyone deficient of Vitamin D? I was once diagnosed with a red mark on my chart, “Deficient”, and believe me it’s not a happy state of being!) Inside our houses we need light to see and carry out our normal “home” routine. Unlike outside, we need to be careful with light at home because it’s not free! Forgetting to turn off lights and heating can take a toll on the monthly bill. As your local Green Irene, I can help you see the light to energy saving at home! Lighting fixtures at home can draw a large amount of power, perhaps sometimes unnecessarily because there are more energy efficient options. With my Light bulb Savings Calculator, I can determine how much you can save by replacing your old light bulbs with more energy efficient compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs).

For example, if you replaced 57 old incandescent light bulbs of different types with the Green Irene Set of CFLs and your electricity rate is roughly $0.24/kwh, you would save more than $6,000.00 over the lifetime of the light bulbs at a cost of $536. In addition, your home would reduce its carbon footprint by 41,000 pounds of carbon dioxide, which is equal to planting 5.1 acres of trees or taking 3.6 cars off the roads.I know what you are thinking, “Wow, that’s a lot!” Yes it is… imagine making that kind of an impact and saving that kind of money by just replacing light bulbs…

I can help you green up your home and save money by showing you where the energy savings actually are in your home. Simply ask your local Green Irene, that’s me…you’ll be taking an important step to greening up, while saving money.

Contact Lane Kennedy, Independent Authorized Green Irene Eco-Consultant

www.GreenIrene.com/1070lane.sanfrancisco@greenirene.com