The cup or mug equation
I’ve been wondering about paper cups for a while now. Is it more environmentally friendly to drink from a disposable paper cup, or to drink from a mug and then use a dishwasher to clean it?
At first I figured it must all come down to energy: does it cost more energy to produce the cup, or to clean the mug? But of course there’s more to it than that. My simple equation becomes a bit more complicated when you factor in the embodied energy* in the paper cup (that is, the total energy that was required to manufacture, transport and dispose of the cup from start to finish of its life), and try to weigh that against the potential for reuse of the mug. Then you would have to balance that against the energy cost of each mug reuse, and factor in frequency of use of each, along with the volume and efficiency of production and running… and all of a sudden my notebook is covered with scribbles and I still have no idea what to drink my coffee out of.
I couldn’t find anything conclusive online, and decided to look further. First stop, Lazyweb. A few months ago I posted my question to Yahoo Answers, but didn’t really get anything more than guesses in response.
Then I asked my friend Dom, who is actually a bit of an authority when it comes to paper cups**. She has been collecting them for years now, I think planning to one day make some sort of action-art based work out of her collection. Any time I meet up with her, she’s usually got a couple of cups that she picked up stowed away somewhere. I emailed her about cups and mugs. She said:
I have to check on the latest, but it was, as long as the dishwasher is packed to its limit each time, and it is a well designed dishwasher i.e. energy/water efficient, the mug is best.
but, as part of some new cup work in the future, I will have to re-investigate the facts.
Pretty good, but still not conclusive. I sort of forgot about it for a while.
Then today, via a mailing list I’m on, the link I was looking for for ages. Here’s the science bit:
The energy of manufacture of reusable cups is vastly larger than the energy of manufacture of disposable cups (Table 1). In order for a reusable cup to be an improvement over a disposable one on an energy basis, you have to use it multiple times, in order to “cash in” on the energy investment you made in the cup. If a cup lasts only ten uses, then each use gets “charged’ for one-tenth of the manufacturing energy. If it lasts for a hundred uses, then each use gets charged for only one-hundredth of the manufacturing energy.
But in order to reuse a cup, it has to be washed. The efficiency of the dishwasher, and the efficiency of the energy system that powers it, determine how much energy is required for each wash. Hocking assumed a new, commercial dishwasher running on Canadian electricity, requiring about 0.18 MJ/cup-wash. The total amount of energy per use is this wash energy plus the appropriate fraction of manufacturing energy, depending on the cup’s lifetime. Figure 1 shows how the energies per use of the three reusable cups decline, the more you use them.
The lifetime needed for the energy per use of a reusable cup to become less than for a disposable cup, is called the ’break-even point.” In Table 2, the break-even matrix shows how many uses are required for each reusable cup to do better than either disposable cup.
The results are extremely sensitive to the amount of energy the dishwasher requires for cleaning each cup. Hocking’s choice for the dishwasher, requiring 0.18 MJ/cup-wash, is barely less than the manufacturing energy of the foam cup, 0.19 MJ/cup. If Hocking had chosen even a slightly less energy-efficient dishwasher as his standard, then the reusable cups would never have broken even with the foam cup.
The lesson of this life-cycle energy analysis is that the choice between reusable and disposable cups doesn’t matter much in its overall environmental impact. One should use one’s best judgement.
Which is to say, today I brought a mug to work. They’re nicer to drink out of anyway.
- A note on embodied energy: here’s something I posted on another blog in response to someone who claimed that buying a hybrid is worse for the environment than keeping your inefficient car because it costs more energy to manufacture the hybrid than it will save over the course of its lifetime:
It’s true that the manufacturing of ‘environmentally friendly’ products involves an energy spend in itself. For example, a solar panel would have to be used for 20 years to compensate for the energy footprint it cost to produce the panel.
However, this cost is the case with all products; just because an item does not recoup the full cost of it’s own production, doesn’t mean it has a greater negative impact than standard products. It just has less of a negative impact, which is better than nothing.
This highlights some of the complications of the ‘carbon neutrality’ idea. At the moment, the best one can realistically look to do is offset their effect of their consumption to a certain degree (although this is almost certainly better achieved through more direct and ongoing means than planting trees every time you catch a plane). Even this still leaves us individually and collectively far from compensating for our environmental effects, or living off the means of one planet (in Europe right now, we’re living off three planet Earth — that is, our rate of environmental consumption would require three planets to sustain).
It’s just kind of a bugbear of mine.
