Perch Energy articles

I recently wrote two articles for a new client: Perch Energy, a company that helps you choose a new power provider based on price and renewable energy content. (The service isn't available yet in NJ, which is a pity, since I sure could have used it when looking for a replacement for Green Mountain.) These pieces on their blog don't carry my byline, so I'm not adding them to my official work portfolio, but I figured it would be okay to share them privately with my small band of ecofrugal fans.

The first one, Complete Guide to Saving Energy At Home, is just what it sounds like: a primer on energy savings. It covers the benefits of conservation and the easiest ways to save, such as turning down the thermostat, eliminating phantom power, replacing old light bulbs...basically, all the stuff you probably know already, but conveniently gathered in one place. And the second, Water Saving Tips At Home, does much the same thing for water use.

Not sure how long-term this writing gig will be yet, but for now, it's nice to have a chance to write about something that's more consistently in tune with my ecofrugal interests than the work I've been doing for Money Crashers.

Recipes of the Month: Three kinds of greens

I had a bit of a dilemma deciding what to post as my Vegan Recipe of the Month for January. I've tried three new veggie-focused dishes this month, but one wasn't quite vegan and the others weren't really  recipes. So I decided to cover them all and figure they add up to one new vegan recipe among them.

The first dish we tried was the Garlicky Cannellini Beans with Wilted Kale and Eggs from the latest Savory magazine (a freebie from Stop & Shop). You can find the full recipe here, but the short version is that you mash up the beans a bit, add them to an ovenproof pan with garlic and red pepper, then add chopped kale bit by bit and let it wilt. When you've got a whole pound in there, you make six little wells in the mixture, crack an egg into each one, and pop the pan in the oven until the eggs are set.

Brian made a couple of modifications to this recipe. He didn't think our biggest pan would accommodate a whole pound of kale, so he used just 12 ounces of it and four eggs while keeping the amount of beans the same. This made the dish heartier and more protein-heavy, which was all to the good as far as we were concerned. He also beat the eggs lightly before adding them to the pan, since neither of us cares that much for egg yolk in its elemental form. The recipe said to serve the dish with dinner rolls, but we just cut a couple of slices of his hearty brown bread to complete the meal.

This was much better than we expected it to be. Neither of us is a huge fan of kale, but in this form, mixed up with the eggs and beans and garlic, it had plenty of flavor. And with the brown bread, it actually made a satisfying meal for the two of us and left a little bit over for a lunch the next day. So now, next time we see a great deal on kale, we'll know something to do with it.

The next dish we tried wasn't really a recipe, just a new twist on our old Savory Cabbage with Vegan Sausage. This, in turn, was an attempt to come up with a substitute for the free-range kielbasa we used to buy at the Amish market using Soy Curls. It works pretty well, but when we came across some Tofurky Polish-style sausage at Lidl the other day, I thought we should try that in the same dish and see how it was. We'd previously tried eating it plain and found it a bit too dry, but I suspected that in a moist dish like this it might work better.

Sure enough, this proved to be the case. Brian cut the sausage links into rounds and fried them in the Dutch oven by themselves, then added the veggies and cooked them until everything was tender. The vegan sausages didn't contribute their own juices to the mixture the way pork sausages would, but they did provide a nice contrast in both flavor and texture. Brian admitted that they might even work a little better in this dish than his own Soy Curl alternative, particularly the few pieces that had been cooked more thoroughly than the rest and were just a bit charred. The slight torching brought out a smokiness that the Liquid Smoke in the Soy Curls couldn't quite match.

However, while the Tofurky sausages were a little better than the homemade version, they probably weren't so much better as to justify the price tag. At $5.58 per pound ($4.89 for a 14-ounce package), they were cheaper than most vegan sausages we've found, and even a bit cheaper than the sausages from the Amish market. But they're still quite a bit pricier than the Soy Curl version, and honestly, not that much better. With just a bit (okay, a lot) of salt, garlic, and smoke flavoring, you can get Soy Curls more than 90 percent of the way to tasting like real kielbasa.

The final dish was the simplest, but probably the biggest success of the lot. To use up the rest of the bag of kale we bought for the bean recipe, Brian decided to try making his own kale chips. He just washed the kale, rubbed it with olive oil, sprinkled on some salt, spread it out on a baking sheet, and baked it for 10 minutes at 450. This succeeded beyond our wildest expectations. Just like our favorite roasted Brussels sprouts, the baked kale was satisfyingly crunchy, with just enough salt and fat to be tasty and not so much as to make us feel gross eating it. And there wasn't a hint of the bitterness we normally associate with this veggie. Unfortunately, I didn't get a picture of it, because we scarfed it down too fast.

Of the three new ways to prepare greens we tried, I think this one is most likely to become a regular addition to our repertoire. In fact, Brian liked it so much that he already bought another bag of kale just so he could try it again, but in his efforts to get it just a little bit crispier, he ended up turning it into biochar. So we've determined that the baking time needs to be closer to 10 minutes than 15 to keep the kale in the sweet spot between limp and burnt. Fortunately, there's more kale left in the bag, so we can try it again and get the timing pinned down.

If the next batch is as good as the first, I think this might make an ideal healthy afternoon snack for Passover. For me, the hardest thing about getting through eight grain-free days is going without my usual afternoon bowl of popcorn. The last couple of years, I've been buying packaged seaweed snacks, but they're not as satisfying, and they're pricey and and overpackaged to boot. These homemade kale chips are cheaper, more substantial, and much lower on packaging, and they're not even that much more work to make than the popcorn. They take a bit longer, but I think they'll be worth the wait. And honestly, who ever felt guilty about pigging out on kale?

