Recycling Our Silver Scraps

Posted by Tawny on 10 Jan 2008 | Tagged as: silver, Sundrops impact

   
Native Silver   
 After 3 years in business, we finally recycled our silver scraps. Not that we used to throw them away, it just took us that long to accumulate enough scraps (tag ends of wire, bent ear hooks, botched wrappings, tarnished pieces, various failed experiments, etc.) to be worth sending in for recycling.

How much scrap did we produce in 3 years? 9.19 ounces. I could easily hold it all in my cupped hands.

We mailed our scraps to Rio Grande, our supplier of jewelry findings and where we got all our silver in the first place. Rio Grande offers 75% of market value in store credit or 65% of market value in cash. The price of silver was about $14.50 per ounce, and as regular customers we took our $99 in store credit.

  
Molten silver pouring
from a crucible Rio Grande will heat our scraps of sterling silver to 1640° F and pour the molten metal into molds.

   
Drawing wire through a hole
to reduce its diameter. Most of the silver we use is in the form of wire. To make wire, a narrow bar of silver is pulled through a tapered hole in a draw plate, lengthening the silver and reducing its width. The silver is pulled through successively smaller holes to make wires of various sizes. Some of that wire is subsequently shaped into other items, including the ear hooks and jump rings we purchase. We also use 18, 20 and 22 gauge wire.


New sterling silver wire and ear hooks - recycled content unknown.
Although Rio Grande accepts and recycles scrap silver, the recycled metal is not kept separate from virgin metal in the manufacturing process. As Erin blogged previously, we have still not been able to find any sources that publish or keep track of their recycled silver content. In general the precious metals and mining industries have a rather poor record of helping their customers consume responsibly. Consumers would do well do start demanding to know where their metal came from, and how it was extracted.

    1 Comment »

Publicity? Neat!

Posted by Shaun on 14 Dec 2007 | Tagged as: Press

So about a month ago I start getting a bunch of email from Australia. Turns out we were mentioned in a magazine there (thanks!). Today I got another email, we are on the front page of the ENN! Thanks again! Since we are getting a lot of traffic it’s time for a shameless plug: don’t forget to visit our webstore!

    1 Comment »

Getting too political

Posted by Shaun on 11 Dec 2007 | Tagged as: 90% Reduction

I apologize for getting political on you, but sometimes our Federal Government makes me rather angry.

A 16 month in-depth investigation by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has concluded something we already know. Our president is a liar. What’s more he likes to pick things to lie about that will cause the most damage to our species, our planet, our country, and it’s people.

The report can be found on the committee’s website. There is a PDF at the bottom.

    1 Comment »

“Giving”

Posted by Tawny on 13 Nov 2007 | Tagged as: philanthropy

I recently finished reading “Giving” by Bill Clinton (from the library, since I’m a tightwad and trying not to purchase excess consumer goods). Although reviews have been mixed (a few have criticized the lack of attention paid to the failures of government philanthropy) I found it fascinating and inspiring, and by the time I finished the book had quite a lot of little scraps of paper marking the ideas I found most interesting. Sure, it’s true that governments have more money and resources that could be used to promote societal good than most of us do, but the book isn’t intended to be a guide for governments. It is intended to reach out and grab individual readers with its poignant stories of successes by people who are both much more and much less powerful than each of us.

There are hundreds of people and organizations discussed, but I want to mention a few that most interested me, that really made me want to get involved.

I signed up for Kiva, an online micro-loan organization that lets you lend small amounts of money directly to individuals - tiny business loans, but which can have a large impact on the lives of these people and their families. Kiva has actually had so much interest as a result of this book that they restrict the amount you can loan any one person to $25: 20 people loaning $25 each will provide a $500 loan. Over the next few months to years the loan will be repaid, after which you can take your money out or re-loan it to another individual. Global Giving is a similar website that enables you to donate money to a specific project of your choice (topics range from AIDS to Climate Change).

Other types of giving are more traditional: donating money to World Bicycle Relief so they can provide locally-made bicycles to HIV/AIDS healthcare workers and help tsunami victims re-establish their lives; or Heifer International to give animals that produce milk, wool, eggs, meat, and honey to help poor families set up businesses selling excess milk etc. I like these particular charities because they manage to make monetary donations work even harder; the locally-made bicycles create jobs in the area, and Heifer families ‘pass on the gift’ by giving away the first offspring of their animal to a neighbor in similar circumstances.

