Small space ecofrugality (and its opposite)

I generally think of tiny homes (under 500 square feet) as inherently ecofrugal. After all, a house with fewer square feet naturally costs less to build (or buy), less to furnish, less to heat and cool, and less to maintain than a bigger one, and it takes less time to clean. But a recent story in the New York Times caused me to question that view. 

I initially clicked on this piece about a 450-square-foot studio in Manhattan hoping to see what sorts of  clever design tricks the homeowner had used to make the most of the space. But not only did the apartment not look at all spacious to me, the price tag on it literally made my jaw drop. The owner, Michael Ingram Jones, paid an eye-popping $799,000 for this tiny apartment because it met his very particular requirements: it was in the West Village, and it was in a prewar building constructed by architecture firm Bing & Bing. Now, you would assume that, if he was willing to pay that much to live in a Bing & Bing building, it must have been because he loved the look of their homes—but apparently that was not the case. He loved the view, but he thought the freshly renovated apartment's layout "was inefficient and wasted space." So the first thing he did was spend another $300,000 to have high-priced architecture firm Messana O'Rorke redo the place from top to bottom.

And what did they do for that exorbitant price tag? They divided up this tiny space into a series of even tinier spaces by enclosing the bed in a huge black box (oh, excuse me, I meant "deep aubergine-gray") in the middle of the room. The architect claims this "creates an object in space, as well as sequences of spaces that can actually make a small apartment feel larger," but based on the photos, it certainly doesn't look larger. It looks like there's a huge block of unused space right smack in the middle of the room, and much of the remaining space is devoted to narrow, dark little corridors for getting around that obstruction. And when the doors to this "bedroom" are opened, all they reveal is a dark enclosure containing a queen-size bed and literally nothing else.

I was equally unimpressed by Messana's "great" bathroom and kitchen. The kitchen cabinets are done in a dark wood with no handles, and the tiny counter and backsplash are in a no-doubt-pricey black granite. The photo caption claims this design creates "visual calm," but what it looks like to me is a tiny, dark, featureless hole. The bathroom, decked out with even-more-pricey white Carrara marble on all horizontal surfaces, has more light, but it's still flat and bare-looking. The vibe it gives off is "expensive hotel," not "home reflecting the owner's personality." The other "rooms" in the apartment, the sitting area and desk nook, have more character, thanks to the owner's collection of nice furniture and art pieces. But they're so tiny that everything just feels crammed in.

In short, this little apartment might just be the least ecofrugal home I've ever seen. Between the purchase price and the remodeling costs, the owner paid a whopping $2,444 per square foot for it, and he ended up with a space that feels dark, poky, and cramped. For clever use of space, Brian and I agreed, this high-end home has nothing on the model apartments at IKEA, which could be replicated for a tiny fraction of the price.

This extravagant and unappealing remodel was so exactly the opposite of what I'd hoped for that I decided to go hunting online for a small-space design that was closer to my ecofrugal ideals. I typed "450 square food apartment" into the search bar and clicked on the first hit, from Apartment Therapy. And the minute I saw the first picture, I felt much more cheerful.

Although this Brooklyn apartment has exactly the same square footage as the one featured in the Times, the contrast between the two could hardly be greater. Where one is dark and confined, the other is bright and open. The first one feels like barely enough space for one person, while the second houses two people and a cat comfortably. It has all the same spaces—seating area, dining area, bedroom, kitchen, bath, office—but all of them are in one big room. And while 450 square feet is small for an apartment, it's very large for a single room, making every part of the apartment feel much more spacious.

Even when you focus on the individual "rooms" within the studio, they feel much bigger and brighter than the tiny roomlets in the Manhattan studio. The kitchen is a real kitchen, with a full-sized stove, sink, and fridge, plus a dishwasher—amenities there clearly isn't room for in the Jones kitchen. Counter space looks limited until you realize that the couple's butcher-block dining table (a family heirloom) is counter-height and can do double duty as a roomy island for food prep. And when the meal is ready, the table can comfortably seat four people, while the tiny table in Jones's "dining area" barely has room for a single plate. Jones said he didn't care about space since he considered the city itself to be his "living room," and presumably, if he wants to entertain guests, he takes them out on the town. But the Brooklyn couple (Eva Medoff and Delaney Rohan) have plenty of room to cook and serve dinner for four or, with a bit of squeezing, even six people if they choose. And after dinner, they still have the entire city at their disposal.

Likewise, the bathroom, though small, feels warm and welcoming, with wood and copper accents, a bit of art, and a shower curtain "so soft it feels like a blanket," rather than a uniform expanse of cold marble. The desk faces a large bookshelf crammed with books and a few family photos, as opposed to the handful of books stacked on two tiny shelves above Jones's desk. And the bed, rather than being hidden away in a big dark box, has its head tucked into a little niche in the corner, next to a sunny window from which the cat likes to look out on the street. This does leave it visible from most parts of the room, which might not be to everyone's taste, but the little corner wall creates enough separation to make it feel like a room of its own. And if they ever feel uncomfortable having it visible while people are over, they could always block it off with a translucent screen or curtain.