Money Crashers: How to Get Affordable Mental Health Care

Just a quick post about my latest Money Crashers article,  which is about finding affordable mental health care.

This is a particularly timely piece, since the pandemic has taken a toll on everyone's mental health. And at the same time, it's also made it harder to get out of the house for treatment. All this is bad enough for people with health insurance (which can still be very restrictive about which therapists you can see); for those without any, it's even worse. 

So this article covers a variety of resources you can use to get mental health care on a budget. It includes in-person therapy, telehealth, free alternatives like hot lines and support groups, community mental health clinics, and the new therapy apps that I keep hearing ads for on podcasts.

Therapy Without Insurance – How to Get Affordable Mental Health Care

Money Crashers: How to Afford Private School Tuition for Your Kids

In the U.S., a year of private school tuition costs $12,350 on average. But the average cost doesn’t have to be the cost you pay. 

Several years ago, I wrote a piece for Money Crashers on the relative costs of private and public school for your kids. This year, my editors had me split that older piece in two. The first part now offers a broader comparison of the pros and cons of public and private schools, weighing factors like class size, teacher qualifications, and extracurricular activities as well as cost. And a new companion piece delves more deeply into private school costs and ways to minimize them. It discusses how to find lower-cost private schools, apply for scholarships and aid programs, negotiate tuition costs, and apply for loans. If you're a parent interested in private school but anxious about the cost, this piece is for you.

How to Afford Private School Tuition for Your Kids

Thrift Week 2022, Day Seven: Share Stuff

And so we come at last to the final tenet of the Ecofrugal Manifesto...

Ecofrugal Principle #7: Share Stuff

When I say "stuff" here, I mean material things. It's nice, of course, to share feelings, or to share household responsibilities, or to share your wealth with others through charity, but none of that has much to do with ecofrugality. But sharing goods — that is, having one car, or one office, or one copy of a book for multiple people, rather than separate ones for each person — has everything to do with ecofrugality. Many people sharing one object means less cost for each person, and less cost for the earth than producing many copies of the same object.

Some examples of this include:

• Public libraries, which allow everyone in town to share the same books and videos 
• Other types of community "libraries" for sharing tools, toys, or seeds and seedlings
• Community gardens, which allow multiple people to garden on the same plot of land
• Ride sharing (other people giving you rides in their cars, so you don't need to own one), car sharing (many people sharing a fleet of cars, so they don't all need their own), and bike sharing (the same thing for bicycles)
• Coworking spaces, which allow people with different schedules to make use of the same office space
  

Of all the ecofrugal principles on my list, this is the one Brian and I personally make the least use of. We share with each other, of course, by having just one car, one TV, one tablet, and so on for the two of us. But we don't have as many opportunities as we'd like to share stuff with people outside our household. We do make extensive use of our local library, but we don't have access to any of the other cool "libraries" some towns have to offer, nor to a car sharing or bike sharing system that might allow us to do without a car or bike of our own. We have our own garden, so we don't have any need to join our local community garden. And even our local community cafe has now, sadly, converted to a normal payment model.

If I could change just one thing about our lifestyle, I think I'd like to have more opportunities to share stuff with our neighbors. It's not mainly about money (though we do, as I've calculated, save quite a lot by using the library, the one shared public resource available to us). And even the environmental benefits, though those could be significant, are secondary. What I really feel like we're missing out on is the opportunity to meet and interact with our neighbors, most of whom we don't really feel like we know. (We made a point of giving each of our next-door neighbors a bag of plums out of the crazy harvest we got last summer, but that was just a one-time exchange.)

Of course, even if we did have access to more shareable resources here in town, we probably wouldn't be allowed to use them right now. At the very least, they'd have safety protocols in place to prevent us from meeting and interacting with our neighbors there. So they wouldn't do much to lighten the social isolation of the pandemic.

But I feel like as 2022 progresses, as the omicron surge starts to ease off, as winter eases into spring and we can once again meet and mingle more outdoors, we should make more of a point of taking advantage of the community resources we do have. We should take more walks in the park, dine out at the outdoor community tables set up in the summer of 2020, go to events like the outdoor film series. In short, we should do all we can to be more involved in the life of our community. Getting to know our neighbors would be an added perk of living ecofrugally — and one that would make it easier to share knowledge about all the other aspects of ecofrugal living, too.

Thrift Week 2022, Day Six: Mend It, Don't End It

Coming into the home stretch now on this year's Thrift Week. For my penultimate entry, I present...

Ecofrugal Principle #6: Mend It, Don't End It

In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley's vision of a futuristic false utopia, all children are subjected to subliminal moral education while they sleep. One of the principles they're taught this way is, "Ending is better than mending." Through this message, the state encourages its subjects to be good consumers and replace all their belongings regularly, at the first sign of wear, rather than repair them. Obviously, Huxley was commenting on what he perceived as a trend in his actual society at the time (1930s Britain), but he didn't know the half of it. If he could see our modern world, where "planned obsolescence" and "fast fashion" are simply accepted as the norm, he'd think all his worst nightmares had come true.

But even in this world, it's possible to opt out. To get off the endless treadmill of working and spending, buying and discarding. Each time you decide to repair something broken or damaged, rather than simply throw it out and buy a new one, you're engaging in a small act of rebellion against the forces of mindless consumption and the environmental degradation that goes with it. You're striking a blow for your economic freedom and also for the health of the planet.

