There were many successes throughout my month of green living. My compost pile, above, was not one of them. Photo by Andy Kroll

So this is it. My final post for “Going Green: Cutting Environmental Impact on Campus,” this fascinating, frustrating, peculiar, enjoyable and enlightening month-long project to live as sustainably and “green” as possible.

No more blogging and writing and filming about solar-powered vibrators or Zipcars or “green” grocery shopping or unsatisfying Wendy’s salads or phantom energy. (At least for UWireGreen.com) In that sense, this post is an ending of sorts.

But it’s a beginning, too. The question I’ve been asked most often by friends, family and other journalists is whether I’ll keep up with my new green lifestyle.

To be honest, I didn’t think twice in responding. With all this knowledge about sustainability and eco-friendly consumption, I fully intend to keep living as “green” as I can from now on.

I may not be writing about it (as much), but that doesn’t mean I’m going to leave all of my appliances plugged in, indulge in 30-minute showers and eat steaks and pork each night of the week. Read More…

The Chevy Volt: the great hope for the future—and viability—of General Motors. Photo courtesy of General Motors.

Last summer’s record spike in oil prices, which shot gas prices up to $4 a gallon or more, may have subsided for now, but the memory of painful prices at the pump still resonates with consumers and automakers.

Add to that the rising tide of legislators, policymakers and environmentalists calling for cleaner cars on the road, and the result is the one of the largest pushes for increased fuel efficiency in U.S. history.

The gas-guzzling SUVs and trucks that once ruled the road during the era of cheap gas are now looked at with derision. In their place are smaller, more efficient compacts and mid-size vehicles like the Chevy Cobalt, Ford Focus, Honda Civic and Toyota Corolla.

Emerging technologies like hybrid engines, combining electric power with combustion engines, advance fuel efficiency technologies even further, as seen in Toyota’s Prius (the “icon of green automobiles,” according to U.S. News and World Report), or Ford’s upcoming Fusion Hybrid model.

At the federal government level, vastly improved fuel efficiency is a priority, as seen in legislation passed by Congress in 2007 mandating that fuel efficiency for cars and trucks meet or exceed 35 mpg by 2020.

On Friday, the Department of Transportation announced that the combined fuel efficiency of 2011 model cars and trucks must be 27.3 mpg, a 2 mpg jump from the existing standard.

“These standards are important steps in the nation’s quest to achieve energy independence and bring more fuel efficient vehicles to American families,” transportation secretary Ray LaHood said in a statement. Read More…

About every few months, my cache of writing and class supplies—pens, notepads, folders, printer paper—begins to run low, which means it’s time to visit the nearby big-box office supply store.

In months and years past, as I’ve run through thousands of pages of notebook paper and innumerable pens, I’ve developed a few personal favorites—the Pilot G2 gel pen, Office Max brand legal pads, the 6”x9” Steno Pads for reporting. But as I approached the office supplies aisle in the nearby Office Max earlier this morning, I noticed an entire section of “green,” recycled, curiously eccentric pens and notebooks and even staplers.

So, in the spirit of month of green living, I did a little investigating for my college-aged readers and myself on the new wave of eco-friendly office miscellany.

A pack of Terracycle brand, 100 percent recycled notebook dividers. Photo by Andy Kroll

The first display, from the brand Terracycle, offered pens with recycled paper casings, biodegradable pens, notebooks made of recycled paper and Chips Ahoy! Wrappers and a slew of other binders and paper dividers made out of 100 percent recycled materials.

A quick look at Terracycle’s Web site says that the company was started in 2001 by two Princeton University students, Tom Szaky and Jon Beyer, whose flagship product is a natural, organic liquid plant food made from “worm poop” and packaged in reused soda bottles. Today, the company’s product offerings range from eco-friendly firestarting logs packaged in reused two-liter bottles to natural window cleaners to pencil cases made of used Capri Sun juice boxes.

For a green-minded shopper, what’s not to like? Inevitably, the price. Whereas a box of 12 plastic Bic ballpoint pens costs as little as $2.50, a four-pack of Terracycle paper pens runs upwards of $7.99—more than three times the price. The company’s three-ring binders and notepads also cost quite a bit more than less environmentally friendly brands.

