Daily Score Blog

A few weeks ago I wrote about an alarming discovery concerning an everyday office product. Those little compressed-gas keyboard cleaners (pictured at left) are vicious climate killers. They emit jaw-dropping amounts of greenhouse gases. A single canister is roughly the climate equivalent of driving my car across the country and halfway back. No kidding.

Evidently, my post struck a nerve: versions of it appeared here, here, and many other places around the web. Better yet, people began to take action.

Here's an example: the City of Seattle's "Green Team," an internal group that helps set sustainable purchasing guidelines, decided to take a close look at retiring the cleaners. One purchasing employee even contacted Office Depot to tell them that the product was verboten in her sector.

What else happened? I have no idea. Do you?

I heard about Seattle's movement only because I happened to know someone involved. Are other places doing the same thing? Is anyone doing more? Do any governments or companies or workplaces already prohibit these things? I'd like to know, but I need help finding out. To put a finer point on it: Sightline needs a volunteer to do the legwork. If you're interested, drop me a line and we'll sort out the logistics. (A few more details are below the jump.)

What's more, I want to figure out how one would go about getting these canisters banned or at least restricted. (After the jump, I spell out a little more about the way I'd like to see a ban work.) As we move toward responsible climate policy, it makes no sense to sell needlessly harmful products when there are perfectly good substitutes available.

There's another angle to the story too: the canisters are health hazards. In fact, many office supply stores are already treating them as dangerous products. That's because, apparently, they're popular for huffing, which causes brain damage and sometimes even death. (Sheesh, the kids these days.) In fact, at a downtown Seattle Office Max, an employee told me that they're kept out of view for precisely this reason. And sure enough, the product label explains that it contains a "bitterant" added to make the taste of the gas unpalatable to would-be huffers.

During my daughters' school year -- back when my two-stop commute was particularly gnarly -- I noticed what must be a familiar pattern to long-time Seattle-area I-5 commuters: traffic on Monday and Friday mornings tended to be way better than it was from Tuesday through Thursday.

In my experience,  it was pretty common for the entire highway  to be clogged for miles -- even the carpool lanes -- on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. But on a good Monday or Friday, the trip from north of Seattle straight into downtown could be a relative breeze, even for drive-alone commuters. The pattern was fairly consistent, but occasionally bad weather or a traffic accident still snarled traffic on Monday or Friday.  However, last week, Seattle's weather was pretty much the same on Monday and Wednesday -- and Monday's traffic was a snap, while Wednesday's was a slog.

I've put together some animations of the two days' morning commutes, from 6:30 to 9 a.m., using archived traffic images from the state DOT. Green means free-flowing traffic; yellow is slight congestion; red is heavy congestion; and black is when traffic has slowed to a crawl.  (Check out my mad Photoshop skillz...)