Kiera Butler

Senior Editor

Kiera answers your green questions every week in her Econundrums column. She was a hypochondriac even before she started researching germ warfare.

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Kiera has written about the environment, arts and culture, and more for Columbia Journalism Review, Orion, Audubon, OnEarth, Plenty, and the Utne Reader. She lives in Berkeley and recently planted 30 onions in her backyard.

Schwarzenegger: Outsource CA Prisons to Mexico

—By Kiera Butler

| Mon Feb. 1, 2010 5:01 AM PST

Last week, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger suggested that the state could save $1 billion by building prisons in Mexico to house California's undocumented prisoners. Said the governor during the press conference:

We pay them to build the prisons down in Mexico and then we have those undocumented immigrants be down there in a prison. ... And all this, it would be half the cost to build the prisons and half the cost to run the prisons.

If that idea sounds half baked, it's because it probably was. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the idea caught his prisons czar offguard, and a spokesman said he hadn't a clue where the governor got the billion-dollar savings figure.

No doubt California (and the rest of the US, for that matter) could use some creative thinking about our astronomically expensive and inefficient prison system, but it'd be much more effective to consider prison reform ideas that are actually proven to work. For example: In the current issue of Mother Jones, Beth Schwartzapfel writes about a program that hooks prisoners up with green jobs—and saves taxpayers money at the same time. Through the Sustainable Prisons Project, inmates at four prisons in Washington state compost cafeteria waste, sort recycling, work on organic vegetable gardens, keep bees, and help local scientists with environmental research. (Who has time to watch moss grow? Well, prisoners.) Beats the heck out of making license plates, and all their work is paying off:

The Department of Corrections has provided Evergreen with a $300,000 grant to administer and run the newly christened Sustainable Prisons Project. It's led to savings that Pacholke is happy to rattle off: By conserving water, Cedar Creek avoided a previously planned $1.4 million expansion of its wastewater treatment facility; by recycling and composting, another facility sent two-thirds less waste to landfills this year—garbage can cost upwards of $100 per ton to haul.

Read Mother Jones' in-depth coverage of America's broken (and broke) prison system here.

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Econundrum: 5 Handi-Wipes or Hot Shower?

—By Kiera Butler

| Mon Jan. 25, 2010 3:50 AM PST

This question comes by way of Mother Jones board member Jon Pageler, who's currently helping with the relief effort in Haiti, where water is in short supply. But I've heard of folks taking waterless showers in non-emergency situations, too. Last year, for example, People reported that that Brad Pitt sometimes cleans up with baby wipes. Granted, Pitt does it to save time between scene changes on the set. But considering that showers comprise 17 percent of indoor residential water use in the US, could bathing with wipes be better for the planet, too?

Probably not, says Jonathan Kaledin, a water conservation expert at the Nature Conservancy. "You have to consider all the water it takes to make the handi-wipes," says Kaledin. "The wipes, the chemicals—it all adds up." The Water Footprint Network, a water conservation nonprofit based in the Netherlands, estimates that growing the wood to make a single sheet of paper requires 2.6 gallons of water. That's already 13.2 gallons for 5 sheets of paper—and that's just the wood. By the time you figure in the water costs associated with the manufacture of the paper, producing the solution the wipes are soaked in, and packaging and shipping the wipes, you're looking at significantly more water (and energy, for that matter) than a five-minute shower, which, if you're using a low-flow showerhead, requires only about 10 gallons of water.

Under extenuating circumstances—disasters that jeopardize water supply, or even regional droughts—wipes might still be a better choice, says Kaledin. But as a general rule, a short shower is a better bet than wipes. Especially if you bathe efficiently: Keep the heat down to save energy. Turn the water off while you soap up. And if you haven't already installed a low-flow shower head, do it now—it'll save as much as 15 gallons of water per shower, not to mention moola on your water bill.

Shopping tip: Showerheads bearing the EPA's WaterSense label are about 20 percent more efficient than their conventional counterparts.