The dilemma that never ends—“green” versus green ($), environmental cost versus cash-register cost.

Fortunately, a few aisles over is the display for a few other—and cheaper—eco-friendly office supply lines. The store brand “green” products aren’t as appealing from a environmental standpoint—Terracycle’s pens are 100 percent recyclable; Office Max’s are only 72 percent—but I could be splitting hairs here, getting a bit too picky with my green goals. (Granted, after a month of trying to cut my carbon footprint, you start to pay close to attention to “eco-friendly” labels and claims.)

The brown label means recycled—and expensive. Photo by Andy Kroll

A two-pack of Zebra brand recyclable pens, I learned, costs $2.99, so even if I bought two packs I’d still end up with more money in my pocket than the Terracycle paper pens. Then again, that’s two times the packaging—and Terracycle’s products all come in recycled packaging as well. A dilemma, indeed.

While I mulled whether to fork out the extra cash in the name of being as green as possible, I checked out Office Max’s printer paper selection, figuring there would be plenty of eco-friendly choices here.

And indeed I was right, as the store’s paper selection (though I’m trying to print as little as possible nowadays) featured a wide array of options, each one color coded to indicate how much of the paper was made of recycled materials—and how much more expensive it was. 100 percent recycled “Multi-purpose Paper” runs $8.49 for 500 sheets—not all that more expensive from other less recycled options.

Against my own financial instincts (what little is left of them), I chose the expensive paper pens. Photo by Andy Kroll

In the end, however, I decided against buying any paper at all—printer paper, notepads, legal pads. I can always use the unused backsides of the various legal pads strewn throughout my room, and if I’m trying to read more online and not print as much then how could I justify buying a 500-pack of fresh paper, recycled or not?

For college students out there—and everyone else who uses office supplies for that matter—try shopping with the environment in mind next time you hit up the campus bookstore or your own local big box. You don’t have to buy a Chips Ahoy! book; a few biodegradable pens wouldn’t hurt, though.

Updates, come and get your updates! I’m already writing the post-mortem for my compost pile (in my head). When I check the heat of the pile, I see there is none; nearly every morning one of the compost box’s sides has fallen, despite my repeated stabilization efforts (I blame squirrel saboteurs); and the pile on the whole seems lifeless.

That doesn’t mean I’m giving up, however. Having talked with a couple of compost experts I know, they surmised that I tried to start the pile too early in the year—I’d have had more success starting in early or mid April, they said. C’est la vie. I’ll try to keep the pile alive until the weather warms, and maybe the sun will breath some life into it. Fingers crossed.

One of the toughest aspects of my month of green living is eating less meat. Trading chicken, beef, lamb and the like for tofu, stir fries and the occasional protein bar has proved far more difficult than anticipated. And depending on the location and your own budget, eating less meat can be even more challenging, as I’ve learned in the past couple of weeks.

Today’s lunch: A Wendy’s side salad. Oh for the days of hamburgers… Photo by Andy Kroll

My parents are vegetarians. (Well, my dad is, and since where one goes the other often follows, my mom is quickly joining the veggie ranks, too.) When I visited them this past weekend, meeting my low-meat goals (I’ve cut my intake by 75 percent) was easy—protein vitamin shakes, breads and fruit for breakfast; salads and vegetarian sandwiches for lunch; and often tofu stir fry or occasionally fish (which my folks haven’t entirely given up) for dinner. On the drive home from their house on Monday, I thought to myself, I could do this whole vegetarian thing no problem.

Then I got back to school. The semester is nearing its end, I’m busier than I’ve ever been, thus time to cook is limited - if present at all. As a result, I eat out and on the run for probably a majority of my meals. And after two weeks of trying to eat mostly vegetarian meals with only a spare few servings of meat, what I’ve learned is this:

It’s really difficult to eat healthy, appetizing meals without meat on a college student’s budget.

