Is HIT insecticide a Mother's best friend ?

Simple Solutions to the Cockroach problem

While seeing some youtube videos yesterday I was repeatedly interrupted by HIT ads to kill cockroaches. The ads made the pesticide sound like a mother's best friend - it is not ! Some of the older ads are here and here, but new ads are on similar lines. 

Study after study has found many pesticides used around the home have significant link with a range of diseases inlcuding asthma, parkinsons, and cancer. 

Cockroaches cant live in your kitchen if they have no food or water. Especially at night, you can remove all food sources including trash. We put our trash bin out in the balcony. 

If a cockroach finds its way to your house, I feel it is much better to kill cockroaches say with a chappal, than use insecticides. A special katori drain cover also discourages them from using the drains as a hiding space. 

We store cooking and steel utensils used in our kitchens in open shelves, not walled in by cupboards. As the moisture from the utensils finds its way to cupboard crevices, especially the part where the cupboard door attaches itself. That is where cockroaches lay eggs. 

A study on the ‘German cockroach’ (found in India as well) has found evidence that they had developed a cross-resistance to a range of powerful insecticides and may soon become nearly impossible to kill with chemicals of whatever kind. 

In addition to what I suggested friends wrote in with this advice : Friend 1 : Alternate method to kill cockroach is mix boric acid powder+ aata+ sugar, 3:2:1 ratio. Kneed it well. Stick on walls near bin, undersink, drawers, humid area. Very effective, specially if dont want to use insecticide in kitchen. Must try!!

Boric acid is generally considered of low toxicity in small doses. 

Friend 2 : 3 to 4 years back, we had a serious cockroach infestation in the kitchen. This was despite a clean kitchen. 

We stationed a vacuum cleaner in the kitchen. Each morning the first task before starting work was to suck all possible roaches roaming around as soon as one saw them once the kitchen light was switched on. One would get a window of some 20 seconds post light being switched on before they ran away and hid. So such as many in 20 seconds was the deal. 

In about 3 to 4 weeks, we 'flattened the curve' of their reproduction rate by increasing their death rate. In another about a month, all roaches were finished. Today we have not a single cockroach, in the house, and it's been free from this menace. This has been the case since 3 years. All cleaned up. No pesticide used.

The ingredients of cockroach bait (which is eaten by them resulting in death) are carcinogenic. 

What Do the Regulators Say ?

United States Environmental Protection Agency's page entitled 'Pesticides' Impact on Indoor Air Quality' says that preliminary research shows widespread presence of pesticide residues in homes. 

80 percent of most people's exposure to pesticides occurs indoors and that measurable levels of up to a dozen pesticides have been found in the air inside homes.

The source of pesticides in homes are products used to kill household pests (insecticides, termiticides and disinfectants) and products used on lawns and gardens that drift or are tracked inside the house.

Exposure to pesticides may result in Irritation to eye, nose and throat; damage to central nervous system and kidney; and, increased risk of cancer.

Chronic exposure to some pesticides can result in damage to the liver, kidneys, and endocrine and nervous systems.

The Standing Committee on Agriculture in its report to the Lok Sabha has acknowledged that excessive use of pesticides has led to high levels of pesticide residues in food and animal feed, accumulation of dangerous persistent organic pollutants, possible increased rates of cancer, increased input costs of agriculture and farmers suffering a wide variety of adverse health effects from occupational exposure to pesticides. 

The Act does not currently enable state governments to ban pesticides long-term. To address the harm done by pesticides on their territories, states should probably be able to permanently ban pesticides that are locally problematic. There is no provision within the Insecticides Act for the recall of existing stocks. 

Inefficiencies contributing to global warming

Perhaps as much as half of British emissions, one report recently calculated, come from inefficiencies in construction, discarded and unused food, electronics, and clothing; two-thirds of US energy is wasted; globally, according to one paper, we are subsidising the fossil fuel business to the tune of $5tn each year. None of that has to continue. Americans waste a quarter of their food, which means the carbon footprint of the average meal is a third larger than it has to be. That need not continue. 

Five years ago, hardly anyone outside the darkest corners of the internet had even heard of bitcoin; today, mining it consumes more electricity than is generated by all the world’s solar panels combined, which means that in just a few years we’ve assembled a programme to wipe out the gains of several long, hard generations of green energy innovation. It did not have to be that way. And a simple change to the algorithm could eliminate that bitcoin footprint entirely.

The four ways humanity can avoid climate disaster..

The FOUR Golden Means..

There are four ways humanity can avoid climate disaster: reducing our need for energy, producing energy through more sustainable, low-carbon means, changing the DNA of capitalism to put a price on carbon emissions, and better environmental conservation.