** As an interesting aside, Dom once met with the head of purchasing for a very large fast food franchise in the UK to try to get them to move from using plastic-coated paper cups to the squishy white foam type, which are apparently much greener. He said that they knew that the change would make sense environmentally and economically, but that the public had the opposite perception and the marketing campaign required to educate their customers and offset the damage to the company’s perceived greenness would cost too much.
San Francisco
I’ve been in San Francisco for two weeks now, and I haven’t written a word about it. Even when I have things — loads of amazing, great things — to write about, I don’t write. The reason being, of course, that it’s precisely when you’ve got lots to say that the last thing you want to do is sit in front of a computer and write about it.
So I’m left with the impossible task of writing something vaguely interesting and meaningful that encapsulates the whole experience in one go. But right now I’m feeling slightly wrecked, I’ve had too many inputs and not enough sleep for two weeks now, and I’m feeling a bit fazed. Happy but tired, I believe is how people describe it. I’ve had two lovely weeks of working in the Googleplex and exploring one of the most complete and personable cities I’ve ever been to. Now I’ll be taking a few days off before I go home, staying with Nick and family, with no plan whatsoever.
How do I describe San Francisco? Right now I’m on the shuttle bus back into the city from work, and it’s night. It’s a great route once you’re off the freeway, past the airport on the right, which goes on for miles, and then the city seems slowly to rise up on either side. The road cuts a path right into the city, and now there are are other freeways slicing sideways overhead as we go under them. I like to sit in the middle back seat of buses. You can look straight forward, down the aisle and out the front window. If you try to widen your field of vision from this seat, you can kind of imagine the roof and pillars between the windows disappearing away and then you’re just hurtling down the road — try it.
Now we’re getting into the city and the road gets bumpier… my laptop is kind of shaking all over the place. This is the rough part of town. Signs, people, parked cars, shopfronts. I can’t see the dark purplish sky any more, because the tall buildings and yellow lights have moved in.
Here’s my stop.
Thoughts on city cycling (winter edition)
I’ve been a cyclist in Dublin city for about six months now. Its definitely a great way to see a city and is green and healthy and all that. But some days it’s cold, and you’re likely to get rained on about once a week. Unfortunately, wet thighs and soggy socks tend to make urban exploration seem a little less important than, say, a towel and a mug of hot tea.
Its manageable though. Saloman boots, wet pants, rainjacket, gloves and a scarf have all been put to use the last few months. I’ve got good lights, but I don’t wear a helmet. I listen to podcasts on my iPod and I use a draughtmans paper clip to keep my right pant leg clear of the chain, which does the job quite well.
I’m lucky in that I’ve got a fairly safe and direct route to work along the canal. There’s a bike lane most of the way, and although bike lanes unfortunately don’t count for much on the mean streets of Dublin, it’s better than nothing. Paula’s daily journey through the city centre was a bit more treacherous than my commute, and she’s got the scars to prove it courtesy of a left-turning car that cut across her cycle lane without indicating, then sped off.
Best of all is weekend cycling, when it’s bright, you’re not in a rush, there isn’t as much traffic to battle, and you’re free to explore. I’m as useless with one-way systems on a bicycle as I am in a car, but at least on two wheels I can break the rules pretty easily or just hop off and walk.
And now winter is slowly melting off and giving way to spring, and very soon the evenings will start to stretch and dry out some more; ideal cycling conditions.
Russell Schweickart on the Whole Earth
Here is a beautiful description of looking down on earth from space that American astronaut Russell Schweickart delivered in the summer of 1974 to a gathering on ‘’Planetary Culture’’.
Up there you go around every hour and a half, time after time after time. You wake up usually in the mornings. And just the way that the track of your orbits go, you wake up over the Mid-East, over North Africa. As you eat breakfast you look out the window as you’re going past and there’s the Mediterranean area, and Greece, and Rome, and North Africa, and the Sinai, the whole area. And you realize that in one glance that what you’re seeing is what was the whole history of man for years - the cradle of civilization. And you think of all that history that you can imagine, looking at that scene.
And you go around down across North Africa and out over the Indian Ocean, and look up at that great subcontinent of India pointed down toward you as you go past it. And Ceylon off to the side, Burma, Southeast Asia, out over the Philippines, and up across that monstrous Pacific Ocean, vast body of water - you’ve never realized how big that is before.
