By Kevin Kam for Energize Ashland

No, I don’t drive a specially-modified 1981 Delorean - though fusion-powered flux capacitors might someday power our future cars!  My car is a much more conventional 2023 all-electric crossover SUV in which, on my daily commute from Ashland to Worcester (31 miles round trip), the car’s trip computer says I’ve averaged 4.0 miles per kilowatt hour across my few months of ownership. Put differently, that’s 250 watt hours for each mile traveled (1 kilowatt hour = 1000 watt hours).  

So how does this relate to aluminum cans? The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) provides a number of environmental factoids (https://archive.epa.gov/epawaste/conserve/smm/wastewise/web/html/factoid.html)   which help give some context to the amount of energy saved by producing products from recycled materials versus brand new materials (aluminum cans, 95%; plastic bottles, 66%; glass, 33%; steel, 60-74%; paper, 40%). The EPA also provides examples  quantifying that energy savings.  For example, the energy saved by recycling one aluminum can will power a 14 watt CFL bulb for 20 hours. Conveniently, that works out to 280 watt hours per recycled can, or about 1 mile traveled in my car.  Now, every time I see a can on the roadside or in a parking lot (if you’re looking you’ll see a lot of them around!), I immediately convert it into miles driven.  

Why should you care? Hopefully this example will get you thinking about how even a single small action (like recycling just one can!) has a measurable environmental benefit. And, having taken that first step, you’ll find many other possible actions which, when aggregated across the 18,000 people in Ashland, will produce a meaningful environmental benefit.  

To that end, I introduce to you Energize Ashland. Energize Ashland is an organization of your friends and neighbors whose mission is to introduce and promote climate-friendly actions through community engagement and education. We hope you’ll come meet us at the Ashland Town Earth Day celebration on April 20, 2024, and check out the Energize Ashland website when it goes live on Earth Day (https://community.massenergize.org/ashland/).   Our website has a variety of climate- and environment-friendly actions and resources, and we hope everyone in Ashland will sign up and record their actions on the Energize Ashland website so that it can then be a resource for measuring and tracking Ashland’s progress toward its climate change mitigation targets.