Since Medoff and Rohan are renters, they didn't do any actual remodeling on this space. However, their "dream landlord" has allowed them to make lots of cosmetic changes—all of which they did themselves on a budget, not with the help of a high-priced design firm. They redesigned their "cookie-cutter" kitchen by painting the cabinets a dark bluish-grey and adding copper handles, and they covered the laminate countertops with butcher-block contact paper (a trick I once used myself in my little apartment in Princeton). The result, to my eye, looks much more elegant than the flat, dark wood and granite kitchen surfaces Jones paid a bundle for. They used the same color scheme in the bathroom, and they picked up on the copper theme throughout the apartment with a shower rod, towel racks, pot racks, and light fixtures made from copper pipe. (All these pieces were DIYed by Rohan. Medoff says her number-one decorating tip is "marrying (or co-habitating, or befriending) someone with secret carpentry skills.")

The only thing I found disappointing about the Apartment Therapy article is that it said nothing about how much this frugal design cost. There isn't a single dollar figure anywhere in the piece, either for the rent or for the renovations, so there's no way to draw a direct comparison between Medoff's and Rohan's total budget and Jones's. However, it's evident that this DIY decor job, using paint and off-the-shelf copper pipe, was much cheaper than the one done by Messana O'Rorke. Since the couple simply changed the appearance of existing elements rather than ripping them out and replacing them with brand-new hardwoods and stone, it was clearly much greener, too. The rent Medoff and Rohan are paying in trendy Williamsburg would no doubt look high to anyone who lives outside the Big Apple, but the total amount they've spent on the place has still got to be a fraction of what Jones paid for his. And their DIYed space is both elegant and cozy, filled with elements that show their personality. 

Of course, I suppose Jones's high-end space is a reflection of his personality too. I mean, it must be, or he wouldn't have paid such a bundle for it. But living in a shoebox-sized showroom wouldn't be to my taste, nor, I suspect, to most people's. If I ever somehow found myself in Jones's apartment, I'd no doubt find it very uncomfortable, but in the Brooklyn apartment, I'd pull up a stool and make myself right at home.

What's the most ecofrugal car?

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that I didn't post anything last weekend. That's because we were away visiting some friends down in the D.C. area. Like us, these folks are eco-conscious, and in two major ways, they're ahead of us on the green scale: their house has solar panels, and they drive a plug-in hybrid car. Brian and I have already determined that solar panels aren't really an option for us, and we've now subscribed to a community solar project instead. But on the way home, we got into a discussion of whether we could be driving something more ecofrugal than our small, fairly fuel-efficient Honda Fit. If we had to replace the Fit this year, we wondered, what would we get instead?

Last time we had to make this decision, back around the beginning of 2011, we decided a hybrid car wasn't worth the added cost. It was much more cost-effective to buy an inexpensive, fuel-efficient gas-powered car and pay a little extra for carbon offsets. But since then, the math has changed. Electric vehicles, both battery-powered and plug-in, have grown steadily cheaper, and experts are predicting that they could reach price parity with gasoline vehicles as early as this year. And electric cars were already cheaper than gas vehicles to fuel and maintain. So, in theory, the most ecofrugal ride would be a small car like our Fit, but one that we can plug in to power it.

But in practice, it's not that simple. Because while electric cars are getting cheaper and more prevalent, most of the choices are battery electric vehicles (BEVs). Buy one of these, and you're limited by its driving range. The EV charging network is much bigger than it used to be, but charging stations—especially the ultrafast kind that can power a car in "as little as 30 minutes"—are still nowhere near as easy to find as gas stations. And even if you can find one of these fast chargers, half an hour to refuel is much slower than filling up the tank with gas.

True, today's BEVs have much longer ranges than before, but it's still not always possible to avoid charging up while on the road. Even the longest-range BEV, the $87,000 Lucid Air, can't go more than 520 miles on a charge—not enough to get us all the way to Indianapolis. More affordable options, like the Chevy Bolt or the Nissan Leaf, can go between 200 and 250 miles, which would require us to recharge at least two or three times en route to Indy at a minimum of half an hour per stop. A shorter trip, like the one we made last weekend, might be possible on a single charge, provided we could plug the car in at our destination. But we probably wouldn't want to count on it.

So, if our Fit were to die tomorrow, there's no BEV that could replace it for all our driving. Our best choice would be a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV), which would allow us to do most of our driving on battery power alone and have the gas tank as a backup for longer trips. What we'd really love is a PHEV version of our current car, the Fit—a hatchback with folding seats that combines fuel efficiency with ample storage space. But unfortunately, no such car exists. (Non-plug-in hybrid versions of the Fit are available in some parts of the world, but not only does Honda not offer them in the US, it no longer offers the gasoline version either.) 

In fact, there's no PHEV on the market that's even remotely similar to the Fit. When you search for "PHEV hatchback," the only model you find is the Hyundai Ioniq, which is no longer available; Hyundai now makes the all-electric version only. Lists of the top PHEVs at sites like Edmunds and US News are dominated by SUVs and luxury cars, with only one non-luxury sedan (the Prius Prime) making the cut. The closest thing to our Fit would be a smallish "crossover" SUV like the Kia Niro, but it's still an SUV, and we hate SUVs. Even an electric SUV that doesn't guzzle gas is still big, heavy, clumsy, hard to park, and dangerous to everyone else on the road. We just aren't SUV people, and we never will be.

