Greenovation: The Great Floor Debate

The popular eco-friendly products are not always the best solution. Lester and Greenovation.tv’s Matt Grocoff drop in on Matt’s neighbor to help him with his hardwood floor dilemma.

Transcript

In home improvement projects, the popular eco-friendly products are not always the best solution. Lester Graham has the story of a home improvement intervention.

Kevin Leeser was not happy with the floors downstairs in his one-hundred year old house.

KL: “Well, we’ve lived here five years and just over the five years they’ve started to get grayer and you can tell that the finish was –in the high traffic areas—you could tell where we were walking it looks like we were hamsters walking through this place.”

LG: “This is maple, right”

KL: “Pfft. Yeah, that’s what they tell me.”

Kevin toyed with the idea of finishing the maple floors… but that sounded really involved.

And then the in-laws visited during the holidays.

KL: “My mother-in-law was like ‘Why don’t you get new floors.’ (laugh) And I was like well, yeah, it would be easier, ‘cause the things I was concerned about were sawdust, and ‘cause I have a newborn, just dirtying up the house and figured just getting some clean stuff, cutting it outside, sticking it down and be done with it.”

LG: So, wanting to be eco-friendly, he thought he’d put down bamboo flooring. Bamboo is renewable and it grows fast… and it’s pretty popular these days.

Then his neighbor stopped by. Matt Grocoff… the eco-friendly home improvement guy with Greenovation-dot-TV who had some –eh—thoughts about Kevin’s plan…

MG: “And, I, like, practically smacked him in the face and I said ‘What are you thinking? This is a gorgeous floor. Go rent yourself a sander or even hire someone for a few hundred bucks to strip the floor and then refinish it.’”

LG: So…You’re not a big fan of bamboo?

MG: “Bamboo is a great product if you have to do something new. You have to ask a question: do you need that new product or do you have something that works now and just needs to be renewed.”

Oh, yeah. Reduce. Re-use. Recycle. So, Kevin’s wife, Lauren and their baby were away for a few days. Kevin rented a sander… …and then started looking for an eco-friendly sealant for his maple floors. Matt had an idea for that.

MG: “Kevin’s using a natural oil from BioShield which is a mixture of tung and linseed oil that is so easy to use. It’s easier to use than even a low-VOC or zero-VOC polyurethene finish and easier to maintain in the long run.”

And in the end… renting the sander, buying sanding pads, buying the floor sealant, paint brushes and all that stuff… ended up costing Kevin about HALF of what it would have if he put down bamboo. Not a bad deal.

But… the big question… what did his wife, Lauren, think of the refinished old floors.

LM “It looks absolutely beautiful and we didn’t have to get new floors. Win, win. We love it. Beautiful.”

Matt Grocoff says he was sure Kevin and Lauren would be happy, because he did the same thing at his house.

MG: “The first thing that I did when we finished with our floor is I took a glass of red wine when we were celebrating and I poured half a glass of red wine on the floor and my wife was like ‘What are you doing!’ And I was like, look, we’re going to spill wine on it eventually, let’s see what happens now. The wine beaded up on the floor. We took a little sponge, wiped it clean and it’s gorgeous, five years later.

LG: “That’s Matt Grocoff with Greenovation-dot-TV. Thanks, Matt.”

MG: “Lester, this is always so much fun. I’m glad to be doing it.”

LG: “That’s The Environment Report. I’m Lester Graham.”

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Looking for Answers at the Dump

  • The city of Chicago has hired the company Camp Dresser and McKee to dig through residents' trash and figure out what exactly people are throwing away (Photo by Michael Rhee)

Large cities in the US are still
struggling to find ways to recycle their trash.
That’s because you can’t use the same program
for every high-rise, office building or condo.
One city is trying to attack this problem by
digging through the garbage. Mike Rhee reports:

Transcript

Large cities in the US are still
struggling to find ways to recycle their trash.
That’s because you can’t use the same program
for every high-rise, office building or condo.
One city is trying to attack this problem by
digging through the garbage. Mike Rhee reports:

(sound of trucks beeping)

This is a waste transfer facility on Chicago’s South Side. It’s kind of a temporary dump.