And repairing works more often than you might think. Most people know that you can take your car to the mechanic when something goes wrong, but not everyone would think to reattach a book cover, restring a pair of Roman shades, or take in an oversized waistband. And even those who know it's possible to patch a pair of pants might assume you need serious sewing skills to do it, when in actuality, I can manage it with nothing but a needle and thread and a simple whip-stitch.

Sadly, repairing instead of replacing isn't always possible. Sometimes, you simply can't restore a bricked device or find a tailor willing to shorten the sleeves on an old coat. And even when it's physically possible, it isn't always economically feasible, such as when the cost to resole a pair of boots is more than a whole new pair. 

So, like most of the other principles in my Ecofrugal Manifesto, "mend it, don't end it" is a rule of thumb rather than an absolute dictum. Repairing rather than replacing should be the default choice, the first thing you think of when something breaks. But if a little (or a lot of) investigation reveals that repair is impossible or impractical or both, it's perfectly acceptable to replace, especially if you choose a secondhand item (Ecofrugal Principle #2) as a replacement.

Thrift Week 2022, Day Five: Make It Yourself

Yesterday's Thrift Week entry was all about doing it yourself. Today's is about a related idea:

Ecofrugal Principle #5: Make It Yourself

While "do it yourself" refers to services, "make it yourself" is about goods. It's what you do any time you decide to make something for yourself — ideally from materials or ingredients you already have at home — rather than buying it in a store.

Brian and I are probably even bigger MIYers (make-it-yourselfers) than we are DIYers. Over the years, we've made countless things at home, both large and small. Some of our more interesting MIY projects were:

• Our brown-paper floor in the downstairs room
• The vanity Brian constructed for the downstairs bath
  
• The two bookcases Brian built for the living room (custom-made to fit over the baseboard heater)
  
• Our Rubbermaid-bin cat box
• Brian's IKEA-hacked sitting/standing desk
• A custom knife-drawer insert
• A cat tree for our two kitties
• A magnet board for my office
• The wooden boxes and attached trellises for our garden beds
  
• Our shipping-pallet compost bin
• A canning rack
• A reusable straw sleeve for transporting drinking straws
• My homemade face wash
• Homemade vegan mozzarella cheese
  
• A travel toothbrush holder
• A soap-dish insert
• Homemade almond milk
  

Obviously, there's some overlap between MIY and DIY. For instance, when Brian bakes a loaf of bread at home, he's MIYing something he could have bought at the store, but he's also DIYing the work of baking it rather than paying a baker to do it. But basically, any time you use your DIY skills to produce a physical object, you can consider it MIY.

Making it yourself can obviously be a money-saver. Pretty much everything on the list above would have been more expensive to buy than it was to make — sometimes a whole lot more expensive. But in most cases, the money isn't the main reason we do it. Instead, our biggest motivations to MIY are:

1. Environmental Benefits. MIY products can be a lot eco-friendlier than store-bought ones. Homemade almond milk and face wash come with no packaging waste. Making products from items we already have on hand, such as scrap wood, saves natural resources. And in many cases (like our compost bin made from pallets pr my straw sleeve made from an old pair of shorts) it keeps items out of the waste stream as well.
2. Custom Design. Often, it's difficult or impossible to find exactly what you want in a store. You have to compromise on the design, the materials, the ingredients, the color, or what have you. But when you make it yourself, you can make it to your own specifications. That was the motive behind nearly all our MIY home products, from the paper floor (which we were able to install directly over the concrete, eliminating the need for a subfloor that would eat up precious vertical space in a low-ceilinged room) to the homemade vegan mozzarella (which tastes better than any store-bought alternative we've tried).
   

Like DIY, MIY doesn't make sense for everything. For instance, neither of us is sufficiently skilled at sewing to make our own clothes (aside from the odd costume piece). The homemade masks we sewed for ourselves early in the pandemic have proved inferior to the ones we can now buy at Rite Aid for five bucks. And despite all my attempts, I have yet to produce a homemade hair conditioner that I'm really satisfied with.

In fact, I wouldn't even go so far as to say you should always try making something first before you give up and go to the store to buy it. In most cases, it's perfectly possible, and much easier, to find what you want on a store shelf. But if you've shopped around and you just aren't finding what you want — or you're finding that what you want comes with a financial or environmental cost that's more than you want to pay — it's always worth giving MIY a try. It doesn't always work, but when it does, it can usually get you a much better product at a much better price. And sometimes, the work of making it actually takes less time, and is a lot more fun, than spending hours on Google Shopping.

Thrift Week 2022, Day Four: Do It Yourself

Thrift Week continues with...

Ecofrugal Principle #4: Do It Yourself

When you see the phrase "do it yourself" or its abbreviation, "DIY," it usually refers to home renovation. And Brian and I are indeed big believers in this form of DIY. We're in the middle of one home project right now, painting the office (which, as a side note, is actually going much faster than our previous room renovations; we've already finished prepping the walls and painting the ceiling and all the woodwork, so if all goes well we should be able to get the paint on the walls this weekend and be moved back in by the end of the month). And over the years we've done quite a few projects of this sort, both large (like creating a new patio) and small (like building a coat rack).

But as a tenet of the ecofrugal life, "do it yourself" means much more than just home repair. The "it" in this phrase can mean any task you could theoretically hire someone else to do, such as:

• Cooking a meal at home rather than going out to eat (effectively "hiring" the chef and servers)
• Doing your own cleaning or yard work rather than hiring a service
• Upgrading the hard drive or memory on your computer
  
• Cutting your own hair (or each other's)
• Changing the oil on your car

At one point or another, Brian and I have done all these tasks on our own. But there have also been some jobs for which we unhesitatingly hired a professional, such as replacing the roof, replacing the furnace, and any auto-related job bigger than an oil change. (In fact, since we got our first 21st-century car, we don't even do our own oil changes anymore.)