After discussing this dilemma a bit, Brian proposed another solution: We could get a BEV as our main car and keep the Fit as a backup. The vast majority of all trips we make are well within the range of the Bolt or the Leaf, so we'd only need the Fit for long drives. But there are obvious downsides to this plan as well. Although our driveway is technically big enough for two cars, it's a tight fit, and keeping two cars parked there all year round would leave us with no place to dump the snow after a big snowfall. (Not that we've had any of those this winter, but we can't assume it's ceased to be a problem.) And even if we weren't driving it often, the Fit would still need insurance and at least some maintenance every year. So owning two cars would definitely be more expensive than owning just one, even a more expensive one.

Perhaps a better option would be to buy a BEV and plan to rent a car for long trips. Renting a car for just a few trips every year would be a bit of a hassle, but almost certainly cheaper than maintaining and insuring a second car year round. And we might not have to keep doing it indefinitely, since the charging network could eventually get good enough to make taking the BEV all the way to Indy a reasonable option. Our biggest concern is that this may not happen by the time gas-powered cars are phased out completely. Then it will be impractical to drive across the country with our BEV and impossible to rent a gas-powered car for the purpose. Under those circumstances, our only choices will be to fly out to Indy for the holidays—which has a much bigger carbon footprint than driving a fuel-efficient car with two people in it—or make the drive significantly longer than it is now, possibly spanning multiple days. Or, I guess, stay home.

Of the electric options available now, this BEV-plus-rental setup is probably the best. But for us, it seems like the best approach of all is to keep our little Fit running as long as possible. Then we can hope that, by the time we're finally ready to replace it, there will be more options that actually work for us: either PHEVs that fit our preferences or EVs and chargers that can reasonably take us 700 miles in one day. Our failure to jump on the EV bandwagon right now may damage our green cred, but it gives us the best chance of making the switch in a way that will work for us long-term. And you can buy an awful lot of carbon offsets for the price of an EV you're not really happy with.

Recipes of the Month: Two low-carb pastas (that we probably won't use in future)

One of the things I've missed most on my new reduced-carb diet is pasta. Even the high-fiber varieties made from whole wheat, chickpeas, or red lentils, which my doctor once recommended as a healthier alternative to plain noodles, have more carbs per serving than I'm allowed to consume at a meal. So, much to my disappointment, this former staple has dropped out of our diet almost completely.

But lately, Brian has been experimenting with ways to bring it back. In the past week, he's tried versions of two of our favorite pasta dishes using alternative, lower-carb noodle alternatives. Both were kind of successful, but one was a lot more complicated than the other.

His first attempt involved making his own low-carb pasta from scratch, using the almond flour pasta recipe from Little Pine Kitchen. The only required ingredients are almond flour, eggs, salt, and a bit of xanthan gum, though the recipe suggests mixing in a bit of melted mozzarella to help hold it together. You mix all this up to form a ball of dough, then roll it out, cut it into pieces, and fry them in olive oil. This recipe, naturally, is very high in fat—18 grams per serving—and has 222 grams of sodium to boot. But, hey, only 3 grams of net carbs, so that's good, I guess?

Little Pine Kitchen provides directions for a variety of different pasta shapes, including cavatelli, farfalle, and orechiette. But Brian decided to try something different: making it into flat sheets and using those in a lasagna. Fried to a crisp, the almond-flour "noodles" certainly didn't look or taste anything like pasta; they were more like slightly crumbly crackers with an agreeably nutty, lightly salty flavor. But layered in a pan with sauce, spinach, and cheese, they did in fact produce something reasonably lasagna-like. The flat sheets didn't have the same texture as real lasagna noodles, but they did do the job of keeping the layers separated. Brian thought that in a way, they were superior to regular noodles, since the layers didn't tend to slide apart on your plate. And they certainly worked better than the previous low-carb substitute we'd tried, Palmini heart-of-palm "pasta," which not only lacked the flavor and texture of pasta but also slid around all over the place.

Nonetheless, I wasn't entirely convinced that this low-carb pasta substitute was really worth the amount of work that went into it. Since all the almond-flour sheets did was keep the layers separated, I suspected we could accomplish the same thing much more easily with a ready-made alternative, such as the Carb Balance tortillas we've been using for Mexican dishes. These would also most likely have a texture and flavor closer to noodles, if still not identical. And since they're much lower in fat and calories and higher in fiber, they'd probably be a healthier alternative too.

The other low-carb pasta substitution was a much simpler one: shirataki noodles. These low-calorie noodles, which you can find in the refrigerator case at many supermarkets, are made from a type of Japanese yam that's naturally low in carbs and high in fiber. The refrigerated packages are more or less ready to eat; all you have to do is rinse them and heat them up. An entire 7-ounce bag of them has just 10 calories and 6 grams of carbs—most of that from fiber. Their taste and texture aren't identical to regular pasta; they have a slightly stiffer chew and no flavor to speak of. But hidden under any kind of sauce, they're virtually indistinguishable from the real thing. 

