Apollo Gonzales's Blog: Curbing Pollution

Deepwater Dispatches: The Worst Possible Time

2010-05-04T02:33:54Z

I think it goes without saying that there is never a good time for an oil spill. Certainly, the "drill baby drill" crowd would agree with me on that. Yesterday, sheltered from the pounding rain in his boat Capt. Kip Marquize tells us why this disaster couldn't have happened at a worse time for the fishermen and shrimpers of the Gulf Coast.

Lowering the Cost of Play

2008-11-19T13:00:00Z

In my living room sits a 32" LCD HDTV. I feel guilty every time I turn it on because I know how much energy the thing uses. Every night I turn it off, and not just stand-by, but OFF. It's the only device in my entertainment center that I turn off every night because it is the largest amongst the usual suspects identified as vampire devices.

At bedtime, when I turn the lights off, my entertainment center looks like something from the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. At the very heart of all of those little LEDs are my gaming consoles. With a 7-month-old baby my time logged gaming is no longer measured in consecutive hours, but in 10 or 15-minute chunks. That means I don't have time to waste waiting for my consoles to boot, and then load a saved game. So I do what nearly half of all gamers do, I leave the console turned on. What I didn't know until today is that collectively gamers are logging 16 billion kilowatt hours per year. For a single gamer like me, that means that my console is burning more energy than my refrigerator - in fact, chances are it's using twice as much. And that TV I feel so guilty about? My console uses 2-3 times more energy.

In a new report called Lowering the Cost of Play NRDC outlines how I, and gamers everywhere, can change the way we use our consoles to save a little cash and 7 million tons of CO2 emissions every year. For a little perspective 7 million tons of CO2 emissions is about the same as the electricity use of 841,000 homes a year. The good news is that the steps are simple, and we can take them now.

The holidays are upon us, and that brings lots of extra time, and a host of new games. Before settling in for a marathon session with Fallout 3, take a few minutes to tweak your console, because being able to destroy your environment in a game shouldn't mean you have to destroy THE Environment in meatspace.

On Leaving My Wallet At Home

2007-11-21T03:28:40Z

I am a geek of the worst kind. I am an electronics gadget geek. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a lover of many other geeky things, like comics and video games, but nothing else comes close to my obsession with gadgets. Now I may not be able to afford an iPhone or latest Garmin GPS, but my lack of funds doesn’t stop me from knowing everything there is to know about those two items. If the opportunity to get one at a sweet price should present itself, I will be prepared. This obsession is evidenced by my possession of not one, but four Polar heart rate monitors. I use one of them, and only very, very rarely. I got such amazing prices on them (a savings of over 80%, amazing right?) I could not walk away. I have memory sticks, cell phones, mp3 players, mp3 player accessories, cameras, computer speakers, laptops, enough cords to make a rug, power tools, and I’m not even going to get into the cycling and camping gear because this could go on all day.

When these items become obsolete, I usually box them up and put them away. Every once in a while the stash gets to be too much and I have to get rid of a few items. Recently I disposed of a Sprint cell phone from 1999. That my friends, is not a joke. When the time comes though, I always find myself searching for a way to recycle the product, and when I can’t figure it out I take it to Goodwill. No one will ever buy these items from Goodwill, and deep down I know those items are going to end up in a dumpster. As AP writer Terence Chea pointed out this week in a story highlighting the problem of "e-waste", those items are going to end up in China. My old printer, the one that worked fine, but was an eyesore, is now somehwere in China polluting a river.

This coming Friday is Black Friday. It is a electronic gadget geeks Christmas. The savings are so obscene that an entire world of Black Friday websites have popped up across the internet. Less than $500 for a 32” HD LCD television? Are you kidding me? Break out the lawn chair and sleeping bag, I’m getting in line today! But why? My television works fine. And so does my first generation iPod mini. And my year old Motorola Razor. And yes, even my Polar hear rate monitor.

So this coming Friday, I’ll be joining the growing movement behind Buy Nothing Day. I’m not going to explain Buy Nothing Day, because it is exactly what the name implies. This year marks the 10th year that BND has been positioned on the same day as Black Friday. After finding out that we are sending about 300,000 tons of our unwanted electronics to China every year, I can’t imagine waiting another year to get behind the cause. No matter how badly I want an iPod touch.