So how do we decide which jobs to DIY and which to leave to the pros? In some cases, it's a question of safety and skills. If doing it ourselves could get us killed, or cause serious damage to the house or car, we usually figure it's best left to people with the proper training. 

But also, we weigh the cost against the benefit. For instance, when it came to rewiring our downstairs room, Brian probably could have done the job himself, but it would have taken him many hours of work and eaten up his weekends for a month or more. By contrast, the electrician we hired had the skills and tools to get the job done in one day. The $642 we spent, weighed against the 80 or more hours it might have taken Brian to do it on his own, was a small price to pay.

I like to think about this in terms of "hourly wage," as Amy Dacyczyn of The Tightwad Gazette (all hail the Frugal Zealot!) calls it. The idea is, when deciding which jobs to take on, think about how many hours it would take you to do and how much it would cost to hire someone to do it for you. Divide the second number by the first, and you have the "hourly wage" you could earn by doing the job yourself. Then you can decide whether it's a job you're willing to do for that wage. 

If it's something you like doing anyway just for the fun of it, the way Brian enjoys cooking and I enjoy decorating the house for the holidays, then it can be worth doing even if the hourly wage is mere pennies. But if you don't enjoy it and wouldn't earn as much at it as you could doing some other job you like more — which, in my case, could mean putting in more hours at my actual, paid job — then you might as well do that instead, and use the money you earn from it to pay someone else to do the job you don't like.

In short, like other ecofrugal principles, Do It Yourself is not an absolute dictum. If you have a job to do, you should always consider doing it yourself, just as you would consider shopping secondhand or using a reusable item in place of a disposable one. But if you do the math and it doesn't make sense, then hiring the job out is a perfectly reasonable ecofrugal decision. After all, ecofrugality is all about making the best use of resources, and that includes your time.

Money Crashers: Two new shopping articles

We interrupt this series of Thrift Week posts to bring you a quick update on two recent articles of mine at Money Crashers — both about shopping.

The first focuses on discount grocery stores. It covers two types of stores: salvage grocers, which sell goods rejected or discarded by other grocery stores, and limited-assortment grocers, which keep their prices down by offering a smaller selection. I have little experience with the former, but plenty with the latter; Trader Joe's, Aldi, and Lidl have all been part of my regular shopping rotation at different times, and shopping at these stores is probably my number-one strategy for keeping my grocery bills down. The article goes into the details of how these stores work, their pros and cons, and what specific shopping strategies to use when you shop there.

Discount Grocery Stores: Are They Worth the Savings?

The second is about Costco membership. This is an issue on which I've gone back and forth before finally settling on becoming a member, so I feel like I know a lot about the pros and cons of joining. In this article, I use my own experience and knowledge I've gleaned from others to identify the top deals that can pay for a Costco membership on their own, as well as the ones that aren't worth the cost of admission.

Is a Costco Membership Worth It? – 13 Reasons to Consider One

Thrift Week 2022, Day Three: Ditch Disposables

For the third day of this year's Thrift Week, I present...

Ecofrugal Principle #3: Ditch Disposables

As a general rule, replacing a pile of disposable products with a single reusable one is a financially and environmentally sound move. This isn't true 100 percent of the time; for example, in 2019 I wrote about how single-use plastic bags are generally better for the environment than reusable canvas bags. And more recently, Pocket served me up a story about how reusable plastic shopping bags are making the problem of plastic waste worse (though when you read it in full, that turns out to be because most people aren't actually reusing them).

Similarly, reusable items aren't absolutely guaranteed to save you money. For example, in another 2019 post, I calculated that the silicone LastSwab, which can be reused "up to 1,000 times," was 2.5 times as expensive as disposable cotton swabs. (The cost of the LastSwab has since dropped from $16 to $12, but that still makes it twice as expensive.) And a couple of other reusable items, such as a bidet toilet seat to replace toilet paper and a water flosser to replace dental floss, would take so long to pay for themselves that I couldn't justify the up-front expense.

So replacing single-use items with reusable ones isn't always the best choice. Before investing in a cool reusable alternative, it always makes sense to do a little research, crunch a few numbers, and make sure it really is a money-saver and, ideally, a planet-saver. But in most cases, you'll find the math does work out in your favor.

I already provided several examples of this in my 2019 Thrift Week series, so I'll just recap a few of the better ones here:

• Zero-waste tap water costs a tiny fraction of the price of bottled water. If you currently buy just one 16-ounce bottle of water a day at $1 a pop, that's $365 per year for 45.6 gallons. Replace that with a $2 glass juice bottle that you rinse out after drinking the juice and refill with tap water at 0.6 cents per gallon, and you cut the cost to around $2.27. And you keep 365 plastic bottles out of the waste stream.
• As I calculated in this Money Crashers piece, using paper napkins at every meal costs around $44 per year. Replace them with a $10 set of cloth napkins that you can use for 10 years, and you save around $40 per year, even factoring in the laundry costs. (The number of trees saved is harder to calculate, but it's more than zero.)
• According to one California Congresswoman's calculations, the average woman spends $7 a month on disposable tampons and sanitary pads. That's more than $3,000 over the course of her fertile years, plus 360 pounds of waste going into landfills. But I've been using the same set of reusable cotton pads for decades, and I fully expect them to last me until menopause. A young person just embarking on the menstrual journey today could buy a similar set for $34 (or two or three, as needed) and be set for life. Or go with the more modern option, a reusable menstrual cup or menstrual disk, that lasts for up to ten years.
• Here's one that doesn't apply to our family, but could have a huge impact for families with kids: cloth diapers. According to my calculations in this article, disposable diapers for one child, from birth to age three, can cost anywhere from $1,440 to $2,880. Cloth diapers, by contrast, cost between $600 and $1,870 over the same period — a huge range, but a significant savings in almost every case. And if you reuse the same diapers for a second kid, the savings more than double. (The environmental benefit are less clear-cut, but the cloth diapers appear to have the edge on average. See the article for details.)
  