Brian tried adding a bag of these to our new Brussels sprout pad Thai recipe, and the result was an unqualified success. They weren't quite the same as the rice noodles we used to put in our pad Thai, but their texture and flavor blended right in with the other ingredients and made the dish feel quite a bit more substantial than it had with nothing but veggies. He also tried mixing some of them with an equal volume of real spaghetti in a batch of pasta Romesco to create a carb-light version that I could eat a reasonable quantity of. If you looked carefully, it was possible to tell the individual strands of actual pasta from the shirataki, and if you tasted a bit of each separately, you could discern the difference in texture. But if you just twirled up a forkful of the combination and put it into your mouth, you'd never notice that what you were eating wasn't the genuine article.

So does this mean shirataki noodles are going to become a regular part of our diet moving forward? Well, maybe not. One problem is that they're a lot more expensive than regular pasta: around $3 for a 7-ounce bag, or about a cup of noodles. That's equivalent to about 4 ounces' worth of regular pasta, which even at today's prices costs less than 50 cents. So eating this stuff on a regular basis would definitely add quite a bit to our grocery bill. But if we knew we were going to be sticking with this low-carb regimen for the long term, it would probably be worth the cost to enjoy our favorite pasta dishes again.

But there's another, much bigger problem. After three difficult months on this low-carb diet, I just got my blood sugar retested, and it was actually higher than before. Apparently, I was doing a better job of controlling it on my previous diet, which was substantially higher in high-fiber carbohydrates. Remember all those foods I had to give up even though I'd always thought they were good for me, like fruit, whole-grain bread and pasta, beans, potatoes, popcorn, and winter squash? Well, it's starting to look like maybe they really were good for me—or at least better than the much higher-fat, higher-protein diet with more animal products (especially eggs, cheese, and fish) that I've been eating for the past few months.

I'm scheduled to discuss this with my doctor on Monday, and I'm hoping she'll give me permission to go back to my former mostly whole-food, mostly plant-based diet. If she does, then I can take all these tricks I've been using to keep my carb count down and toss them gleefully out the window. But even if she thinks I still need some kind of special diet to control my blood sugar, I'm going to push for one that's different from what I've been doing so far. Seeing as how it's made my life a lot more difficult and less enjoyable without, apparently, doing me any good, I see no reason to continue with it.

Gardeners' Holidays 2023: Festival of Seeds

Although February 2 is the first Gardeners' Holiday of the year, there's usually not much going on in the actual garden at that time. Last year's crops are long gone by then, and it's far too early to start putting any of this year's into the ground. So this Gardeners' Holiday is usually devoted more to planning ahead for the coming season: laying out the garden plot, pruning the plum trees, and starting our first seeds indoors, which generally means the parsley. 

But this year is a little different. This year, the parsley seeds we bought from Botanical Interests (the new seed supplier we chose to replace Fedco) specifically said on the packet that starting them indoors was not recommended. (The preferred procedure is to direct sow them once soil temperatures are over 50 degrees, soaking them in water for 24 hours first to aid germination.) But we do have one crop that's not only already started, but already starting to come up: our new strawberry plants. 

When I bought these, I assumed that we'd simply be sowing them directly outdoors and hoping they would take root in our rich, dense soil. But the instructions on the packet said it's actually preferable to start them indoors, and to do it really early—14 to 16 weeks before the last expected frost. Around here, that means mid-January, when the ground is generally frozen solid. So our usual procedure of starting the seeds in tubes with a layer of seed-starting mix over a layer of garden soil wasn't going to work. 

Fortunately, we happened to have an alternative seed starting system available. One Christmas, we forget exactly when, someone had given us a "cell greenhouse kit": a tray with 36 individual cups, 36 pellets of coir, and a clear plastic lid. The idea is that you just put the pellets in the cups and add water, and they swell up to fill the entire space. You can then push your seeds straight into this growth medium and cover the whole thing up with the lid. It will keep the seeds warm and moist, and when the seedlings start to come up, it will let in light to nourish them.

In real life, this did not work exactly as described. Perhaps the kit had been left sitting for too long and the pellets had dried out too much, but when watered, they did not expand nearly as much as the directions said they would. They absorbed some water, sure, but they only went from being little dry cylinders to slightly bigger wet cylinders. Brian eventually had to break up the coir with a fork and then add a little seed-starting mix on top to fill the receptacles. Then he sprinkled a couple of the tiny little strawberry seeds into each individual nook, misted them thoroughly with water, covered them up, and put them on top of the fridge. (The instructions for the strawberries said it's best to keep the seeds in a warm spot out of direct sunlight initially and only move them into the sunshine when they start to emerge.)

That was roughly two weeks ago, and here's what we have now: tiny little shoots poking up out of the dirt (or dirt substitute). They're much too small at this point to look anything like actual strawberry plants, but they are real, live, green plants growing in our home in the dead of winter. It may be 24 degrees outside with a brisk wind blowing; the outdoor landscape may be entirely dormant, without a trace of green anywhere. But here, in the sunny window in our guest room (which is also our conservatory, or the closest thing we have to one), the gardening season has already begun.