Yes, there are fantastic vegetarian restaurants in Ann Arbor—but they’re hardly cheap for a college student trying to stretch out a dollar. And the vegetarian offerings at other restaurants are mostly delicious, but those places are usually sit-down establishments, which isn’t conducive to a busy college student’s schedule.

So what I’ve ended up eating as of late are a lot of slices of veggie pizza (delicious but a bit too greasy), paltry side salads from fast food joints and innumerable peanut butter sandwiches.

For anyone knowledgeable about food policy or rising obesity rates in the U.S., the dearth of quick, healthy food options is old news. But having not paid too much attention to what I eat until joining the legion of Michael Pollan acolytes and then beginning this project, I never realized how little healthy food is available for busy people on a budget. And, to be honest, the healthy-ish food out there right now—the salads and baked potatoes—tastes pretty awful. Not to mention that this kind of fast food usually comes packaged in excess amounts of plastic and paper all stuffed into an oversized paper bag bound for the garbage can.

So what to do for a college student-turned-semi-vegetarian? I could pack my own lunches with more vegetarian meals, which I plan to do when my schedule lightens and the next paycheck arrives. I could suck it up and learn to enjoy the Wendy’s “side item” offerings more; after all, my baked potato and plain salad cost a mere $4.50 or so today. I suppose moving back in with mom and dad is an option, but I’ve already done that once, and my parents have replaced my brother and I with dogs and a cat; us kids are old news.

A reader of one of my earlier posts was nice enough to send me a few vegetarian recipes, and I intend to use those soon. But do any other readers have some suggestions for a veggie-minded, cash-strapped, hectic college student? I’d love to hear them if you do with a comment here or an e-mail at akroll [at] umich.edu.

The half-empty jar of pasta sauce and remaining few slices of cheddar sit there looking lonely on my shelf of the refrigerator, like two shy wallflowers at a middle school dance.

In other words, it’s time to hit the grocery store and restock.

I had intended to write my “Going Green”-themed grocery shopping post about buying my produce and bread at the local farmer’s market on Saturday mornings, but decided otherwise, out of the worry that students without easy access to a farmer’s market wouldn’t find help in the post. So instead, I went to the regular grocery store—that ubiquitous Midwest chain, Meijer—and attempted to shop there as green as possible.

Which was, of course, far greater of a challenge. Meijer does promote and sell its own “Natural” and “Organic” brands of, say, peanut butter or laundry detergent; but, as The New York Times’ Mark Bittman recently pointed out, these supposedly eco-friendly, sustainable products aren’t always the answer, having evolved into a fad more than a revolution in how we eat and live:

[E]ating “organic” offers no guarantee of [healthy eating]. And the truth is that most Americans eat so badly — we get 7 percent of our calories from soft drinks, more than we do from vegetables; the top food group by caloric intake is “sweets”; and one-third of nation’s adults are now obese — that the organic question is a secondary one. It’s not unimportant, but it’s not the primary issue in the way Americans eat.

To eat well, says Michael Pollan, the author of “In Defense of Food,” means avoiding “edible food-like substances” and sticking to real ingredients, increasingly from the plant kingdom. (Americans each consume an average of nearly two pounds a day of animal products.) There’s plenty of evidence that both a person’s health — as well as the environment’s — will improve with a simple shift in eating habits away from animal products and highly processed foods to plant products and what might be called “real food.” (With all due respect to people in the “food movement,” the food need not be “slow,” either.)

Healthy shopping doesn’t just mean “Natural” and “Organic”

If there’s one tip I can share about how to buy healthy food at regular grocery stores, one that I learned from both Michael Pollan and experience, it’s to shop from the perimeter walls of the grocery story and to avoid the inside lanes and shelves. After hearing Pollan mention this is in a great talk at Google’s headquarters, a lifetime of shopping with my mom became so much clearer in my head—the walls in most grocery stores are lined with coolers and freezers and shelves with watering devices, i.e., for the food that’s most fresh. The inside of most stores, on the other hand, contains food loaded with preservatives and chemicals and ingredient lists numbering fifty long with indecipherable words. The kind of food that would still look the same if it were left on those shelves for decades.