Bottom line: if a large portion of your household trash is made up of disposable objects, it's always worth a quick search for reusable alternatives. If there is one, it's very likely to save you money and shrink your burden on the planet. Plus, you won't need to take out the garbage nearly so often.

Thrift Week 2022, Day Two: Shop Secondhand

My Ecofrugal Manifesto continues with...

Ecofrugal Principle #2: Shop Secondhand

Like eating plants, this is an obvious ecofrugal two-fer. In fact, it's a three-fer, because each time you buy something secondhand rather than new, you save money, save natural resources and energy that go into making new stuff, and keep waste out of the landfill, all at once. It's a win-win-win.

But exactly how big are these benefits, really? Well, it varies depending on what you're buying and where, but let's see if we can come up with some ballpark figures.

The financial benefit is probably easiest to measure. To get an estimate, let's look at our most recent secondhand shopping excursion, a trip to a Goodwill store in Indianapolis that Brian and I generally make a point of visiting over Christmas. (Side note: if you're planning to visit Goodwill any time soon, do as I did and wear leggings under your trousers. That way you can still try on pants if all the dressing rooms are closed due to COVID.) Here's what we bought:

• One pair of Christopher & Banks blue jeans for $3.50. A similar pair retails for $49.95 new.
• One pair of Cabin Creek cotton pants for $4.49. (Yes, I know these are grandma pants, but they fit, and that's enough of a Christmas miracle for me.) These appear to be no longer available in stores, but a similar-looking pair from Lee costs $44.
• A paperback copy of David Sedaris's Holidays on Ice for $1. Price at Amazon: $11.60.

So, in total, we got $105.55 worth of stuff for $8.98 before tax. That's a savings of over 90 percent. I'm not saying we do this well every time we shop secondhand, but here's another data point: According to the 2020 Consumer Expenditure Survey, the average married couple spends $1,705 per year on "apparel and services." Brian and I together spend an average of $440, or about 26 percent of the average — and shopping secondhand is the main money-saving strategy we use.

As for the ecological benefits, I touched on these a bit when I covered thrift shops in Thrift Week 2016, but here are a few facts I dug up just now:

• Americans sent more than 21 billion pounds of clothes to the landfill in 2015. 
• The fashion industry produces 10 percent of the world's carbon emissions, more than international flights and maritime shipping combined.
  
• It's also the world's second-largest consumer of water and pollutes the ocean with microplastics.

Buying clothes secondhand rather than new doesn't completely wipe out their ecological footprint, since transporting goods to thrift stores produces some emissions. But it shrinks their footprint by a lot, and it reduces the influence of fast fashion with its endless cycles of buy-discard-buy.

And the benefits don't stop with clothing. Brian and I shop secondhand for all kinds of durable goods: books, gifts, furniture. We certainly don't buy everything used; probably not even half of what we buy is secondhand. But we always try to buy secondhand when we can, and that habit has probably saved us thousands of dollars over the years we've been together.

So I'm not urging you to join The Compact and pledge to buy only secondhand goods for an entire year. All I'm recommending is that you make a habit of looking at secondhand sources first when you shop. You may not find what you need, but if you do, it's pretty much guaranteed to be a cheaper and greener choice than buying the same item new.

Thrift Week 2022: The Ecofrugal Manifesto

It's been 12 years today since I first decided to revive the celebration of Thrift Week on my blog. Over the years, I've used this week of posts to highlight many different aspects of the ecofrugal life. I've done roundups of my favorite thrift-friendly websites, books, local thrift shops, and recipes. I've challenged myself with a week of vegan eating and a week of local shopping. I've discussed ways to ditch disposable goods and live more sustainably in general.

This year, I decided, it was time to take a step back and look at the big picture: the ecofrugal lifestyle itself. So for Thrift Week 2022, I'm presenting the Ecofrugal Manifesto. Each day will feature a different key principle of the ecofrugal life, one of the most basic guidelines for reducing your burden on the planet and the burden on your budget at the same time. Thus, the entire week will provide a complete crash course in how to live ecofrugally. And I'm starting with...

Ecofrugal Principle #1: Eat Plants

Eating less meat and more plants (veggies, grains, beans, etc.) is a perfect example of an ecofrugal two-fer. Eating plants is indisputably a more sustainable choice; plant-based sources of protein consistently have a lower carbon-footprint than animal-based sources, and with a few notable exceptions (such as nuts), plant foods have a lower water footprint as well. And in general, plant-based foods are also cheaper. A 2021 Oxford study found that for people in high-income countries, a fully vegan diet is the most affordable way to eat, cutting food costs by up to one-third over the typical diet. A 2018 study and a 2020 survey likewise found that meatless diets are cheaper overall than diets with meat.

Mind you, this is not the same as saying that plant-based foods are always cheaper than animal equivalents. Plant foods designed as substitutes for animal foods are almost always pricier. For example:

• Skim milk typically costs around $3 per gallon at our local supermarkets. Almond milk, our preferred nondairy substitute, costs $1.79 per half-gallon at Lidl, or about 19 percent more. (Notably, our homemade almond milk is significantly cheaper than the real thing, but it's lacking in vitamins and calcium.)
  