The vanity project

It's become kind of a tradition for me to ask Brian to tackle a new DIY project every year as my birthday present. This has proved to be the best way for him to give me something I'll appreciate, since (a) he hates gift shopping but rather enjoys tinkering, and (b) he doesn't generally make time for big projects unless prompted. Last year's project was painting the office; in 2016, it was installing new closet doors; in 2015, it was a knife drawer insert for the kitchen. And this year, I've officially requested a new sink, faucet, and resurfaced vanity top for the bathroom.

This bathroom vanity was one of the first things on my to-fix list back when we first bought this house. When we first saw it, the vanity was covered with laminate in a sort of faux-marble pattern, which wouldn't have been so bad if it hadn't been a dingy green shade that clashed with the lighter green fixtures and tile. Rather than replace this right away, I opted as a stopgap measure to paint over it with plain old latex paint. I used a rag-rolling technique to create a two-toned, marbleized pattern and finished it off with three coats of water-based sealant.

That worked fine, and it held up surprisingly well—so well that this "stopgap" solution ended up staying in place for the next 15 years. Of course, it was still just a painted surface, so often it suffered a little damage from water or abrasion. But for quite a few years I simply patched it up by getting out the leftover paint and dabbing it on the bare spots. It wasn't perfect, but it was still presentable.

But eventually, those minor blemishes started turning into bigger scars that were harder to conceal. So I started to put off the job of patching them, which of course meant that surface gradually started looking worse and worse. In the meantime, the sink itself was starting to show signs of wear: some cracks around the base of the faucet, some rust stains around the drain that couldn't be scrubbed off. And the faucet, which had never been great-looking, was growing more and more difficult to shut off completely. Finally I decided that this was beyond a patch job, and the whole kit and caboodle—faucet, sink, and vanity—would need to be replaced.

The question then was, how? The sink and faucet didn't pose a huge problem; we'd already tackled the job of installing new ones in the downstairs bathroom, and we were pretty sure this wouldn't be any harder. But installing a new vanity in this space would be a lot trickier than putting one up on the bare wall downstairs. The niche where the sink sits now is not a neat, rectangular space; the existing vanity top has a little divot cut out of one corner to accommodate a bump in the wall and a smaller divot cut out of another corner to fit around the door frame. So we couldn't simply buy a new vanity top the same size as the old one and squeeze it into the same space; it would have to be cut in the same places to fit exactly, which would be a very fiddly job.

Now, some years ago, I'd looked into the possibility of re-laminating our kitchen countertops (which aren't as ugly as the old bathroom vanity, but are still no treat to look at). Brian's dad talked us out of attempting this, arguing that it was an easy job to mess up and a lot more hassle than installing new countertops from scratch. But for this particular location, I thought, with its tricky shape, surely adding a new layer of laminate to the existing top would be easier—and considerably cheaper—than pulling it out and trying to cut a new one to fit in the same space. And Brian, when I put the case to him, was inclined to agree that re-laminating the existing vanity top would be more within the scope of his DIY skills than installing a whole new one.

So, about a week ago, I placed an order for four items from Home Depot:

• A 4-by-8 sheet of Formica in "Butterum Granite." This came rolled up inside a huge box; we've unrolled it and laid it out underneath a rug downstairs to try and flatten it out before we need to use it.
• A container of contact cement to attach it.
  
• A basic white drop-in bathroom sink (since I knew there was little to no chance of matching the exact green of the existing sink).
• An inexpensive single-handle faucet with a 1.2-gpm flow rate.

We haven't even received all of these yet, but already the project has hit a snag. When Brian looked at the safety information on the contact cement—which wasn't included in the description online—he discovered that in order to use it safely in our bathroom, we would not only have to open the window wide for ventilation but also turn off the heat in the house. According to the instructions, it's unsafe to use if there's an open flame anywhere in the house, including the pilot lights on the furnace and water heater. So if we used this stuff for the project, we would have to wait until spring to begin it. And even then, it would be a smelly, unpleasant, and even with the gas shut off, possibly hazardous process.

Thus, we're planning to return the unopened can of contact cement to the store and replace it with the low-VOC nonflammable version. (Sadly, this isn't available at any Home Depot or Lowe's within 100 miles of us, but we can order it from Ace Hardware.) The nontoxic version is more expensive, and it takes a much longer time to use; you have to wait about an hour before you can even stick the surfaces together, and up to seven days for a full bond. So, if we use this stuff, our upstairs sink will be out of commission for much longer than it would with the nasty version. But balanced against the risk of blowing up the house, we think that's a worthwhile tradeoff.

Sadly, having this delivered from Ace Hardware will take about a week, which means there's no chance of being able to tackle the project next weekend. And the rest of our weekends in February are so fully booked up that we probably won't get to it until the beginning of March. But that's still better than waiting until it's warm enough to go without heat, hot water, or the stove until we're 100 percent certain the cement is fully dried. And after putting off this job for 15 years already, another month won't matter all that much.

Thrift Week (in one day) 2023: Stuff Green People Hate

If you've been reading my blog for several years, you may have noticed that I did not run my usual Thrift Week series this past week, as I have done every January since 2010. And you might reasonably have suspected that after 13 years, I had simply run out of good ideas for a whole week's worth of related posts. But actually, that wasn't the problem; I still had several possibilities in the pipeline that could have worked. The fact is that last Tuesday, when my birthday (which is also Ben Franklin's birthday and thus the official start of Thrift Week) rolled around, I happened to be busy with other stuff, and I just forgot.