Recycle Your Cell Phone For Haiti

—By Kiera Butler

| Fri Jan. 15, 2010 1:38 PM PST

Here's a cool program that allows you to donate to the earthquake relief effort in Haiti and put your old cell phones to good use: Through ReCellular's Phones for Haiti program, you can send in your old phones to be refurbished and sold in the developing world. The profits from the phones are then donated to the Red Cross. According to Inhabitat blog, fancy phones (iphones and the like) can fetch as much as $100 a pop.

It's an interesting idea, but I imagine getting actual refurbished cell phones into the hands of relief workers and quake victims would be helpful as well. Anyone know of any programs that allow you to donate your old phone directly?

UPDATE: Maybe ReCellular's model is best after all. According to this Global Post article, in-kind donations can actually worsen the suffering after natural disasters.

The Great Promise of Voodoo Wasps

—By Kiera Butler

| Fri Jan. 15, 2010 12:57 PM PST

Researchers have sequenced the genome of three species of parasitic "voodoo wasps." Since the tiny creatures feed on insects that plague crops, scientists believe they could serve as an alternative to chemical pesticides. If that weren't cool enough news on its own, consider their method of killing, which sounds like something out of a sci-fi film. A zombie flick, to be precise. The wasps get their Voodoo nickname from their habit of zombifying their prey:

The three wasps all belong to the Nasonia genus and are strictly speaking "parasitoid" species, meaning that they lay their eggs inside the paralysed bodies of other insects, keeping them alive long enough for the wasp larvae to grow and mature into adults as they feed off the living flesh of their "zombie" host.

Said lead scientist John Werren in a statement, "If we can harness their full potential, they would be vastly preferable to chemical pesticides which broadly kill or poison many organisms in the environment, including us."

News of non-toxic pesticides is always welcome, but these ideas rarely take off on commercial scale, thanks in no small part to the mammoth chemical pesticide lobby. We recently reported on Obama's nomination of Islam "Isi" Siddiqui, executive of the pesticide industry lobbying group CropLife America (CLA), as chief agricultural negotiator for the office of the US Trade Representative. When Michelle Obama announced plans to plant an organic vegetable garden on the White House grounds, CLA members wrote her a letter saying the thought of chemical-free veggies made them "shudder." Touchy, touchy. Isn't it fun to imagine how they might react to a flock of chemical-free zombifying wasps?

Econundrum: Is Your Tap Water Too Dirty to Drink?

—By Kiera Butler

| Mon Jan. 11, 2010 3:50 AM PST

I've long been a proud drinker of tap water. Here in the Bay Area, most of our water comes from the famously pristine Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, surrounded by 500 square miles of wilderness in Yosemite National Park. What impurities could possibly make it into such a remote place?

Plenty, turns out. The Environmental Working Group recently tested the water in 45 states and found 316 contaminants. Nearly two thirds of those contaminants are not regulated by the EPA—meaning local water authorities aren't required to filter them or even monitor their levels. I looked up San Francisco's water in the EWG database and learned that my tap water contains eight pollutants. Relatively speaking, that's actually not too bad: In other cities (Pensacola, Florida, Riverside, California, and Las Vegas, Nevada, topped the dirty water list), researchers found high levels of unregulated chemicals like perchlorate, a key ingredient in rocket fuel shown to be toxic to the thyroid gland, and MTBE, a gasoline additive that can cause kidney and liver damage.

So what's the solution? Not bottled water, says EWG researcher Nneka Leiba. "Often it's just tap water in a bottle. And then there's the price." (EWG researchers found 38 contaminants in 10 popular brands.) Another problem: the environmental impact of manufacturing, shipping, and disposing of all those bottles. (Check out Mother Jones' exposé of Fiji Water's ecologically and socially questionable practices here.)

Your best bet is a good filter. Carbon models—the kind in the popular Brita filters—are fairly affordable (you can get a refrigerator pitcher filter for about $10), and they remove most contaminants (though not perchlorate, MTBE, or arsenic). Reverse osmosis filters, which hook up to your faucet, are pricier (around $200), but they'll keep almost all contaminants out of your tap water.