• The plant-based butter substitutes we typically use in baking, such as Earth Balance and Country Crock Plant Butter, typically cost us around $3.50 per pound. The pound of real butter we bought recently at Lidl for use in my birthday cake (a chocolate brioche, for which Brian was unwilling to trust the butter substitutes) cost $1.64, less than half as much.
  
• Shredded mozzarella cheese costs $2.49 a pound at Aldi, and we can often find the good stuff in block form for only $1.99 a pound. Our homemade vegan mozzarella costs about $7.46 per pound, roughly three times as much. And most store-bought alternatives (which aren't nearly as good) cost still more.
• Impossible Burger costs around $6.29 for 12 ounces, or $8.39 per pound, at Target. That's nearly 25 percent more than real ground beef at $6.79 per pound.
• We recently got a coupon for $1.50 off Just Egg, a plant-based egg substitute, at our local Stop & Shop. But when we checked the price, it was $6 for a container equivalent to eight eggs. Even with the coupon, that works out to the equivalent of 56 cents per egg. The Certified Humane eggs we buy at Lidl are $2.39 per dozen, or 20 cents per egg — and that's pretty pricey as eggs go.

It's these plant-based animal substitutes that give vegetarian and vegan diets an unjustified reputation for being pricey. But these substitutes aren't an essential part of a plant-based diet. If you focus on recipes that are naturally plant-based, or adapt meat-based dishes by simply leaving out the meat rather than using a meat analogue, your meals are likely to be cheaper and also more satisfying. Plant-based diets are only costly when they're really meat-based diets without the meat.

Moreover, if you eat a naturally plant-based diet most of the time, you'll save enough money that you can afford to splurge on these animal substitutes once in a while. That's what we do: our diet is mostly plant-based recipes like the ones covered in my 2018 Thrift Week (mushroom barley soup, pasta fagioli, skillet kugel, stir-fry with tofu), plus a smattering of animal food substitutes (faux mozzarella, Gimme Lean beef) and just a few real animal products (eggs, canned tuna). And if you need proof that this is a frugal way to eat, consider this: according to the 2018 study I mentioned above, "the daily cost of food for a healthy menu plan can be as little as $6.5 per day," yet our food expenses over the past year were a mere $4.50 per person per day. In other words, our healthy, mostly-plant diet comes in at around 70 percent of the USDA's estimated minimum, even with the occasional splurge.

In short, if you want to do just one thing that will save you money and reduce your ecological footprint at the same time, eating less meat is about the best choice you can make. (And if you want to do six more things toward the same goal, stay tuned for the rest of this week.)

Our next home project

So, remember how we replaced the bifold doors in our office six years ago? Remember how that project took us about three months to complete from start to finish? And remember how I said the new doors made the rest of the office look kind of dingy by comparison, but considering that our usual M.O. when it comes to home repair is "good and cheap, but not fast," it would probably take us "months if not years" to renovate the rest of the room?

Turns out my prediction was a bit optimistic. In fact, in the six years since, we've made essentially no progress whatsoever on this room. Every so often I'd mention that we really should get to work on it, and Brian would agree that yes, we really should, and that would be the end of it.

In point of fact, we've been putting this project off much longer than six years. We've actually been putting it off for close to fifteen years, ever since we first bought this house. At the time we moved in, there were already lots of small but annoying problems with the room that we knew we'd have to fix "at some point." Like the ill-applied corner tape that had become visibly wrinkled under its layers of paint:

And the mismatched, paint-splattered outlets and cover plates:

And the numerous spots on the wall where the painters, rather than go to all the trouble of removing hardware and spackling up the holes, had simply painted over it:

But none of these problems was so large as to make the room unlivable, so for years we simply lived with them. And over the course of those years, we added numerous imperfections of our own, like crudely filled nail holes and one larger patch where we had to repair the wall after a "hit by doorknob" incident. None of which we'd actually bothered to paint over, because why go to the trouble of trying to match the existing wall paint when we knew we'd need to repaint the entire wall eventually?

So these little problems simply piled up until I finally realized that the only way we'd ever do anything about them would be for me to throw down the gauntlet and officially request it as a birthday present. So last month, I put Brian on notice that a repainted office was what I wanted for my birthday. And this week, we took the first steps toward making that happen.

Now, when I say "first steps," I mean just that. We haven't done anything so dramatic yet as covering the floors or taping the ceiling or even buying the paint. But we've begun what may be the hardest part of the process: rearranging our house so that we can still function in it while the painting is going on.

You see, one reason it's taken us to long to tackle this project is that, unlike our big downstairs room and our downstairs bath and even our upstairs guest room, the office is a space we actually use every day. In order to do any work on it, we'd have to find another place for me to work, and then transfer my desk and computer into that other room. And while the rest of the furniture in the room wouldn't need to be available for use during the project, it would still need to be moved out and stored somewhere. It was all this prep work, more than the painting itself, that we never could work up the gumption to face.

So the first step in getting the office ready for painting was to decide where the new temporary office should be. The bedroom and the kitchen are both fully occupied, so that left two possibilities: the big downstairs room or the small upstairs guest room. After some debate, we decided that the guest room, though smaller, was a better bet. Putting me in there during the renovations meant that we wouldn't have to heat the downstairs room every day, and it would also allow me to stay closer to the rest of the living space. (As for Brian, who is also working at home right now, he says he can set up his laptop pretty much anywhere.)