Having remembered about this just now, on what would normally be the last day of Thrift Week, it seems a bit silly to start a weeklong series at this point. So, for this year only, I'm going to compromise by condensing a whole Thrift Week into a single post. Instead of seven short-to-medium posts on a single ecofrugal topic, you'll get one long post covering all seven ideas in list form. And the topic I've chosen for this Thrift Week blitz is: The Seven Least Ecofrugal Things You Can Buy. (It's sort of the anti-ecofrugal counterpart to my Stuff Green People Like series.)

When I first jotted down this idea, I planned to lead off the series with a Keurig coffee maker. This seemed like the perfect example of an anti-ecofrugal product, since it's both expensive and wasteful. The machines themselves start at $80, while a drip or French press coffeemaker can cost less than $20. Then there's the cost of the K-cups: $19.99 for 22 K-cups of Starbucks Breakfast Blend coffee, or 91 cents per cup. Compare that with the cost of the same coffee in whole bean form at Walmart: $13.24 for 18 ounces, which works out to 25 cents per cup assuming 47 cups per pound. On top of that, the K-cups are neither recyclable nor compostable, while the leftover grounds and filter from a press or drip machine (or my trusty Aeropress) can go straight into the compost bin. And they don't even make good coffee.

But this week's Washington Post presented an article on the topic that contradicted this view. As I noted last week, you probably can't read the article if you're not a subscriber, but the headline sums it up: "Single-use coffee pods have surprising environmental benefits over other brewing methods." It points to an environmental analysis published in The Conversation (which you can read with no paywall) that compared the carbon footprints of different brewing methods and found that the biggest factors are the coffee itself and the energy used to heat the water. The least wasteful method, assuming you use the recommended amounts of both, is instant coffee (though taste-wise it has even less to recommend it than the pods). But the much-maligned pod machine actually comes in second, since it limits the amount of coffee and water used per cup. The most wasteful method is the standard drip machine, which both uses the most ground coffee per cup and uses extra electricity to keep the pot warm. (The analysis didn't cover the Aeropress, but it did list the amount of coffee used in each method: 25 grams per cup for drip, 17 grams for a French press, 14 for a pod machine like the Keurig, and 12 for instant. I just now measured the amount I use in my Aeropress and it was 15 grams, so I'm doing about as well as a Keurig without all the plastic waste.)

This just goes to show that figuring out a product's ecological footprint can sometimes be a tricky business. So for my Least Ecofrugal list, I'm going to stick strictly to things that are so clearly wasteful (of money and everything else) that there's no realistic chance some smart bunch of scientists is going to come along and prove otherwise. And by that strict standard, my seven choices are:

1. A high-end sports car. I was originally going to say an SUV, since these vehicles are not only gas-guzzlers but are also more expensive to own than most other vehicles. But I have to concede that the data shows they are indeed safer for drivers (though they make the road less safe for everyone else). Sports cars don't offer even that benefit. 

In a 2019 Insider article on the nine most expensive vehicles to own, five of the nine were sports models. And on a 2021 list of the least fuel-efficient cars you can buy, sports cars also dominate. Some models are more efficient than others, but unless you're going for an all-electric (and really expensive) Tesla, they're never going to compete with a fuel-efficient sedan.

2. A boat. Everything that's wasteful about cars goes double for boats. I'm not talking about a little canoe here, obviously, but a big boat that costs money to fuel, maintain, dock, and insure. A longstanding joke among the yacht set is that owning a yacht is like standing in a cold shower tearing up hundred-dollar bills.

How many hundreds are we talking here? Well, according to Deep Sailing, the cost of boat ownership can be anywhere from $450 for a speedboat to $250,000 for a big yacht—per month. However, Watercraft 101 puts the cost much lower, saying that a boat that costs $20,000 to buy up-front will probably cost less than $3,000 per year to own. And Born Again Boating splits the difference, saying that a 23-foot boat will cost around $30,000 in its first year and $15,000 per year after that. The cost seems to depend a lot on what kind of boat it is and how it's financed. 

But here's the thing: unless you fish or run a ferry for a living, you don't actually need to own a boat at all. Unlike a car, a boat is used mainly for recreation, not transportation. So both the cost of ownership and the environmental cost of the boat's emissions are entirely unnecessary.

3. Cigarettes. This one's a no-brainer. At an average cost of $8 per pack, a pack-a-day smoker would spend over $2,900 per year on cigarettes alone. But that cost is just the tip of the iceberg. Smokers also pay significantly more for health care, health insurance, and home insurance, and they're less productive at work, reducing their ability to earn. According to a WalletHub study, the lifetime cost of being a smoker can be anywhere from $2.2 to $4.1 million. And from an environmental standpoint, tobacco not only pollutes the air that nonsmokers have to breathe, it's also responsible for habitat loss; soil degradation; pesticide pollution; deforestation; significant costs in water, energy, and transportation; and, of course, discarded cigarette butts all over the place.