These are the easy ones in my mind, the ones that only involve money. I would like to get involved with Habitat for Humanity again, partly because I want to learn more about building, especially low-energy homes using green materials. That will depend to some degree on where projects are located - for all the benefits of not having a car, bicycles can be restricting.

    2 Comments »


Enjoying our blog? You will love our store!

90% Reduction: Food

Posted by Tawny on 26 Oct 2007 | Tagged as: 90% Reduction


An American family with all the food
they eat in a week.
 Starting Point: Food

This is the most difficult category to quantify usage and impact. Money isn’t a good metric because buying cheap food from Wal-Mart is certainly not better or less polluting than buying slightly more expensive food at a local farmer’s market (not only is the latter grown locally, it is more likely to be organic, and the all proceeds go to small farmers). Counting food miles is difficult in all but a few stores, and the relevance of the system is controversial.

The method chosen by the 90% Project coordinators is not to compare your usage to the average American, but to set some goals concerning your food sources, and try to live by them. These goals are expressed in terms of trying to get certain percentages of your food intake from the more desirable sources…

Food CategoryGoal
1) Local (or homegrown) and organic:70% of your diet
2) Dry, bulk, unprocessed:25% or less of your diet
3) Conventional, transported goods:5% or less of your diet

Personal food habits
We buy most food in bulk from Costco (categories 2 & 3). For the last couple years we got an organic produce box every two weeks (some of which is not local, especially in winter), but stopped it midway through this summer intending to go to a farmer’s market. Unfortunately, we only went twice. We discovered some difficulties with transporting produce on bikes - squishy fruits don’t handle the jarring of hitting bumps very well if you don’t take a lot of care packing them. I found a couple apple trees next to the recycling bin, and in the spirit of Fallen Fruit I picked a bunch each time I dropped off some recycling - over the summer we made a couple quarts of applesauce, a couple pies, apple challah, and plenty of dried apples for adding to oatmeal and granola and for snacking on all winter. I made a drying rack out of some cube shelving slid between a couple tabletop CD racks I found at Goodwill. Since Denver is so arid, I just left the apple slices on the shelves for a couple days until they were dry.

Although we aren’t particularly good about buying local or organic, we do eat a lot of whole and homemade foods and little highly processed foods (we use a fair amount of canned food though - beans, diced tomatoes, pineapple, etc). I make nearly all the bread we eat, homemade granola, and some pasta (thanks to Shaun’s mom for the pasta machine). I tried making hard cheese once, and sometimes I make yogurt, but it’s not worth it unless there’s a good source of milk. A few years ago I worked at a petting farm for a summer and made lots of fresh goat cheese (the most basic, unripened kind) and yogurt, and brought home eggs every day. I made a bunch of apple, plum, and berry jam at the same time that we are just now finishing up (stretched by our mothers’ wonderful homemade raspberry jam). Sadly, I haven’t found any public fruit in Denver aside from the apple trees.


This 10-person family in Ecuador
grows almost all of their own food.
 I decided to try container gardening for the first time this summer (tomatoes, radishes, peas, etc). Some attempts were more sucessful than others - some plants died while we were out of town for a few days (Denver is dry!), my radishes never really developed (I think I needed some compost/fertilizer but I used the greens in salads), and I only planted enough of each plant to have a single cherry tomato or snap pea at a time to pop in my mouth. First try, I now know better for next year.

My best guestimate of our household food consumption is about 5% local and organic, 50% dry, bulk, and relatively unprocessed, and 45% conventional, transported goods. Not that great by Project standards, but we plan to make better use of farmer’s markets next year.

Obviously, many of us in America could reduce our food impact another way as well: stop overeating. :) Easier said than done, I know.

    No Comments »


Enjoying our blog? You will love our store!

Cars suck, but what about bikes?

Posted by Shaun on 21 Oct 2007 | Tagged as: Electric Bicycle

I do spend a lot of time touting the reasons you should ditch your car, so I suppose it’s only fair that I talk about the downside to bicycles. This week seems like a good time to do it…

…I missed my bus.

