Normal Rockstar

Going Green: Backyard Compost Experiment

My bandmate Glenn has been reading quite a few books these days on composting, so we've been hearing a lot about it on the road as a result. He's been wanting to try building a compost - but he doesn't have his own space to do it right now, so yesterday we decided to start one at my place instead!

There's a bit of a science to building a good compost, and Glenn has read it all, so I was in good hands. Basically, from what I gathered yesterday, a good compost requires just the right combination of carbon and nitrogen. After mowing the lawn, we collected a bunch of the grass clippings - an excellent source of nitrogen. We then pruned back some of the trees in my backyard, providing an excellent source of carbon. We then built a carbon/nitrogen layered pie, so-to-speak:  layer of leaves/branches, then a layer of grass clippings, then a layer of leaves/branches, grass clippings, etc. It's looks pretty good - I'll keep you in the loop in the next number of weeks and we'll watch how it progresses... hence the experiment.

Of course, there's no better way to top off a morning of hard work outside than enjoying a nice cold (root)beer - and we did! We're drinking Fitz's Rootbeer - brewed and bottled in St. Louis. According to Glenn, the only rootbeer connoisseur I know, it's the second best rootbeer in the world. Check out the website and order yourself a case!

Zipcar Revolution

This is one of the coolest ideas of come across in a while (and once again I came across it in my most recent issue of Fast Company). Zipcar is a company that is revolutionizing the way people live in urban centers. It can be a fairly expensive and rather unnecessary thing for someone in the city to own a car. Besides paying for parking all the time, you may only need a car for a few hours every week to run various errands - the rest of the time you're riding public transportation or walking. So the basic idea of Zipcar is that scattered around a major metro center (click here to see a map of where they currently are in the US) they have cars parked in reserved parking spaces. As a member of their service you are given a keycard that allows you to walk up to any Zipcar and unlock the doors, activating your reservation. Then you use the car for an hour or two (or as long as you need it), leave it in a parking space, and walk away. The best part? The low hourly rental fee includes gas and insurance, unlike standard car rental agencies.

Check it out - if I lived in an urban center, I would be a member in a heartbeat!

Rockefeller Christmas Tree goes Green

Have you ever heard of a tree going "green"? I though they were green enough already... It would be more appropriate to say that New York City is going green.
The 84-foot-tall Norway spruce chosen to adorn the Rockefeller Center is covered with 30,000 multicolored light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, strung on five miles of wire.

Using the energy-efficient LEDs to replace incandescent bulbs will reduce the display's electricity consumption from 3,510 to 1,297 kilowatt hours per day. The daily savings is equal to the amount of electricity consumed by a typical 2,000-square-foot house in a month.

Way to go NYC! Read the rest of the story here...

Bottled Water: Healthy or Simply Irresponsible?

The bottled water industry seems to have come under some serious fire recently, and - after finally pulling my head out of the sand and educating myself on some of the issues - for good reason. My bandmate Glenn was way ahead of me on this issue - he posted this back in May after having read this article in a Maclean's magazine.

Well, last night I read this article in the current issue of Fast Company and really had my bell rung. I was amazed to discover that in America last year we spent $15 billion on bottled water - more than iPods and movies combined. Senior writer Charles Fishman examines how complex the mix of social, environmental, and economic issues surrounding the water business can be. He points out the obvious - we don't really need bottled water! - but doesn't just go ahead and brand it as evil.

This was one of my favorite quotes:

"In San Francisco, the municipal water comes from inside Yosemite National Park. It’s so good the EPA doesn’t require San Francisco to filter it. If you bought and drank a bottle of Evian [for $1.35], you could refill that bottle once a day for 10 years, 5 months, and 21 days with San Francisco tap water before that water would cost $1.35."

Yes, I want to be a good steward of my environment - throwing away all those empty plastic bottles seems rather silly (not to mention the millions of dollars we spend importing water from other countries when we have more than enough here in America). But the thing that really gets me is how much we're spending - I'm spending! - on a product that, where I live, is both free and safe.

So - next time you see me with a bottle of water in hand, ask me if it's been refilled. It's such a small thing but can have such a great impact. Will you join me?