At first blush, wood burning might not seem very environmentally friendly.  Cutting down big stately old-growth trees, sawing them up with gas powered saws and log splitters, and then throwing them into a roaring fireplace belching smoke … yeah, I see your point.

However, there’s lots wrong with that picture.  First, nobody should be cutting down old-growth timber for firewood.  There’s plenty of dead wood in most areas, and fast-growing timber on small managed woodlots can be indefinitely sustainable.  Also, cutting smaller trees or dead limbs minimizes the need to split wood, and (for the energetic) makes hand-cutting a possibility as well.  Third, fireplaces are decoration, not a heat source.  Modern air-tight woodstoves can be 80% efficient.  Combine this with a highly insulated home, and you’ve got the ultimate in renewable ‘green’ heating.

That’s our motivation for buying this woodstove.  Unfortunately, time constraints force us to buy wood from others, and bad insulation means we’ll be burning far too much the first year, but at least our Lopi Endeavor stove will ensure that it burns cleanly.  The Lopi produces only 4 grams of particulate pollution per hour, the cleanest for it size of all EPA-certafied wood stoves.  It does this by injecting fresh heated air directly into the firebox at the top.  This fresh air combines with “exhaust gases” and causes a secondary ignition.  The result is more heat output and a cleaner final exhaust.

The secondary burn is that line of fire across the top of the stove.  It looks like natural gas is being injected into the stove, but it’s actually just oxygen igniting the tars and wood alcohols in the smoke.  It only kicks in when the stove is appropriately hot (woodstoves burn most efficiently when they burn very hot).  Sometimes it can dance across beautifully, like the Aurora Borealis, or even totally obscure the viewing glass in a blazing inferno.  The result, is this:

Where there’s smoke, there’s a fireplace.  Where there’s no smoke … maybe a modern woodstove?

So far on this blog it seems that we’ve talked a lot about mummified rats and sorted trash and not much about motivations.  Robin and I have a lot of interests, and many of these entertwine with the purchase of this house and our plans for it — organic gardening, animal husbandry, beautiful fir trees, fine woodworking, anachronism, Arts & Crafts style, reading books, wood burning stoves, renewable energy, environmentalism, .. the list goes on.

Yes, we are guilty environmentalists.  Is there any other kind?  Comedian Cathy Ladman once said that “religion is basically guilt, with different holidays.”  Well, by that standard, environmentalism is basically guilt with different neuroticisms.  It is impossible to read about the many negative side effects of the modern lifestyle and not feel guilty.  This drives some people to don tie-dye and chain themselves to trees.  Others buy a Prius and obsessively recycle their Dasani water bottles.  To make matters worse, the issues are often so complex and interconnected that a simple rule book for decision making is impossible to find.

I was thinking about this a couple days ago while driving a pickup truck load of rigid plastic (about 200 pounds of mostly broken toys) to be recycle.  In the Eugene area Weyerhaeuser Recycling (also called International Paper Recycling, (541) 744-4100) will accept this material at no cost.   Since normally this would just go into the landfill, we did our best to sort it out.  But was this the right decision?

Well, it depends on what factors you want to consider.  From a money standpoint, I made a terrible decision.  The drop bin costs me $65/ton to fill.  That works out to $6.50 if I just threw my truck load of plastic in the trash.  Instead, the recycle center is 24 miles round trip from our house, and my truck presently gets only 9mpg due to an undiagnosed engine problem.  With present gas prices, that 2.7 gallons of fuel cost about $9.30.  Not only that, but I had to take 4 hours of vacation time to get to the center during their 8-5 business hours.  Definitely a bum deal.

But environmentally, it was the right thing, right?  Um … maybe?  According to this Grist article, recycling one ton of plastic saves 685 gallons of oil.  So my 200 pounds of plastic save 68.5 gallons of oil?  That’s a good deal for only 2.7 gallons burned to deliver it, but the forklifts at the recycle yard also run on petroleum, as do trucks that will haul away the giant dumpsters, and the factories that will grind it up, melt it down, and turn it into fresh Polystyrene.  I seriously doubt that those oil savings numbers really took into account all the factors either.

The point of all this is not to argue the merits of plastic recycling, but to highlight the challenges of making good “green” decisions.  Renovating a home is nothing but a continuous stream of decisions, and most of them–roofing products, water and space heating, insulation upgrades, flooring and wall materials–have environmental, aesthetic, and monetary advantages and disadvantages.  Assuming the complexity doesn’t drive us to madness, we’ll probably share a lot of those decisions along the way. In the end, we can’t hope to have the perfect ‘green’ house … just a less guilty one.