But in order to get my desk into the guest room, we first had to make room for it. So that's the step Brian took today, carrying the futon downstairs and cramming it into the big room between the gaming area and the sitting area. That leaves a nice big gap in the guest room where, if all goes well, we can transfer my desk and its accoutrements next weekend. 

We've also moved the large office bookcase and its contents into the living room temporarily. There's enough room for it, but it does make the room look rather cluttered — and, because the huge dark bookcase blocks one of the table lamps, rather dark as well. Brian commented that it now feels like a Victorian parlor. 

As for the rest of the stuff that's in the office now, well, Brian's desk (really a small table) and kneeling chair can probably fit in downstairs somewhere. Our homemade cat tree can squeeze into my new office in the guest room. And the filing cabinets, which are both heavy and bulky, can just move into the center of the room with a drop cloth draped over them, where they'll provide a good spot for setting things down.

That just leaves the futon to deal with. There's clearly no more space in the guest room, and the back storage room (which is also a laundry room, which is also Brian's workshop) is completely full already. I mean, completely. If not overfull. (Probably cleaning out and refurbishing that room will be my birthday present next year.) So I guess we'll just have to find room for that one in the big downstairs room along with the two futons that are already there.

So yes, this project will certainly make a mess of our house. I'm hoping that will give us an incentive to get it done quickly and not stretch it out over three months like we did with the guest room. I'm hoping the work on this room will go faster, since the walls don't need quite as much preliminary work. Maybe we can get it done by February?

5 possible game changers for the climate

I'll admit, I haven't been feeling great this past month about our species' chance of surviving climate change. The deal nations agreed to at the COP26 climate summit, even if they all adhere to their promises, is probably only good enough to limit global warming to 2.1°C, according to Climate Action Tracker. And right now it's not looking like the U.S., currently the world's second-biggest carbon emitter, is going to come close to meeting its goals.

With Republicans refusing to come to the table, the Democratic Congress was pinning all its hopes for climate action on the Build Back Better Act, which Joe Manchin just killed (or at the very least, severely wounded). Last week's Weekly Planet newsletter from The Atlantic responded to the news by declaring, "Manchin has virtually sealed the planet’s fate: The world is all but guaranteed to warm by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above its preindustrial temperature by 2040." Author Robinson Meyer commented, "I try to avoid despair when writing about climate change....But sometimes despair is the right emotion."

But right or wrong, despair isn't an emotion I can live with for very long. So instead, for this first blog entry of the new year, I'm focusing on the stories I've heard in the past few months that give me reason for hope. These five stories cover new and little-known developments that have the potential to avert, or at least mitigate, the coming climate catastrophe. Each one of them, on its own, could be a big piece of the solution to the climate puzzle; all five, taken together, could mean our species actually has a fighting chance of coming out of this crisis intact.

Game Changer #1: Carbicrete

When people think about what causes carbon emissions, they tend to picture cars and cows, not concrete. Yet this ubiquitous building material is responsible for roughly 8 percent of the world's carbon emissions — much more than aviation fuel (2.5 percent) and not that much less than agriculture (12 percent). If it were a country, it would have the third-largest carbon footprint in the world, right behind China and the U.S.

The main source of these emissions lies in the process used to make cement. It involves heating limestone and clay in a kiln to a temperature of more than 1,400  °C. Not only does this require huge amounts of energy, it also releases carbon trapped in the limestone — about 600 kg of carbon for every ton of cement.

But there's actually a way to cut this step out of concrete production entirely. A new Canadian product called Carbicrete replaces the concrete in traditional cement with steel slag, a waste product from steel production. Then — stay with me here — the mixture of steel slag, aggregate, and water is injected with CO2 and subjected to a chemical process that converts the CO2 to stable calcium carbonate, creating a strong, dense material. In other words, this material actually removes CO2 from the atmosphere, rather than creating more. About 150 kg per ton, in fact, plus the 600 kg that aren't produced from the cement.

Moreover, Carbicrete is stronger than traditional concrete and less susceptible to damage from freezing and thawing. And the material costs of its production are actually 10 to 20 percent lower than traditional concrete's.

So what's the downside? Well, there are two. First, the carbon curing process requires a factory, which takes money to build. And second, there's not enough steel slag available to make enough Carbicrete to meet all the world's current concrete needs. It could only replace about 10 to 20 percent of existing concrete. But 20 percent of 8 percent of all the world's carbon emissions is still 1.6 percent, which ain't hay.

Game Changer #2: Soil Carbon Storage

Remember how I said that agriculture is responsible for 12 percent of global carbon emissions? A lot of that has to do with the way we till the soil. Soil contains a lot of plant matter, and the carbon in that plant matter breaks down slowly over time. But when you take a plow to that soil, you expose more of it to the atmosphere, causing it to break down faster and release a lot of that stored carbon in the form of CO2. Since humans started farming roughly 12,000 years ago, we've released about 110 billion metric tons of carbon into the air this way.

But this trend is reversible. Farmers can put carbon back into the soil by planting deep-rooted perennial crops that store more carbon in the soil. They can grow cover crops to draw in carbon after the main crops are harvested and plow them under before planting to put that extra carbon into the soil. These techniques not only draw down carbon, they make the soil more productive, so we can grow more food on the same amount of land.

With the right techniques, even severely degraded soil can be restored. I read this year of a multi-year project that's just starting to regenerate the Sinai peninsula this way, creating a huge carbon sink and potentially improving rainfall across the Middle East. China has already done it on a large scale in the Loess Plateau, raising more than 2.5 million people out of poverty in the process.