Two or three times a week I have to travel an 18 mile round trip to work. Given the distance I usually do this on the bus — It’s a great time to listen to all those podcasts that have been piling up. This is a usually an acceptably good getting-to-work system. However, you are subject to the vagaries of the public bus system. You have to get to the stop 5 or 10 minutes early, because sometimes the bus comes early. You have to hope that the bike-rack on the front of the bus isn’t already full (it only has 2 slots, but since I’m near the end of the line it is pretty much never full). You generally hope that there aren’t any/many crazy people on the bus — I find that earphones work AMAZINGLY well at keeping people from talking to you. Really none of this is all that bad, but, for the first time this week I missed my bus. I had forgotten something and had to go back to the house. Had I been driving to work in a car this would have cost me 5 minutes, rather than half an hour.

…I was caught in the rain

It finally happened. A week or two ago I was biking the afore-mentioned 18 mile round trip and it started to rain when I was halfway home. I became soaked, and very cold. One common question that I get when I tell people that I went car-less is: “What will you do when it snows?”. They have it wrong. It’s not the snow that gets ya, it’s the cold rain. I’d much rather be dealing with snow than 35 degree rain. Snow is slippery, but cold rain cuts to the bone. That having been said: It wasn’t that bad. I just kept peddling and had a hot chocolate when I got home (yummy). It’s also worth pointing out that it’s been 5 months since we bought the electric bike kit and I only now got caught in the rain for the first time.

…Today it’s snowing

Finally: As I’m writing this it is snowing. A lot. Today is the first day that it dropped below freezing here in SW Denver. This temperature drop came on the wings of a pretty good snowstorm. As I write this we have over 3 inches, and it’s sticking to every surface (it’s not melting on contact).

As I mentioned before, everyone seems to think that bikes can’t handle the winter. At least in Denver, I believe this fear to be basically unfounded. The pavement stays uncovered most of the winter. When it snows a lot, as it is today, I’d stay off the road just as much as I would in a car. The real question is what to do with yesterday’s snow. I have to admit that I’m not sure how much the snow will hamper my biking, but I’m happy to bike full steam head first into the winter months and figure it out. Not to sound too high-school-counselor-ish, but: it’s really your attitude that matters. If you think you can’t bike in the winter, you won’t try. If you think you will grab the winter by it’s nether regions and force it to submit to your bicycling will, you will find a way.

It will probably be a different story when I move to Minnesota.

    1 Comment »


Enjoying our blog? You will love our store!

90% Project: Notes on Consumer Goods

Posted by Tawny on 13 Oct 2007 | Tagged as: 90% Reduction

It seems that in my last post I got distracted by telling everybody how well I’d done in this category and forgot to adequately explain the category itself. Oops. :)

The Consumer Goods category basically encompasses spending on material goods that aren’t food or included in any of the other categories they outlined.
    “…what we’re mostly talking about is things like gifts, toys, music, books, tools, household goods, cosmetics, toiletries, paper goods, etc…”
Another thing about consumer goods that I just noticed in their FAQ: local, sustainable consumer goods only count at 50% of their actual cost. That’s one problem with this 90% Project: it defines many things rather arbitrarily and not all in the same place.

    No Comments »


Enjoying our blog? You will love our store!

90% Reduction: Consumer Goods

Posted by Tawny on 24 Sep 2007 | Tagged as: 90% Reduction

Starting Point: Consumer Goods

  • American average:
         $10,000/household/year
  • 90% reduction goal:
         $1,000/household/year

Every dollar spent produces about 1/2 lb of carbon. In the 90% project used goods (e.g. craigslist, yard sales, etc.) count for 10% of what you pay1, and purchases from Goodwill and other thrift stores have no emissions cost2. From Aug ‘06 to July ‘07 we spent…

Yard sale items:       $224 * 10% = $22
Thrift store items:        $54 * 0% = $0
New consumer goods:                      $1,189
Cash transactions:                           $309    
  • Spent in the last 12 months:     $1,520/year, or 15% of the average American
I included all the cash as if it had been used to purchase new consumer goods, even though it was actually spent on a variety of things including eating out, farmer’s market and thrift store purchases as well as new consumer goods. We’re pretty tightwaddy, and I bet that if I could determine where we actually spent that $309 in cash we would be within a couple percent of the goal.

