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About our cover: TEAC's Waste Warrior volunteers staff the Compost/Recycle/Trash stations at the TaSH Farmer's Market in Patriots Park, and occasional events elsewhere. We're always looking for others to help with this simple, rewarding activity. Check our Waste Warrior page on the TEAC website.
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NEWS OF THE MONTH FROM THE TARRYTOWN ENVIRONMENTAL ADVISORY COUNCIL
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LOVE YOUR VILLAGE
PARTICIPATING IN TEAC IS EASY!
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The Tarrytown Environmental Advisory Council (TEAC) relies on volunteers to keep things moving. We're a fun and engaging group of like-minded citizens working to make Tarrytown's air, land, and water healthier and cleaner and we need concerned, engaged residents like YOU to join our team. Some areas of involvement - Tarrytown Lakes, Vine Squad, Landscaping Committee, Energy Committee, Community Outreach, Zero Waste and more. Contact Tarrytownenviro@gmail.com to learn more and express interest.
OUR MEETING is TUESDAY, November 12, 7:30pm this month. And there will not be a TEAC Meeting in December. Our meetings are usually on the second Monday of the month at 7:30 pm and are open to the public with a Zoom option.
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Gardening in Uncertain Times
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By the TEAC Landscape Committee
It’s been a surreal fall, dried leaves crunch under our feet as temperatures still hover in the 70’s many days. We are now in our third month with no meaningful rainfall and the creek in Patriots Park is dry as are many others. Westchester County issued a drought watch this week with guidelines for conserving water as did the Village of Tarrytown:
Please Conserve Water
The New York City Department of Environmental Protection has issued a drought watch for its water customers, which includes the Tarrytown Water System. A drought watch is the first of three tiers of warnings. In addition to the scant rainfall over the past month, the DEP is repairing an important aqueduct. Please do what you can to conserve water.
- Turn off the faucet while shaving, washing up, brushing teeth, and washing dishes.
- Fix dripping and leaking faucets and toilets.
- Don't run the tap to make water cold or hot.
- Put a plastic jug filled with water in the tank of conventional toilets.
- Throw used facial tissues into the waste basket instead of using the toilet as a waste basket.
- Wash only full loads of dishes and laundry.
- Install water-saving plumbing fixtures.
- Take shorter showers or fill the bathtub only part way.
More ways to conserve water can be found on the State DEC website. |
The ground is dry and hard from lack of rain yet bees and the occasional butterfly are still out looking for sustenance from late blooming plants. What’s a gardener to do in a season filled with once unprecedented events that may now be the new normal? There seems to be so much beyond our control yet there are tangible steps that we can take to help our gardens thrive and support the life that depends on them to survive.
Water All living things need water, even drought tolerant plants. Water your perennial gardens and young trees deeply once a week until a hard freeze if there is no rain. Newly planted trees and shrubs need 1” of water per week for the first two years to develop strong roots and thrive. Our newly planted street trees could use a little TLC as well if you can provide some water.
Wildlife It’s a difficult time for wildlife as natural water sources evaporate, animals need our help to survive.Please keep your birdbath filled or provide shallow containers of water for birds, squirrels and others.
Leaves Tell your landscaper to stop blowing the leaves from your lawn and to mulch mow them instead. Mulched leaves enrich the top soil and protect plant roots especially during droughts. Add clover to your lawn as it withstands drought and stays green much longer than lawn grasses. Leave whole leaves in all other areas of your property to provide natural mulch that will break down into rich soil and shelter overwintering pollinators. Somehow the din of gas powered leaf blowers roaring away on 70 degree November days seems very wrong, we can do better, starting in our own yards.
Planting is an act of optimism, it expresses our belief and hope for a better future. This is the time to collect seeds from your gardens, to plan for winter seeding of native plants and to evaluate what did well for you this season. We will be searching for resilient native plants and long blooming pollinator friendly annuals to help us navigate this new normal. Visit the Tarrytown Pollinator Pathway website for a great list of native plants that will enhance your landscape in these changing times.
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NEW RECYCLING GUIDE APP for WESTCHESTER
Sustainable Westchester is switching from the Recycle Right "Recyclopedia" app to a more-informative one called RecycleCoach. Search your App Store for "recyclecoach" (from Municipal Media, Inc.)
TEAC recently looked into the mythology surrounding the recycling of pizza boxes. It turns out that a modicum of grease is OK for a box to go into the cardboard recycling bin, as long as it's not dripping or caked in food. If in doubt, you can tear off the soiled part for trashing and recycle the rest.
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Food Waste is Not Garbage!
If you are throwing food waste into the garbage, read on... Every day, over 1.13 millon pounds of food goes to waste Westchester County (55% commerical, 45% residential), and is sent to the “waste-to-energy” incinerator plant in Peekskill NY. This trash could solve many local problems if, instead of incineration, it was composted.
