I was walking down CVS Pharmacy the other evening and saw toilet paper labeled as 100% recycled.  We all use those white, soft rolls daily, which means plenty of resources must go into producing them, right?  So I felt a  need to get to the bottom line.

Since we are not equipped with feline cleaning equipment, we need to use the next best tools

You may not have made the connection, but toilet paper is made from paper, and about 98% of toilet paper is made from virgin sources.  In fact about 7 million trees are consumed annually to take care of our #2 duties.  Sure a sick person may use toilet paper to blow his or her nose, mom or dad may use it to clean up a spill, or teenagers may dress in black and under the cover of darkness layer a victim’s home with TP (In America this is a prank called TPing someone’s home…I must admit, it’s kind of fun), but for the most part those bleached white rolls are used in the lavatory setting.

It’s kind of strange that we use living organisms as majestic as trees to ensure adequate levels of posterior hygiene.

• Europe flushes approximately 60 million rolls of toilet paper daily.
• The United States uses 36.5 billions rolls of toilet paper annually, which represents at least 15 million trees pulped  (www.treehugger.com)
• US production also consumes 473,587,500,000 (473.5 billion) gallons of water
• 253,000 tons of chlorine is used for bleaching purposes.

Add on the resource costs to transfer TP tolls across the globe and one can see the asinine amounts of resources used to produce an item that’s used once and disposed of forever.  Yeah we can’t really reuse toilet paper too effectively.

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) reports that approximately 400,000 trees would be saved annually if each American household replaced  only one roll of TP made from virgin, pulped trees with TP made from 100 percent recycled products.  That’s significant.

So after grabbing a roll of 100% recycled toilet paper from CVS I inspected it, and just as I thought it was rougher than some of the softer virgin products.  It was also 1-ply, so you may use more to maintain that comfortable hand to bum barrier.  You do sacrifice quality for the environment in this case, but a 2 ply 100% recycled content product is available in the market. Check your stores, buy a single roll if possible and give it a test run. You can also do a web search and purchase online.  For commercial applications, ask your vendor to supply you with a sample of 100% recycled TP.  Other alternative, base products such as hemp will be coming online, but in the short term, this solution is less bad.

The youngest SF Mayor in we can’t remember how long.

San Francisco pulled into the lead for most progressive energy policy last week when Mayor Gavin Newsom (at 42, the youngest San Francisco mayor in over a century) submitted his nine-months-in-the-making proposed legislation on existing commercial buildings to the city’s Board of Supervisors.

The proposed legislation would require the owners of commercial buildings over 5,000 square feet to conduct an energy-efficiency audit every five years, and to supply annual updates – all of which would be available in a public database, according to the SF Gate.

And guess what? These required audits would come back with helpful suggestions on how to increase the property’s energy efficiency, say by sealing windows, or upgrading the HVAC system. Kind of like what BuildingAdvice does. Tenants would also have access to an estimate of resulting energy savings from taking those steps, the cost of implementing them, and their economic value.

In a post on City Insider, an SF Gate blog on “the people, politics and places of San Francisco,” John Coté wrote that Newsom likened the commercial building audits to fuel efficiency ratings listed on car windows at an auto dealership.

The local branch of the Building Owners and Managers Association (part of nationwide BOMA), the commercial real estate industry’s heavy-hitting advocacy group, supports the legislation, although there are still skeptics in the business community, the mayor said. Berkeley, Sonoma County, Palm Desert and Boulder, Colo. have similar programs going.  Once approved, the legislation sets a staggered, three-year schedule for compliance, starting in April.

(This article re-blogged from http://airadvice.com/buildingblog/?p=1059)

By Moe Fakih
AEF Consulting, Engineering & Construction, Inc.

It felt like one point I was suffocating from all the daily junk mail that hit my snail mailbox.  I stopped opening up those credit card offers that looked like official business or looked like a bill I forgot to pay, and I wasn’t sure I was getting pissed at all the paper being wasted or if they were simply insulting my intelligence?  Sometimes these companies try to entice or scare you into opening their mail.  It got to a point where those letters were removed from my mail box, looked at for one second, ripped in two and then dumped into the recycle bin.

Entertain me on this quick junk mail journey – somewhere a native ecosystem or a native rain forest was removed, a tree farm was planted in its place, that tree took years or decades to grow, it got chopped down by gas powered equipment in seconds, was processed into pulp using chemicals, turned into paper by using bleaches and other chemicals, got oil based ink sprayed all over, was transported across the globe only to make into my hands and then into the waste bin.  Yay, what a great use of resources!