Note: the previous calculations do not include purchasing and assembling our electric bicycles. Another rule of the 90% Project concerning purchases is: Items purchased in order to directly aid in reducing your emissions over the long-term only count for 50% of their purchase price. We bought our bikes at pawn shops (count for 10% of the total $140 we paid), and the e-bike kits, helmets, locks, new tires, etc. count for 50%. The kits cost $484 each, and all the extra stuff necessary to get the bikes in working condition and have carrying capacity added up to $260. So…

Two used bicycles:            $140 * 10% = $14
Two ebike kits:         ($484 * 2) * 50% = $484
New bicycle paraphanelia: $260 * 50% = $130
Total (that counts for the project)          = $628

… the bikes all by themselves are already 63% of our yearly allotment of $1,000. So, although we were only a few percent over the goal during the last 12 months before the bikes, if they’re included I don’t think we’re going to make it this year. :) I’m not too worried though; our gasoline consumption is now down to zero aside from public transportation (which counts for 100mpg).
    1Although the stuff is being reused, the seller will presumably just go out and buy more new stuff with the money you paid, so there is still an impact.
    2These items are far enough down the re-use ladder that if they were not bought they would certainly be thrown away.

    No Comments »


Enjoying our blog? You will love our store!

Cheating? No, Transportation!

Posted by Shaun on 14 Sep 2007 | Tagged as: Electric Bicycle

I have now had this conversation 3 times….

***I Pull up to Costco on my electric bike***
Curious Passerby: “What is that thing in your front wheel”
Me: “That’s a motor, this is an electric bike”
Them: “That’s cheating you know”
Me: “How did you get here?”
Them: ***Points at their Canyonero***
Me: “Who is cheating more?”
Them: *Laugh*

Three out of three Costco shoppers that noticed my bike called it “cheating“. While I do find this conversation to be highly amusing, I think it may be indicative of an actual problem.

I think the bike isn’t cheating because I’m making a different comparison than the one being employed by Mr Curious Passerby. I’m playing: “Whats the best way to get to and from Costco” and comparing the e-bike to all methods of transportation that I might choose to use. I like it better than the alternative (a car) because it uses less resources, emits less pollution, gives me more exercise, and is far, far cheaper.

They are playing: “only crazy people ride bicycles to Costco”, and are comparing my e-bike to a regular bike as they don’t seem to fathom that a bike can stand in for a car. Using their basis of comparison I’m spending more money, getting less exercise, and emitting more pollution than the alternative (a bike). This, as far as I can tell, is “cheating”.

I feel safe ignoring a regular bike as a Costco-transportation-option to because I know I would never stick with it. There is just no way I’m going to haul 60 lbs of groceries up a hill and then want to do it again next week. Not gonna happen.

The problem is that people need to think of bicycles as being in the same category as automobiles: “transportation”. I think that this simple mental classification is a large part of the reason why nobody rides bikes in this country.

    1 Comment »


Enjoying our blog? You will love our store!

90% Reduction: Water

Posted by Tawny on 07 Sep 2007 | Tagged as: 90% Reduction

Starting Point: Water

The most accurate way to determine your water usage is by looking at your water bill or reading your water meter. I don’t recieve a separate water bill - water is included in the HOA fees at my condo complex. We do have a water meter, but it isn’t quite the same as the instructions telling me how to read a water meter. For one thing, it measures up to millions of cubic feet.


My water meter, which reads:
1,142,000 cubic feet
  • American average:
         100 gallons/person/day
  • 90% reduction for 2 people:
         20 gallons/day

The meter moved from 1,139k to 1,142k ft3 over 21 days (3k ft3 / 21 days = 142 ft3/day; 1 ft3 = 7.48 gal) which means we supposedly used 1,062 gallons/day. Somehow I don’t think that’s right. I don’t know whether this meter is for the entire complex or includes the nearby swimming pool or what, but it’s obviously not just for us.

I tried a few water calulators to at least get a general idea of the amount of water we use. We have an early low-flow toilet (abt 2 gal/flush), each take a short-ish shower every 2-3 days (although we have been showering more often since selling the car - you get sweaty biking everywhere in summer), we don’t leave the faucet running while brushing our teeth, wash dishes by hand, and have no yard (although landscaping water is not supposed to be included according to the project rules anyway). The calculator results varied by about 20 gallons/day:

  • Current water usage:
         47-68 gallons/day, or 23-35% of the average American.

We could easily get a low-flow shower head (the highest calculation had us at 24 gallons/day for showers), and washing dishes over a tub instead of with the water running (even though we are relatively careful) would probably let us reduce some more. I suppose these online calculators don’t include drinking or cooking water, so our usage could be a bit higher than these numbers indicate.

    No Comments »


Enjoying our blog? You will love our store!

Next »