Hudson Compost Services (HCS) will pick up your food scraps on a weekly trial basis for FREE through the end of the year. Try them out to see how easy food scraps recycling can be.
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ELECTRIC DRIVING OVERREACH
Self-Driving? Don’t believe it!
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By Dean Gallea, Co-Chair and Energy Committee
Electric vehicles (EVs) are unquestionably the future of automobiles and small (at least) trucks, having proved their safety, reliability, and range over several years of robust sales by just about every automobile manufacturer worldwide. The big advantage for everyone, of course, is the reduction of fossil-fueled energy use in our transportation, which remains one of the largest contributors to greenhouse-gas emissions.
Most EVs have all the drivability assistance features of their gas-powered ancestors, and then some. Car designers have added ever more cameras and sensors to allow for such things as adaptive speed control, and lane-keep assist, providing some automation in steering and pedal controls, relieving the driver of some of the minor adjustments needed to keep the car centered in the lane and a safe distance from the car ahead. Some advanced EVs have tried to go further, managing lane changes, navigating to freeway exits, and even stopping at traffic signals.
 Recently, Elon Musk decided to throw Tesla owners (like Yours Truly) a promotional bone and turn on what the company calls “Full Self-Driving” (FSD) for a month, in an effort to upsell owners to the $99/month feature upgrade. The FSD designation has “(supervised)” appended to it, meaning that the driver has to remain in control of the vehicle by hands on the wheel and eyes on the road. That’s already the case for the “autosteer” feature that most Tesla and other premium EVs have. If the car senses you are not fully aware and ready to take control, it will beep loudly and, after a few more seconds of inattention, drop out of assisted driving.
I tried out the “free until Nov 25th” FSD feature, and discovered IT MAKES MISTAKES that a human driver wouldn’t. Here are a few examples:
- Approaching a traffic light or clearly-visible stop sign, it correctly slowed down while indicating to me that it’s going to stop in several hundred feet. It requires me to touch the accel pedal lightly to confirm that the way is clear to proceed. If a traffic light was green as I approached, AND there was traffic moving through the intersection, the car kept moving, correctly. But at a couple lights on 9A, where a car ahead of me was stopped on a red that turned green as I approached, my car was still slowing to a stop at the green light, causing the driver behind me to brake unnecessarily (and wonder about the doofus in front of them!)
- FSD was overly-aggressive at “zipper merging” – where two lanes narrowed to one and the convention is to alternate cars between right and left. My car tried to edge in front of the car on my right, which was in the narrowing lane, but was ahead of me on the merge. Being cut off is one of the main causes of “road rage”, and I want no part of that!
- I had several instances of “phantom braking”: a phenomenon where the car thinks there is a hazard where none exists. This happened where, for instance, a car ahead was turning off the road and clearly would be out of the intersection by the time I reached it, or a car slowed down while changing lanes well ahead of me, or where a car in an adjacent lane was driving just a bit too close to the dividing line, but not over it. Phantom braking can be overridden by pressing the accelerator, but it can confuse a driver behind you, and could lead to a rear-end collision.
- While I didn’t test it out, I can imagine that a car in FSD mode would blow past a crosswalk where a pedestrian was waiting to cross well out of the right-of-way. That would elicit a potential violation of State law.
As an engineer, I can agree with some use of driver-assist technology on high-speed, limited-access highways – Interstate expressways and some State roads without intersections – to guide the car safely to the right exit. But our streets and urban arteries have too many random events happening on them to let me feel safe having the car’s AI handle the decisions. It’s just not as quick and logical as a good driver would be. I will not be making Musk yet more wealthy by buying FSD!
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GOT A GREEN THUMB?
COMMUNITY GARDEN 2025 OPEN FOR SIGN-UPS
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Tarrytown's Community Vegetable Garden is between Cobb Lane next to the Paulding School annex. Each fall we solicit applications for gardeners in anticipation of the spring planting season. For more info and to sign up, visit THIS LINK.
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FrankenHeater LIVES!
At the Dobbs Ferry Repair Cafe last Saturday, TEAC Co-Chair Dean (who loves these events) "got his hands dirty", so to speak, with a visitor who brought in two broken room heaters. One had a burned-out heat coil, the other had a burned out control board, and no replacement parts were to be had. Taking an idea from an old movie, Dean transplanted the "brain" (control board) of one into the "body" (heater cabinet) of the other, and created FrankenHeater! Voila, one working monster of a heater, and half the need for recycling.
See the flyer below for other Repair Cafes in our area, including Ossining's next Saturday.
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IT'S A VINE IDEA
Save A Tree, Cut A Vine
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Trees are incredibly beneficial assets. They purify the air we breathe, support diverse wildlife, mitigate climate change, and enhance the value of our properties. Unfortunately, the vitality of our trees (and shrubs) is often under siege from invasive vines. These relentless climbers can choke the life out of trees by obstructing their access to water and nutrients, leading to their eventual demise.
