Green-O-Gram December 9, 2008

Energy Challenge
The KCC is providing an Energy Challenge to Kansans. On line tools are available to create ten member teams to compete on reducing energy usage in homes from November through March. If you are interested in participating in a team from KNI, contact the Green Team (kel@kni.ks.gov) as soon as possible! Note that this competition is for seeing how much energy team members can save December-March AT HOME, NOT AT KNI. If we can pull together 10 KNI employees, we will have a team, so act fast!

I’m dreaming of a Green Christmas….or Hanukkah….or Kwanzaa….or….
With the holiday season upon us, we are interested in sharing green tips that both honors the spirit of the season as well as values the “green” way to live. If you have some ideas you would like to share, send them to us and we’ll include them. In the meantime, here are some ideas that can get you started:
Visually speaking, nothing says “Christmas” quite as loudly as the millions of lights – colored or white, blinking or non-blinking – that illumine America’s nighttime sky in December. But the festive displays come at a cost. Christmas lights consume electricity about as voraciously as a three-year-old tears through gift wrapping. Consider:
• The Edison Electric Institute has reported that holiday lighting raises December demand for electricity in the United States by 5 percent. The new lights purchased each year alone draw enough electricity to power the city of Seattle for three months.
• In December 2000, with California in the throes of a serious energy crisis, the not-for-profit corporation charged with operating most of the state’s high-voltage power grid reckoned that holiday light displays were drawing a collective 1,000 megawatts of electricity, or enough to power 1 million homes.
Solution: Conserve energy, embrace new technology
Besides the most obvious and effective remedy of doing without lights, or drastically curtailing the amount of time they’re lit, here are some ways to enjoy holiday lighting with a reasonably clean environmental conscience:
• Display only mini-lights, which have been found to consume 1/20th the electricity it takes to power old-fashioned large Christmas bulbs. Even if your strands of mini-lights have 10 times the number of bulbs as the older variety, using them still cuts consumption in half.
• Replace conventional interior lights with more efficient fluorescent bulbs to create an “energy credit” that can be spent on holiday lighting.
• Switch to light emitting diode (LED) lighting. LED bulbs use 90% less energy than standard incandescent lights and confer the added benefits of generating significantly less heat and lasting significantly longer.
http://green.msn.com/Green-Living/Christmas-Without-All-That-Waste/1

A study cited by the U.S. Environmental Agency found that between Thanksgiving and New Years Day the volume of household garbage in the United States increases by 25 percent, from about 4 million to 5 million tons per week. Some of the extra waste is generated by the holiday feeding frenzy, certainly, but much of it is in the form of gift wrap and packaging.
Most of the 38,000 miles of ribbon reportedly thrown away by Americans every year are jettisoned during the holiday season. And then there are the holiday cards: 2.2 billion of them, according to researchers at Hallmark.
Solution: Think out of the box, or without the box
Give expression to the spirit of giving in ways that have the least environmental impact:
• Give homemade presents and cards.
• Pack presents not at all or in reusable containers to cut down on waste. Wrap them with old maps, the comics section of a newspaper or children's artwork.
• Buy cards made from recycled paper and continue to recycle them.
• Buy green gifts. That way, any harm that’s done through generation of waste will at least be partially offset.
Problem: Christmas trees after the lights come off
The National Christmas Tree Association expects Americans to purchase between 28 million and 30 million trees this year. The good news, according to The Sierra Club, is that 98 percent of them will have been grown on Christmas tree farms, so their harvesting will have minimal impact on the environment. The bad news is that 10 million of them eventually will take up precious space in the nation’s landfills.
Solution: “Plant” it forward
Here are a couple of things to keep in mind when buying – and discarding – your perfect pine:
• Consider renting a living Christmas tree. For about what it costs to buy a tree, outfits like The Original Living Christmas Tree Company in Portland, Ore., take trees out of the ground, pot them, deliver them to customers and then after the holiday pick them up for replanting in area parks and school districts.
• Encourage green practices on Christmas tree farms by buying a tree grown without pesticides. The number of organic tree farms is growing.
• Instead of putting the tree out on the curb for regular garbage pickup, take it to a tree recycling facility, where it can be turned into mulch or wood chips.
These may seem like modest solutions, but if millions of people put them into practice, the cumulative effect would make Christmas bright green indeed.
http://green.msn.com/Green-Living/Christmas-Without-All-That-Waste/2

Submitted by Frances Boudreau, Washburn Intern, KNI Green Team