4. Diamonds. You know who came up with the "rule" that a diamond engagement ring should cost two months' salary for the groom? Big surprise: it was the DeBeers diamond cartel, which has kept the price of diamonds artificially high for decades by deliberately restricting supply. One hundred years ago, most engagement rings didn't have diamonds in them at all. Then DeBeers launched a successful campaign to convince husbands-to-be that the only proper ring was a diamond, and moreover, a diamond costing a month's salary. This was such a success that DeBeers later bumped the figure up to two months' salary in the U.S. and three months' salary in Japan.

By 2021, according to The Knot, the average cost of an engagement ring in the U.S. had reached $6,000. (Granted, this figure may be skewed upward based on the magazine's readership.) And what do you get for that $6,000? Not an investment that produces any sort of return. Not an asset that you can sell for a profit, since the recipient is obviously expected to keep the ring as long as the marriage lasts. And definitely not a happier marriage, since a 2014 Emory University study found that the couples who spent most on their rings (between $2,000 and $4,000 in 2014 dollars) had a 30 percent higher risk of divorce than those who chose more affordable rings ($500 to $2,000). 

A big diamond ring is a pretty ornament and a status symbol, but it provides no tangible benefits whatsoever. And given all the environmental and human rights abuses associated with diamond mining, you're probably doing both the earth and your wallet a favor by choosing an old-fashioned ring with a different type of stone—or a modern one with a lab-created diamond. Or, if you're willing to break with this not-so-old tradition, doing what we did and skipping the engagement ring entirely.

5. An expensive wedding. You know what else that Emory study found increased the risk of divorce? Expensive weddings. Couples who spent between $10,000 and $20,000 on their weddings were 29 percent likelier to end up divorced than those who spent between $5,000 and $10,000; couples who spent over $20,000 increased their divorce rates by a whopping 46 percent. By contrast, couples who spent less than $5,000 (like us) actually reduced their risk. Couples who spent even less than we did—$1,000 or less—cut their divorce rate nearly in half. (Having a big wedding, with lots of guests, did not pose the same dangers: the couples with the most wedding guests actually had a lower risk of divorce than those with the fewest. Apparently, the real mistake is spending a lot of money on each guest.)

A frugal wedding like ours also eliminates many of the environmental costs associated with traditional weddings: elaborate invitations, single-use decorations, pesticide-laden cut flowers, gas-guzzling limos, and even one-use-only wedding attire. We didn't have any of that stuff, and we're still together after 18 years, so it clearly didn't hurt us any.

6. Marble countertops. I've complained before about the ubiquity and price of granite countertops, but marble is even worse. It's even more expensive than granite, at $15 to $190 per square foot, and even harder to care for. Since it's porous, you have to not only seal it but also use special, non-abrasive cleaners to avoid scratching it. It's also vulnerable to chipping and etching from acid. And it has all the same environmental problems from quarrying and transporting the heavy stone that granite does.

7. The latest smartphone. After many years of not owning a smartphone at all, I've finally come to accept that the benefits of these little gadgets outweigh their drawbacks. But there's a big difference between owning a smartphone and buying a new top-of-the-line phone every year. 

The financial costs are obvious. The latest, greatest iPhone has a starting price of $1,100; the latest Samsung Galaxy model costs $1,200. You could get around half of that price back by trading in last year's model, but you're still paying over $500 per year for new phones (not even counting the cost of the service). By contrast, my first smartphone, a bottom-of-the-line Motorola, cost $130, and I'd still be using it now if it hadn't developed a problem that I was unable to fix. 

But worse still is the environmental toll. Producing all those new phones requires a lot of rare materials like lithium, cobalt, and gold. Mining these materials is environmentally destructive, and disposing of them is hazardous. And while old smartphones can be reused and recycled, many users simply discard them when they upgrade.

It's clearly better for the environment to buy a decent phone, hang onto it as long as possible, and make sure it gets recycled when it finally becomes unusable. And it will clearly save you a bundle, too.

***

So there you have it: my selections for the seven least ecofrugal consumer purchases. If you think any of my choices are unreasonable, or if you think there's something even worse that I left off the list, let me know in the comments.

That's it until next Thrift Week, when I promise to be a little more on the ball about starting on the 17th. (This time, I'll get Google to remind me about it ahead of time.)

Now we're (still) cooking with gas

This past Tuesday was my birthday, and one of my gifts was a subscription to the Washington Post. I'd asked for this specifically because my mom, who is a Post subscriber, keeps sending me links to articles she finds interesting, and I can never read them because the Post only allows non-subscribers to view one free article per month. And one of the first articles I was able to read with that new subscription was an op-ed from writer Tove Danovich entitled "I bought an induction stove. Then the power went out." 

You probably won't be able to read the piece if you're not a subscriber yourself, so I'll just sum it up briefly: Like many people, Danovich recently jumped on the bandwagon and swapped out her gas stove for an induction stove powered by electricity. And like most people who do this, she went on and on to her friends about how wonderful it was: so fast, so responsive, so easy to clean! Why would anyone ever choose gas? Then, as foreshadowed in the headline, she got an answer to that question when a storm knocked out her electricity—a problem she says she'd never once experienced before in her Portland, Oregon home. With no way to cook a meal or even brew a pot of coffee, she was driven out into the storm "in search of caffeine." 