Even if you do recycle the paper not 100% makes it back as other paper.  In fact up to 70% of recycled paper is virgin material.  But lets face it, when you take a look at trash bins (yes I have done this) you see lots of paper and other items that are headed to landfills and buried forever.

And what informational blog post would be a good post without statistics to make you say, “dang”?

Junk Mail Stats that Make you Say, “Dang”!

• It takes more than 100 million trees to produce the total volume of junk mail that arrives in American mailboxes each year—that’s the equivalent of clearcutting the entire Rocky Mountain National Park every 4 months.
• Junk mail in the U.S. accounts for over 100,000,000,000 pieces of mail each year¹—about 30% of all the mail delivered in the world
• Almost 50% of the solid mass that makes up our landfills is expected to be paper and paperboard waste
• Every year American households receive a total of 104.7 billion pieces of junk mail or 848 pieces of junk mail per household, which requires 6.5 million tons of paper.
• A response rate of less than 0.25% is considered acceptable for the 500 million U.S. credit card solicitations that are mailed monthly.
• Animal species in places such as Indonesian rain forests are losing their habitat due to deforestation and human paper farm encroachment. Indonesia is home to 12% of Earth’s mammal species, and 17% of all bird species.
• A national poll by Zogby International found that 92% of respondents discard or recycle at least some of their junk mail without reading it.
  (Stat Source: http://www.donotmail.org)

Where do we go from here?

There is a solution to end this madness.  I was able to completely stop credit card advertisements and greatly reduce the amount of junk entering my home.  It wasn’t that tough and here’s how:

End Credit Card Mailers

To opt put of credit card mailings go here and fill out the online form at https://www.optoutprescreen.com

Direct Marketers

Telemarketing

The federal government has created the National Do Not Call Registry — a free, easy way to reduce the telemarketing calls you get at home. To register your phone number or to get information about the registry, visit www.donotcall.gov, or call 1-888-3821-222 from the phone number you want to register. You will get fewer telemarketing calls within 31 days of registering your number. Telephone numbers on the registry will only be removed when they are disconnected and reassigned, or when you choose to remove a number from the registry.

Mail

The Direct Marketing Association’s (DMA) Mail Preference Service lets you opt out of receiving unsolicited commercial mail from many national companies for five years. When you register with this service (for a $1 fee), your name will be put on a “delete” file and made available to direct-mail marketers. However, your registration will not stop mailings from organizations that do not use the DMA’s Mail Preference Service. To register with DMA’s Mail Preference Service, go to www.dmachoice.org.

Email

The DMA also has an Email Preference Service to help you reduce unsolicited commercial emails. To opt out of receiving unsolicited commercial email from DMA members, visit www.dmachoice.org/EMPS. Your online request will be effective for five years.

That’s it, good luck, and please help reduce the junkfest.

AEF Consulting, Engineering & Construction, Inc. Ready-Set-Green!

Thousand Oaks, California – Today AEF Consulting, Engineering & Construction, Inc., (AEF) an energy efficiency, green building and construction firm, has been established.  The green building firm is a coalescence of three other firms that separately provided services in three key areas – Green or LEED® project management, energy engineering, and construction. The principals of C&F Consulting, Inc., Improvement Facilitations, LLC and Structural Development, Inc. saw the importance and the value to bringing their talents and experience under one roof.

“Once we performed energy conservation reports, our clients were asking us if we would also engage in implementation. As a result we saw that having a construction manager on site would help us complete projects faster, and since we are familiar with the account, we could engage in the most economical and expeditious path towards improving our client’s bottom line and helping them go green.”, said Wayne Alldredge the company’s COO.

AEF will assist clients with benchmarking building energy use, identifying areas of opportunity for savings, and implementing the measures required to become energy efficient.  In essence the company will be a one-stop-shop for clients wishing to go green.  AEF will also help organizations create green policies and programs that last over time.

“We can convert any organization or building to one that is energy and resource efficient, but once we walk away it’s important for that program to continue to operate as intended.  A sustainable company culture is critical to maintain the green investment”, said the AEF’s  CEO, Moe Fakih.  Mr. Fakih continued, “Now that we have Brian Elzenga as our Executive Vice President of Construction, we have an extremely competent team of green minded professionals who are focused on quality, the environment and return on investment.”

AEF will be cataloging the environmental impacts of its green efforts by quantifying the reduction in emissions from each project.  Reductions in operating costs and in pollution will be a win-win for their clients and for the planet.