Earth Day ponderings

To honor Earth Day, I plan to bike to work, use CFL bulbs, recycle my paper and plastic waste, and clean up a local park. Pretty much everything I do on a regular basis already. So, why blog about that?

Well, I've been looking for more environmentally friendly ways to roast coffee as well. Roasting coffee throws off a lot of smoke and uses a lot of natural gas. I have been debating about a switch to propane from NG because of its higher thermal capacity, thereby perhaps using less gas overall. But switching to propane doesn't help solve the fact that when you roast beans, they are throwing off carbon. There are a few solutions to this problem, though they seem to go from the slightly unreasonable to the ridiculous...

1. an afterburner installed on the roaster essentially incinerates the smokes - a weird concept, but the data I've seen shows it works. The downside to this is additional gas and energy consumed to basically burn up smoke (which does produce smoke, but far, far less)
   
2. a solar powered roaster - which requires a move to a sunnier and warmer climate (or stop roasting for 6 months out of the year). Neither of these seem likely any time soon.
3. Build my own roaster that captures heat from the afterburner to roast the coffee faster and with less gas. Hopefully, that new, freshly incinerated flavor won't draw too much attention away from the beans.
   

On the home front, my wife and I have been talking about new and better ways to serve the environment as well. My latest crazy scheme (which frankly won't ever get off the ground) is to buy a diesel car and start making my own biodiesel for it. It's not much of stretch, since I already brew beer, but I could tell from the eye-roll that I got when I revealed that plan, that it was DOA. I suppose that I probably should start more simply with something that doesn't require buying a new car first....

Oh well.

What are you doing for Earth Day?

Happy Earth Day, everyone!

Big Dave