Let’s start with the first point: reducing our energy consumption. There are three major sectors that make up the bulk of energy consumption in our society: food, transportation, and housing—how we eat, how we get around, how we live—the basics of our daily lives.

Reducing Energy Needs for Food

It is forecast that farmers will start investing in renewable algae or hydrogen-based fuels for machinery, and the installation of solar and wind generators on their land. Meanwhile, farming soil and its heavy dependence on nitrogen-based fertilizers (created from fossil fuels) is a major source of global nitrous oxide (a greenhouse gas). Using those fertilizers more efficiently (like via soil testing) is crucial. 

Overusing chemical fertilizers can increase the salinity of soil, making it difficult for plant roots to absorb water. Incorrectly applied chemical fertilizers can damage  plants or increase the acidity of the upper layers of soil, making it harder for some plants to absorb nutrients. Chemical nitrogen fertilizers work best when they are tilled into the soil and lightly irrigated shortly before planting time.

In addition to supplying nitrogen and other nutrients plants need, compost improves the structure of the soil, allowing water to permeate through it more easily and increasing its ability to retain water. Unlike chemical fertilizers, organic soil amendments release nutrients over a period of several years. Legumes form a symbiotic relationship with bacteria in the soil that allows them to draw nitrogen from the atmosphere. Legumes are commonly planted on nitrogen-deficient soils and then plowed into the ground where the nitrogen absorbed from the air is released into the soil as the plants decay.

Eventually, switching to algae based fertilizers will become a major focus in the coming years. To get serious about agriculture carbon reduction, we’ve also got to reduce the numbers of cattle. 

Reducing our need for electricity for homes, offices and factories
Electricity and heat generation produces about 26 % of global greenhouse gas emissions. Buildings, including our workplaces and our homes, make up three-fourths of the electricity used. Today, much of that energy is wasted. We need to watch out for :

·       Do we leave TVs and Computer sockets on at night – this too uses electricity.

·       Do we take the trouble to keep our houses as cool as possible through natural means – via chiks / roller blinds outside and inside our windows, by keeping all doors and windows open when the outside air is cool, such as in most summer nights.

·       Do we optimize the most efficient ways of cooling ourselves – apart from ceiling fans, wall fans placed in kitchens, bathrooms, balconies and stores can help; small mini coolers with honeycomb pads can be wheeled everywhere and use only as much power as a fan. These coolers can easily run on inverters / colony generator back up up also.

·       When using Airconditioners (ACs), do we keep them at a more optimal temperature of say 25 C with perhaps a light fan, rather than keep them at 20-22 and then use blankets for covers in summer nights.

·       The same goes for heaters – blowers and oil heaters are energy guzzlers as they have settings only for 1000 / 2000 watts.

·       Halogen heaters instead have 3-4 rods, each rod varying in wattage use from 125 – 300 Watts. So one can only switch on only as many rods as one needs. They give out light too apart from heat, eliminating the need for putting on a separate light in the evening.

·       People often don’t realize that they lose enormous amounts of heat / cool via their window / door glasses, as glass is a good conductor of heat and cooling. So keeping your glass windows as insulated as possible with chiks / roller blinds / thick curtains when using either cooling or heating devices is a good idea.

·       It is not too expensive to replace your normal single fixed glass panes with double glass panes. The trapped air between two glass window panes acts as a very good insulator. A good carpenter or iron-works person can change your single fixed glass pane to double glass ones. In our homes, the single 3 mm fixed panes were removed from all windows and 6 mm panes installed on the inside, and 8 mm panes installed on the outside, in the same frame where earlier single glass panes were fitted. There is a more than 2 inch gap between the two fixed glass panes now.

·       In my memory in 2016 we paid around 400 INR a sq foot for removal of previous panes, cleaning and painting of the frame, buying of 6 mm and 8 mm glass panes, and installation with silicone injections which seal air in.

·       Window ACs in our house were enclosed in simple, open-able wooden boxes which reduce air-flow between outside and inside when the ac is not in use. To my memory we paid about Rs. 4000 per such box in 2014.

·       Both these measures have reduced noise from outside (like sometimes from a neighbouring club) in our estimation by about 60 % but have also insulated the room/s to the some degree from loss of heat / cold.

·       Putting blankets on your beds and sofas in winter increases their insulation enormously, making you warmer when you use them.

·       Another possibility is to turn buildings into mini power plants by converting their windows into see-through solar panels (yup, that’s a thing now) or installing geothermal energy generators. Such buildings could be taken entirely off the grid, removing their carbon footprint.

·       In India, ofcourse, rooftop solar electricity generation is slowly making its presence felt.

It is estimated that in the US in the coming decades the buildings will triple or quadruple their energy efficiency, saving 1.4 trillion dollars.

Acknowledgement : Some of the above material is adapted from Quantumrun Forecasting. The ideas for energy saving at homes are my own.