And you finally come up across the coast of California and look for those friendly things: Los Angeles, and Phoenix, and on across El Paso and there’s Houston, there’s home, and you look and sure enough there’s the Astrodome. And you identify with that, you know - it’s an attachment.
And down across New Orleans and then looking down to the south and there’s the whole peninsula of Florida laid out. And all the hundreds of hours you spent flying across that route, down in the atmosphere, all that is friendly again. And you go out across the Atlantic Ocean and back across Africa.
And you do it again and again and again.
And that identity - that you identify with Houston, and then you identify with Los Angeles, and Phoenix and New orleans and everything. And the next thing you recognize in yourself, is you’re identifying with North Africa. You look forward to that, you anticipate it. And there it is. That whole process begins to shift of what it is you identify with. When you go around it in an hour and a half you begin to recognize that your identity is with that whole thing. And that makes a change.
You look down there and you can’t imagine how many borders and boundaries you crossed again and again and again. And you don’t even see ’em. At that wake-up scene - the MID-EAST - you know there are hundreds of people killing each other over some imaginary line that you can’t see. From where you see it, the thing is a whole, and it’s so beautiful. And you wish you could take one from each side in hand and say, “Look at it from this perspective. Look at that. What’s important?”
And so a little later on, your friend, again those same neighbors, another astronaut, the person next to you goes out to the Moon. And now he looks back and he sees the Earth not as something big, where he can see the beautiful details, but he sees the Earth as a small thing out there. And now that contrast between that bright blue and white Christmas tree ornament and that black sky, that infinite universe, really comes through. The size of it, the significance of it - it becomes both things, it becomes so small and so fragile, and such a precious little spot in that universe, that you can block it out with your thumb, and you realize that on that small spot, that little blue and white thing is everything that means anything to you. All of history and music and poetry and art and war and death and birth and love, tears, joy, games, all of it is on that little spot out there that you can cover with your thumb.
And you realize that that perspective… that you’ve changed, that there’s something new there. That relationship is no longer what it was. And then you look back on the time when you were outside on that EVA and those few moments that you had the time because the camera malfunctioned, that you had the time to think about what was happening. And you recall staring out there at the spectacle that went before your eyes. Because now you’re no longer inside something with a window looking out at a picture, but now you’re out there and what you’ve got around your head is a goldfish bowl and there are no limits here. There are no frames, there are no boundaries. You’re really out there, over it, floating, going 25,000 mph, ripping through space, a vacuum, and there’s not a sound. There’s a silence the depth of which you’ve never experienced before, and that silence contrasts so markedly with the scenery, with what you’re seeing, and the speed with which you know you’re going. That contrast, the mix of those two things, really comes through.
And you think about what you’re experiencing and why. Do you deserve this? This fantastic experience? Have you earned this in some way? Are you separated out to be touched by God to have some special experience here that other men cannot have? You know the answer to that is No. There’s nothing that you’ve done that deserves that, that earned that. It’s not a special thing for you. You know very well at that moment, and it comes through to you so powerfully, that you’re the sensing element for man.
You look down and see the surface of that globe that you’ve lived on all this time and you know all those people down there. They are like you, they are you, and somehow you represent them when you are up there - a sensing element, that point out on the end, and that’s a humbling feeling. It’s a feeling that says you have a responsibility. It’s not for yourself.
The eye that doesn’t see does not do justice to the body. That’s why it’s there, that’s why you’re out there. And somehow you recognize that you’re a piece of this total life. You’re out on that forefront and you have to bring that back, somehow. And that becomes a rather special responsibility. It tells you something about your relationship with this thing we call life. And so that’s a change, that’s something new.
And when you come back, there’s a difference in that world now, there’s a difference in that relationship between you and that planet, and you and all those other forms of life on that planet, because you’ve had that kind of experience. It’s a difference, and it’s so precious. And all through this I’ve used the word you because it’s not me, it’s not Dave Scott, it’s not Dick Gordon, Pete Conrad, John Glenn, it’s you, it’s us, it’s we, it’s life. It’s had that experience. And it’s not just my problem to integrate, it’s not my challenge to integrate, my joy to integrate - it’s yours, it’s everybody’s.
Books, mapped
I’m kind of fascinated by the relationship between literature and place. For a start, those blue cultural plaques that indicate the house that a famous writer once lived in always kind of knock me out, just for their immediacy. I suppose it’s kind of inspiring to think that this, right here, is where so-and-so wandered off in the afternoon to grab some lunch, or clear their heads. George Bernard Shaw lived right around the corner from me once (as did Leopold Bloom). I cycle past Patrick Kavanagh’s bench every day going to work.