Garbage trucks pick up trash from people’s homes and pile it up here. The piles are then packed
onto even bigger trucks and hauled to landfills far away.

Chris Martel looks over the mounds of trash here. Martel is an engineer, and a solid waste
expert.

“There’s a lot of different paper types here, there’s a plastic bottles, all things that are recyclable.”

But they’re probably not going to be recycled. They’re going to a landfill. That’s why Martel is
here.

He works for a consulting firm called CDM, or Camp Dresser and McKee.

The city of Chicago has hired the company to dig through residents’ trash and figure out what
exactly people are throwing away. Martel has been doing waste sorts like this for more than a
decade.

As we walk to another part of the building, he remembers his first one fondly.

“That’s where I fell in love with my wife, after giving her flowers out of the trash and stuffed
animals out of the trash.”

She didn’t mind they were recycled.

We get to the waste sorting area. There’s a group of workers surrounded by dozens of large and
small bins.

(BOOM)

(laughs) “That boom was the tipper dropping the waste load.”

A rugged, yellow loader dumps about 300 pounds of garbage at our feet. It’s a sample from one
of the large piles in the facility.

A team starts sorting through the garbage.

Scott Keddy is one of them. He picks up a plastic garbage bag.

“We just open it up and see what kind of surprises lie inside, like it could be this #1 plastic PET
bottle, or this rigid, plastic thinga-ma-jobber that did something for somebody at some point,
which is different from that.”

They’re sorting them into 81 different containers. Each one is for a kind of paper, plastic, metal,
food or some other piece of trash.

The point is to figure out how much of each material people are throwing out. And where it’s all
coming from.

Suzanne Malec-McKenna is commissioner for Chicago’s Department of Environment.

She says the tough thing about creating a recycling program in a city like Chicago is the diversity.
Not only do you have residents and businesses creating waste, but restaurants, prisons,
manufacturers for car parts. Each of these creates a different kind of garbage.

The city has been trying to come up with a recycling program that works for everyone for 20
years. Malec-McKenna says the study will help the city decide how to manage it all.

“You can’t have a cookie cutter approach for a city this diverse. You’ve got to come up with a
range of different kind of program options for it. We’ll come up with the right mix.”

But while the city figures recycling out, the garbage will keep piling up in landfills.

Martel, the waste expert, says he hopes that waste is reduced soon. He says most people don’t
understand the sheer quantities of garbage that are out there.

“Unless you physically see and touch it you don’t realize what a large amount it is and what the
implications are and how easy it is to divert these materials.”

Big cities around the country are realizing this, and working on a solution.

For The Environment Report, I’m Michael Rhee.

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Energy Efficiency Often Overlooked

  • A new report says energy efficiency is often overlooked (Source: Jdorwin at Wikimedia Commons)

A new study suggests we could reduce our
energy use by 15% a decade. But Lisa Ann
Pinkerton reports many people don’t realize it’s
an option:

Transcript

A new study suggests we could reduce our
energy use by 15% a decade. But Lisa Ann
Pinkerton reports many people don’t realize it’s
an option:

Experts call energy efficiency the invisible powerhouse. They say people and policy
makers don’t notice efficiency as an energy solution, because its impacts aren’t
tracked. Plus, it’s an option that’s built into things like energy efficient windows and
appliances.

“Energy efficiency is imbedded in all of the products that we use every day that we don’t
generally see it.”

That’s Karon Ehrhart-Martinez, co-author of a new report from the American
Council for an Energy Efficient Economy.

She compiled data from 2004, the most recent available, and found 300 billion
dollars of investment saved the same amount of energy that 40 power plants could
generate in a year. Ehrhart-Martinez says that’s just a fraction of the energy we
could save, if we chose more energy efficient options when we buy.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lisa Ann Pinkerton.

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