To promote sustainability in my personal life my family and I are very active in waste diversion. We are a family of 4 and live in the Town of Markham in the York Region. Both the Town and Region have taken a very proactive approach to recycling. The Town of Markham has a population of over 250,000 and diverts over 70% of its waste, which is tops in Canada. The York region (including the Town of Markham) has a population of 1,000,000 and diverts 65% of its waste from landfills.
The program involves blue and green bins, yard bags and bins and specialized waste disposal depots. Our family is now in the practice of sorting in the house and in the garage which takes little time and effort. Our total solid waste that goes to the landfill adds up to about a half a green garbage bag every two weeks.
The Town is very involved informing the residents what programs are established and new ones coming. They track the results and pass the information on so we can see the difference we are making.
Missiongreen Newsletter
I believe that sustainable practices are important in everyday life. Some people may not be aware that I live in Mexico and work for PFB remotely. We moved to the port city of Manzanillo, Colima 5 years ago this week. Boy, what an eye opener it was when it came to recycling; there isn’t any! It’s a real shock to the system when for years we become so conditioned to recycle only to have it all end overnight. I still remember the first time I threw glass bottles away in the trash.
To us sustainability is more than just recycling. Its obvious to us that the way we currently live on this planet is not sustainable. If you think its bad now just wait until China and India become more modernized and their middle class start to demand the goods that we as a society demand. We were in China in July and the trip blew us away. This country will be the next superpower and their appetite for energy, materials and food will be unprecedented.
So, I believe that unless we change our ways we will not be able to sustain our way of life on this planet. Following are the things that we do to try and live a more sustainable life.
Use only returnable soda and beer bottles.
Buy milk in plastic bags. (Still wasting plastic but less waste than tetra packs)
Compost all waste vegetable material.
No longer use plastic bag liners in trash bins in the house.
Take and use my own plastic bags for buying vegetables at the supermarket.
Take and use my own shopping bags at the supermarket.
Turn off all electrical devices at the wall when they are not in use.
Use compact fluorescent bulbs throughout the house.
Don’t use any air conditioning; we installed ceiling fans throughout the house instead.
Run the pool pump for only 2 hours per day.
Diverted gray water from laundry and kitchen to water the gardens.
Own a Honda Fit, a small low gas usage car.
We live in a gated community comprised of approximately 170 lots; 130 have been built on. This community was set up as a condominium and is 30 years old this year. I joined the board of directors last year as the secretary. Even though this wasn’t planned, the president and I fired our old manager and hired a new one. One of my prerequisites was to hire a manager who had somewhat of an environmental outlook.
This year our manager and engineer presented plans to replace our office air conditioning and tennis court lighting with more energy efficient ones. Payback from lower electrical costs is 18 months. They also presented a plan to do a trial gray water system that will turn our sewerage into irrigation water. If this phase is successful we could implement it throughout our community for common areas irrigation and save ourselves $4,000,000 over 10 years. Water is becoming very scarce in Mexico and hence is becoming more expensive. We may also be in a situation where we will have excess gray water that we can sell to individual homeowners for irrigating their private lots. I will be promoting and selling this solution to the homeowners at the next AGM.
Another area that needs looking at this year is our street lighting. I have been given the task to work with our manager to present a new lighting solution to the board. We currently have 140 poles using 100 watt sodium bulbs, and lamps that do not focus the light. I have identified a fluorescent induction solution that produces a more quality light with similar lumens by using 40 watt bulbs. I will be presenting and selling this solution as well at the next AGM.
I have also been given the task to rewrite our community by-laws and construction regulations. I managed to get board agreement to allow the installation of solar electrical panels, solar hot water heating systems and pool solar heating panels on roofs. Previously none of these solutions were permitted due to aesthetic concerns.
Next year I plan on trying to find a company who will collect recyclables such as newsprint, cardboard, glass, plastic and cans. Fortunately, the high price of oil has made these recyclables more desirable. Manzanillo has the biggest port on the Pacific side of Mexico so the chance of companies establishing here to collect and ship recycled products to Asia for processing is more likely.
We are in the process of building a new house; in the same community. These are the sustainable features we are doing in conjunction with this project. The house will be completed in March next year; hopefully:
Solar hot water system.
Solar pool panels for heating. (Yes, we do feel the cold here in winter when the temperature gets down to a chilly 22 C.
Solar pool pump.
All used water, except for toilets and the dishwasher, will run out onto the lower gardens through at network of submerged piping.
We will use cacti and other low water plants on the upper half of the property.
No air conditioning will be installed but we will plumb the house for it if someone requires it in the future.
We have decided not to install solar electricity at this time. The cost to produce household electricity with this method is still far too expensive; there are no subsidies in Mexico for this. We will wire the house ready for it in the future though. We will wait for the newer technology cells that hopefully will generate more electricity at lower cost. Fortunately the Mexican government passed a law last year forcing the CFE (Comision Federal de Electricidad) to buy back surplus power from a homeowner; similar to what many states in the U.S. and provinces in Canada have done. This negates the need to buy a lot of batteries thereby reducing the overall cost of the system.
I have to be honest here; what I’m about to tell you was done for financial reasons at the time; not sustainability reasons. However, one of the reasons I liked this investment was because it was green and I could watch it grow!
I was born in New Zealand and immigrated to Canada in 1990. NZ has some of the largest areas of man made forests in the world; the species planted are mainly Radiata Pine from California but spruce and Douglas fir are also planted. Due to the climate, it takes 28 years for a pine tree to grow to maturity in NZ. While on a trip back to see my parents in 1985 we spotted an ad in a newspaper advertising forest ownership by way of partnerships. We decided to buy 6% of a 1,000 acre farm that was developed into a forest by a company who specializes in this type of thing. The company also manages the forest on behalf of the partnership. New Zealand is a signatory to the Kyoto Protocol and has just passed legislation defining a system for buying and selling carbon credits. We now have the option to sell the carbon credits instead of harvesting the trees in 2022.
My own home was built with many sustainable ideas incorporated into the structure, but two of the most important original design considerations were along the concept of energy efficiency and durability – I view these two ideas as leading concepts when designing a new structure.
Energy efficiency deals directly with how I am impacting the earth immediately – its green house gases and it’s usage of critical world energy resources plus it’s a significant monthly financial consideration.
Durability is guided by the proper selection of building materials and life cycle assessment. If a building last a 100 years and is easily maintainable then I’m not continually rebuilding a home for my family and this significantly reduces my usage of resources.
We incorporate many features from a very well insulated house using 7 1/4” thick EPS on the roof, to heating with a geo-thermal lake loop system, to a unique on site septic system, dual-flush toilets, to sustainably bamboo floors, low VOC paints, low VOC carpets, to true linoleum floors that are completely recyclable, to high efficiency windows and countertops that utilized recycled granite fabricated into a man-made counter plus other counters are made from a recycled paper, called PaperStone.
