It’s Electric!
Does that title make you want to dance? In a line? (It’s astounding how many YouTube videos there are of people teaching The Electric Slide, the line dance. I’m kind of partial to what looks like the official video for the song “Electric Boogie” by Marcia Griffiths.) Or, does it make you want to begin the research to see if your next car purchase could be a plug-in hybrid or an all-electric vehicle? Or, does it make you want to run out and get yourself an induction cooktop to reduce your use of natural gas?
Introducing CRCC’s EVs
Firstly, we’d like to introduce you to our 1st and 2nd electric food scrap collection vans, Fauna and Flora II. Our first-ever van was named Flora so it seemed fitting to name our first EV Flora too, or in this case Flora II. The City of Evanston helped us to purchase them so we’ve been using them for routes in Evanston since November 2023. We’ve since expanded to using them for routes in Skokie and Chicago as well. We’re happy to be a little less reliant on fossil fuels and it’s our intention to purchase more EVs in the future.
Energy Efficiency
I don’t think that energy efficiency gets the credit it deserves. Does it have a branding problem? Does it remind you of your coupon-clipping grandma? It’s first in line in the reduce, reuse, recycle hierarchy.
We’re very happy to be participating in the Skokie Green Business Recognition Program. (You may be thinking, wait, I thought you were based in Evanston. We are, but our garage spaces are in Skokie.) As part of the program, we’re receiving energy audits both for electricity and gas. And, it’s pretty exciting. We’ve received recommendations for lighting upgrades and are moving forward with them. These assessments are free and the upgrades are heavily subsidized. We’re paying for just 30% of them, and as a result of upgrading, our energy costs will go down. ComEd and Nicor offer these audits to both residential and commercial customers.
We charge the new EVs at the garage, so this energy efficiency will help to offset the energy needed to do that.
Electric Car
A couple years ago, I bought a used plug-in hybrid. At the time, my friend’s father, Matt DeLorenzo, had just written a book called How To Buy An Affordable Electric Car: A Tightwad’s Guide to EV Ownership. I was lucky to have him personally consult on the actual car I was considering buying. It feels overly dramatic to say that this purchase changed my life. I think it changed my lifestyle ever so slightly and it certainly changed my routine. The car I had before was a Toyota Prius, a hybrid. I wasn’t buying that much gasoline but it was a lot more than I buy now. The thing about plug-in hybrids is that if you keep them charged, you don’t have to use the gas. I buy gas maybe 3 times a year. Because, it turns out that I’m kind of a tightwad. I live in an apartment and can’t charge at home so, therefore, I need to do 100% of my charging in public parking lots. Because it’s just a tiny bit of a hassle, I’m driving less. Remember that reduce, reuse, recycle hierarchy I mentioned earlier? Because I often walk home and work while my car charges, I’m walking more too.
Induction Cooktops
A friend of mine, Kim Moldofsky, has become an evangelist for walking away from your gas stove and using an induction cooktop instead. She and her husband hosted their second pancake breakfast in their garage, where they offered you the chance to try one out yourself. I think this is such a brilliant hands-on approach. In theory, you can know what’s good about induction cooktops: they use electricity, not gas, which has been shown to adversely affect indoor air quality; the single burners are portable, so you can do most of your cooking in a different room if you’d like; (Kim has moved much of her cooking to a side porch which keeps the kitchen and first floor of the house cooler in hot months.); they cool off much faster than the metal grates on a gas range or traditional electric burners; they have a flat smooth surface so they’re much easier to clean; and my personal favorite, they have a timer so you can program it to turn itself off; but actually trying to cook on one of these cooktops helps seal the deal. If you’d like to do a deeper dive into all things electrification, Kim recommends that you look at all of the excellent resources at Rewiring America. She has been active in the environmental group in her town and has hosted other community events like composting tours and crafting your own climate message. Find all that she’s up to at Scrappy Affirmations.
Our Own Induction Experience
My boyfriend and I have our own apartments. My kitchen has an old-school electric stove and oven. My boyfriend has a gas stove and oven. I used an Amazon gift card I’d received to buy one of those portable one-burner induction cooktops for a friend who was redoing her kitchen and at my suggestion installing an induction cooktop. I thought it would help her transition to be able to practice and she could give it back to us when she was done. She ended up eating salads and never opened the box, so it came back to us brand new. My boyfriend was, at first, skeptical. He has a small kitchen and wasn’t seeing how he could fit one more thing into it, but he did find a place on the counter and, after using it for a little while, kind of fell in love with it. After a few months, he hit on the idea that he could put it on the top of the gas stove if he could find a fire-safe barrier, on the off-chance that one of the gas burners was accidentally turned on. The universe provided one by reminding him that he had some large ceramic tiles in his storage locker, leftover from the previous owner’s installation of a ceramic tile floor. A perfect solution! By the way, he attended Kim’s most recent pancake breakfast and showed off pics of his solution to the assembled. He also wowed them with his pancake-flipping prowess.
I went looking for a statistic about how much of our daily cooking is done on just one burner and instead found this article about a residential energy consumption survey done in 2020. If you look at the map you can see that 80% of Illinoisans used gas stoves. We are ripe for electrification!
Battery Recycling
Isn’t recycling annoyingly confusing? Especially when we get information like this: it’s dangerous to put that in the garbage, do this instead. But then later you hear: oh, it’s not dangerous anymore. You can put those in the garbage. What?! How can that be? I had this experience recently with CFL bulbs. I took them to my local hardware store and was told that they don’t recycle them anymore. They offered to put them in their trash for me, but I decided to get a second opinion.
I learned about the recycling program at the retail store Batteries Plus from the Recycle page on Chicago Environmentalists website. They accept a robust list of batteries, bulbs and small electronics for recycling. Because I had a couple of CFL bulbs and a small handful of alkaline batteries I wanted to recycle and a desire to replace those batteries with rechargeables, I recently went to the store in Niles. It was a very positive experience. If we had not made a purchase or if we had had a large volume to recycle, they would have charged us, but because we bought something and our volume was small, they didn’t. I encourage you to call them for prices if you have a great quantity.
Baby Steps
These are all relatively small changes. Nothing all that dramatic. But, it does feel good to take even baby steps if they’re in the right direction. And, it feels really good to dance! It’s electric!