Then there’s the recognition of places you already know when reading a book. Dublin has lots of examples of this too (Joyce, of course, O’Casey, Yeats), and I especially sense it in the old pubs here (you can go for pints with Con Houlihan in Madigans or Brendan Behan in McDaids).
All of which is quite the preamble to saying that one of my favourite Google products in ages launched this week: Maps in Book Search. Now every book information page has got a small Google Map showing the locations featured in the book, with links to an extract for each place.
Here’s the map for On the Road showing all of Sal and Dean’s stops:
Book Search is still scanning like crazy, so I’m looking forward to seeing maps of Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy and Iain Sinclair’s Lights Out for the Territory, among others, some time soon.
The Beaver Kid
The recent ‘Reruns’ episode of the always excellent This American Life radio program tells the story of The Beaver Kid.
The kid is Groovin’ Gary, who was happened upon by an aspiring film film director, Tent Harris, in a Salt Lake City parking lot one day in 1979. Harris is trying out his brand new videocamera for the first time when The Beaver Kid starts to act up for the camera, doing impersonations and cracking jokes. Harris tapes him.
The story goes on from there, becoming an obsession for Harris, and ends over twenty years later at the Sundance festival, with the footage being used to open a bizzare and wonderful film by Harris that features Sean Penn and Crispin Glover replaying the meeting and what happened next. As Harris explains in the This American Life program, the guilt he later felt towards The Beaver Kid led him to remake the original footage he shot, trying to somehow change what had happened by doing so.
The film has never been released, but YouTube provides, with the entire film broken into ten seperate segments. Here’s the first part:
The rest of The Beaver Trilogy on YouTube: parts 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.
Me too!
I have nothing important to add, but it would be remiss of me not to point out that I too am totally excited by it all. They really seem to have done a wonderful job and produced a marvelously designed object. Bravo. Plus, we had lots of fun following the whole thing unfolding on IRC and websites.
Just one question though: will anyone be able to develop apps for this thing? It seems like it could be a catalyst for finally launching location-aware software into the mainstream, but it wasn’t really mentioned. I imagine it would require a whole new development platform though, right? Or maybe just an API for Cocoa? Would Cingular try to prevent a VOIP app (they evidently weren’t pleased enough to allow one to be bundled)? Is it UNIX based?
Ok, that was more than one question. No doubt more to come.
I missed my true calling as a hawker
While filling out this form I had a hard time finding an entry in the ‘Occupation’ select box to match what I do. You can tell that the list comes from some dusty old insurance almanac, being almost completely devoid of any reference to more recent professions. In the end the wonderfully mechanical ‘Computer Operator’ was as close as I could get, conjuring up images of me pulling cranks and levers all day long at a giant steam-spewing counting machine.
I also got an insight into some of the many other ways I could be keeping the lights on, which include:
Arborist Armature Rewinding Artificial Inseminator Boxer Canal Operation Cemetery Subdivider Chewing & Smoking Tobacco Digger Driver Dry-Liner Electrotyping & Stereotyping Extraction of Pine Gum Folding Cardboard Boxes Freezer & Locker Meat Provisioner Fur/Gown Trader Gravedigger Gypsum Hawker Hypnotherapist Log Merchant Machinist Mattresses & Bedsprings Milk Agent Money Lender Mushroom Picker Net Maker Panel Beater Pigs Police Protection Pools Collector Pressed and Moulded Pulp Goods Private Detective Railroad Property Lessors Ship Building & Repairing Shoe Repair & Hat Cleaning Service Stonemason Tarmacadam Worker Tree Nuts Wood Pallets & Skids X-Ray Apparatus & Tubes
Three word reviews: latest books
Not a year-end list, but here’s what I read since the last time:
The Areas of my Expertise by John Hodgman Worthy toilet fodder.
Space: Japanese Design Solutions by Michael Freeman Many empty rooms.
Penguin by Design: A Cover Story 1935-2005 by Phil Baines Many design classics.
So Many Ways to Begin by Jon McGregor Quiet, beautifully observed.
Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons This was great.
Ways of Seeing by John Berger A worthy re-read.
How We Are Hungry by Dave Eggers Current favourite writer.
Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami I was disappointed.
Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain Tasty morsel (groan).
On Photography by Susan Sontag Aged but insightful.
Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski. Hard, relentlessly hard.
Tips welcome.