Fresh on the outside, most everything else on the inside.

So I shopped the walls, and left the inner aisles untrodden. The end result? My cart was filled with far fresher food, food that will go bad in a week if I don’t eat and food that costs quite a bit more. For college students, with our hectic schedules and erratic behaviors, the inner aisles are indeed more convenient—it’s food that keeps for longer, takes less time to cook, makes for easy on-the-go snacking.

But is it healthier? Not at all. Support local economies and local farmers? No chance. And it’s a matter of deciding whether you’re willing, as Pollan says, to vote with your fork: You shopping decisions impact how food policy in this country is developed, and supporting fresh-grown, local food not only keeps your healthier but communicates an important message.

A produce sale, ahem, ripe for the picking

And to be honest, shopping fresh can be done a budget. Here’s a tip of mine: When you’re at the store, look for fresh produce that’s nearing its expiration date. Usually, tomatoes or peppers or apples or pork chops (though I’m not eating many of those lately) that are close to their expiration are marked way down because the stores need to offload those products. A $4 bag of lettuce becomes a $1.50 bag of lettuce. A box of roma tomatoes for $3 becomes $1. For the Kroger chain grocery store near my house, I’ve found that most Friday afternoons there’s a lot of produce discounted throughout the store, and if I’m planning a dinner or even doing a bit of my own shopping, I can get great fresh food for cheap.

The catch is that you have to use the produce sooner—in the next day or so, if not that very evening. For someone like myself who likes to cook, that’s not a bad thing; for those averse to cooking, this may be a bit more of a problem. Either way, it’s a nice exception to pricey fresh food standard.

There’s always coupons, too, in the city and student newspaper, online, at the campus union or student center.

A major problem with shopping at this particular Meijer is that I have to drive there. It’s more than three miles away, and without a bike capable of holding five or six bags of groceries (I’ll get to those shortly) or a Zipcar membership, I had to fire up my little-used car parked in the driveway. I haven’t driven the car much at all in the past three weeks, but it was a necessary evil for this shopping excursion.

There were those bags, too. I ended up using plastic bags at the checkout counter—again, far from the best option (bringing your own reusable bags), but I will say that my roommates and I save our plastic bags and reuse them for other tasks around the house. Will they ultimately still end up in a landfill, though? Yes. Note to self: Time to invest in some reusable bags, Andy.

A reader from another post mentioned the issue of milk in the context of cattle producing greenhouse gases, that if we cut our milk consumption, like I’m trying to cut my meat intake, that would decrease animal-related emissions. On this particular trip, I did not buy any milk or milk products. I’m not much of a milk drinker (bad experience with a glass of curdled 2% milk), but the issue of buying milk or getting calcium from another source is a tough one: We need calcium and milk is a popular source of that nutrient, but the cattle that produce that milk for us do indeed have a substantial carbon footprint. It’s a dilemma on which I need to be better informed saying much else, though soy milk, which I take in all my coffee, is a potential alternative.

Shopping fresh may seem expensive, but with a bit of extra effort and flexibility, it can be done affordably for college students on slim budget. I picked up some fresh tomatoes, lettuce, peppers, bakery bread and peanut butter (the kind with only “Peanuts” as an ingredient and with the oil on top—the sign that it’s fresh) this time around.

But I’d be lying if I didn’t say I longed for some of those preservative-laden goodies lining the store’s interior—a bag of sour-cream-and-onion chips, some Keebler’s cookies, a frozen mac-and-cheese dinner. Though I’ve been pretty diligent in the past year or so to stick to fresh foods, the siren’s call emanating from those frozen pizza section (once a major vice) still tugs at me on occasion. Hopefully, the more I stick to healthy, fresh food, the more that will go away.

I’d love to hear from anyone with their own tips on shopping healthy on a budget that don’t necessarily involve farmer’s markets or more eco-friendly stores like Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods Market. To all you foodies out there, please do not hesitate to share your own tips or ideas, or send them to me at akroll [at] umich.edu. I’d be more than happy to write another post with suggestions!