Restoring degraded soil, one study says, could capture 1 to 3 billion tons of carbon each year. That's the equivalent of 3.5 to 11 billion tons of CO2 emissions — 11 to 34 percent of annual emissions from fossil fuel burning. Now that really ain't hay.

Game Changer 3: Ocean Farming

Agriculture has the potential to draw down carbon not just on land, but in the ocean as well. 

Last summer, Freakonomics talked about this in an interview with kelp farmer Bren Smith. He's the author of Eat Like a Fish and the founder of Greenwave, a nonprofit aiming to get at least 10,000 growers started farming 1 million acres (about 4,046 square kilometers) of ocean. And since the kelp goes down a lot farther below the ocean surface than most crops go up from the ground, that's a very, very large volume of kelp. 

Smith wants to make kelp the new soy. Not that many people eat straight-up soybeans and soy-based foods like tofu, but soy is in just about everything — not just food but also oils, lubricants, and plastics. Likewise, Smith wants to see kelp used not just in hipster salads, but in animal feed, fertilizer, bioplastics, and packaging materials. All of which would be net carbon negative.

And the benefits don't stop there. Seaweed also absorbs nitrogen and phosphorus that can cause fish-killing algae blooms. It battles the ocean acidification caused as the seas absorb CO2 directly. And it's a way to grow tons of food without taking up vast tracts of land (or, in this case, sea). Smith grows scallops, oysters, and mussels, as well as kelp, all on the same batch of long lines trailing down into the ocean.

Sadly, the Sierra Club claims kelp can't directly make a big dent in global carbon emissions — even if you sink the kelp to capture the carbon permanently, rather than harvesting and eating it. One square kilometer of kelp can sequester 1,000 metric tons of CO2 per year, which sounds like a lot. But when humanity is currently emitting the equivalent of 50 billion tons per year, it's a mere drop in the ocean. 

Still, aquaculture does have the potential to be a carbon-neutral form of agriculture that could take the place of more carbon-intensive farming. It could also help mitigate the carbon emissions from other areas of agriculture, like cattle farming, as cows that eat seaweed emit far less methane. And it could do the same with other industries that produce carbon-intensive products that could be made from seaweed instead, such as fuel and fertilizer.

Game Changer 4: Enhanced Weathering

Here's another way to stuff more carbon into the oceans: enhanced mineral weathering. The ocean already absorbs quite a lot of carbon through natural weathering, which works like this:

1. CO2 dissolves in rainwater.
   
2. The slightly acidic rain reacts with carbon-containing rocks like limestone. 
3. The dissolved carbonates from the rock get carried to the sea and eventually settle on the seafloor.
4. Over time, the layers of sediment build up and turn into rock.
   

Now, this doesn't seem like a net benefit, since the carbon started out trapped in rock and ended up trapped in rock. But as the carbonates from the rock enter seawater, they increase its alkalinity. That makes the ocean capable of absorbing more CO2 from the atmosphere.

Enhanced weathering speeds up this process by grinding rock up fine to expose more of its surface area, so rain dissolves more of the minerals in it. You can spread the ground-up rock directly in the ocean or, better yet, on cropland, where it boosts soil nutrients and increases crop yields. It can also improve crop health, fend off pests and disease, and fight soil erosion. And that ground-up rock reduces the need for petroleum-based fertilizers, so it's a two-fer.

Game Changer 5: Fusion

There's an old joke about nuclear fusion: It's a cheap, clean power source that's just 50 years away from becoming a reality...and always will be.

Except now it's not. This year, scientists at MIT successfully used a superconducting magnet to create a magnetic field strong enough to contain a fusion reaction. Having proved that is possible, they're now at work building SPARC, a working fusion reactor. And if that works, they'll get right to work on a bigger reactor, ARC, that can actually produce electricity. Clean, continuous electricity with essentially no fuel cost. If all goes well, it could be online by early 2030.

This is the true moon shot. Unlike the other game changers I've listed here, this is a technology that doesn't exist yet. It may take longer than expected to make it work, or it may not work at all. But the scientists behind it say they have "high confidence" that it will, making this cheap, clean, carbon-free power source could a reality in as little as eight years.

And SPARC may not even be the world's first fusion reactor. Another team made up of scientists from seven nations is already at work on ITER, a fusion power plant that's scheduled to fire up for the first time in 2025. It won't produce electricity either, but it can potentially be used to produce tritium, a necessary fuel for future reactors that do. China has fusion projects of its own in the works; yesterday one of them managed to keep a reaction going for a record 17 minutes. And a British company, Tokamak Energy, announced its own breakthrough in magnetic field generation last month.

Yes, I know there are other carbon-neutral energy sources that aren't in the experimental phase, that exist right here and right now. Solar, wind, hydro, biomass, and conventional nuclear fission all have a role to play in the decarbonization of the grid. And we'll surely need to scale them all up a lot over the next few years to have a chance of staying below 1.5°C. 

But fusion, once we get it working, is essentially limitless. It means human society can continue to grow, continue to use ever more energy, and maybe not make our planet uninhabitable in the process. It may be too late to save us — but it definitely won't be too little.

For me, stories like these are a big help. They make me feel like my so-far feeble efforts to fight climate change aren't a waste of time. It's hard to keep banging your head against the brick wall that is Congress when it seems like it's already too late to do any good. But when I hear about new advances like these, I can believe that maybe, with their help, there's still time. And that gives me the will to sign in to one more Zoom meeting, write one more letter, attend one more lobbying session, and keep chipping away, bit by bit, at that brick wall.