Despite the headline, this story itself occupies only the first few paragraphs of the article. Danovich spends the rest of it explaining why, even after this incident, she's still absolutely convinced that ditching her old gas stove was the right thing to do. Gas stoves, she points out, emit pollutants that are dangerous to both our health and to the planet—though she's a little unclear on exactly why. (She seems to think the reason they've been linked to childhood asthma is that they "constantly leak methane," even when they're not running; in fact, the primary compound responsible is nitrogen dioxide, or NO2, which is produced only when the gas is burned.) She maintains that the reason most people continue to cling to their gas stoves is that they're snobs who don't want to give up their "high-end status symbols." For her, the fact that they don't work during a power outage is at most a minor inconvenience, not something that would ever deter any reasonable person from making the switch.

Unfortunately, I cannot dismiss this problem so easily. In fact, it's the main reason I haven't seriously considered replacing my own (not at all high-end) gas stove. 

I know that global warming is the single biggest threat currently facing humanity—perhaps even the biggest threat we've ever faced. I know that keeping the overall temperature rise below 1.5°C (2.7°F) is our best chance to avoid the deadliest impacts of climate change. And I know that we have no chance of meeting this goal unless we completely eliminate fossil fuel use—including my trusty gas stove—by 2050.

But I also know that no matter what we do, we can't avoid all the impacts of global warming. Many of them are already here, and even if we manage to meet the 1.5°C target, they won't go away. One of the effects we've already begun to see is more frequent and more powerful storms—the kind of storms that tend to result in power outages. Already, here in our New Jersey home, we experience power outages regularly—in extreme cases, several in a week. The one triggered by Superstorm Sandy lasted 24 hours at our house, and we got off easy; some of our neighbors were without power for days. 

One of the reason we made it through these disasters relatively unscathed was that our stove continued to work (except for the electric igniters, but we could easily light the burners with a match), so we didn't have to go hungry. Our battery-powered emergency gadgets can provide us with light, communication, even entertainment, but we don't have a backup for the stove. And with global warming increasing the odds that there will be more superstorms in our future, going without a backup seems more unwise than ever. (In fact, while so many of my fellow environmentalists are exulting about going all-electric and capping off the gas lines to their homes, getting fossil fuels out of their lives forever, I've actually gone the other way, adding a natural gas fireplace to our home specifically as an emergency heat source.)

This is why it frustrates me so much that environmentalists have chosen gas stoves, out of all the gas-burning appliances in a home, to fixate on. Even though cooking is responsible for only a tiny percentage of household natural gas use, they seem to think that they should attack stove use first because a stove is easier to replace than an entire heating system, and therefore it's an easier sell. But for me, the stove is much harder to replace than the heating system or anything else that runs on gas—and that's entirely due to the fear of power outages. My gas heating system, which is a much bigger offender than the stove, would be much costlier to replace, but much easier to get along without. It's useless in a power outage anyway because it relies on an electric pump to circulate the water, so I wouldn't be risking anything by replacing it with a more efficient electric heat pump. Replacing my gas dryer with an electric one would likewise pose no risk, since I can't do laundry anyway if the washer isn't working. The gas water heater would be a little harder to part with, since it allows me to enjoy a hot shower during a power outage, but that's a luxury I can manage without for a couple of days if I have to. But without my gas stove, no electricity means no hot water, no hot coffee, and no hot food. And if the power outage is due to a severe storm, I can't even leave the house to get these things.

There is one possible way out of this dilemma: find a backup system for cooking, similar to the gas fireplace that serves as a backup for heating. I've looked into this before, but most of the sources I found suggested either hauling out the charcoal grill or cooking with a solar oven—both options that won't work in the middle of a severe storm. However, after reading Danovich's piece, I decided it was worth digging into the topic a little bit more. And this time, I managed to track down an article on the self-sufficiency site Common Sense Home that offered a couple of ideas that were at least technically feasible. The first option, a flameless heater designed for use with MREs (meals ready to eat), wouldn't be ideal for us because we probably couldn't find any MREs that would fit our dietary needs. But the second, a camp stove that could be used with canned fuel (such as Sterno), seemed to have some merit. A quick search revealed that I could buy a folding stove for around $10 and a dozen cans of Sterno (good for 6 hours each) for around $40. Together, these would enable us to enjoy hot meals with neither gas nor electricity for a week or more.

Of course, even with this backup, we still wouldn't be able to go fully all-electric at home, since the gas fireplace would still have to stay. But since it's only there for an emergency backup, it wouldn't be used very often. Of course, if America actually does get its act sufficiently together to eliminate fossil fuel use entirely, we'd eventually lose our gas service and have to find an alternative, but I'm sure we'd have plenty of time to figure that out.

But even if swapping out our gas stove is a viable option, I remain unconvinced that it's crucial to do it immediately. Yes, there is definitely a link between NO2 from gas stoves and asthma. But we don't have asthma, and we don't have children at risk of developing it. And we do have a decent range hood, which (according to the experts at both Good Housekeeping and Wirecutter) can remove most of the dangerous fumes associated with cooking. 

I do want and intend to go all-electric at home eventually. But given that our gas boiler and water heater are responsible for the lion's share of our fossil fuel use—and that there's a much better technology available to replace them—I think those, not the much-maligned gas stove, should be our primary targets.