Green living: cost vs. reward
I’ve always been aware of some of the basic concepts of green living , in some way or another, be it through my family, friends, or community, and it is something that I’ve been slowly getting into the last year or so, and it’s partially tied to what I would like to do if I had a house: growing at least some of our food, using natural light, grey water collection, electricity from the grid supplemented by wind-turbine generated, etc. All of those are things that would take money and/or time to accomplish, and really, that’s what switching to green options tends to entail.
I guess the first place to start are with those three Rs of green living: reduce, reuse, and recycle. We all know about them, but without some conscious effort, it’s hard to put into practice. Let’s take a soda or water bottle as an example.
- Recycling the bottle would mean you purchase it from a store or vending machine, use it, and when done, into the correct recycling bin it goes.
- Reusing the bottle would mean that when you’re done, you rinse it out and use it for water (or some other liquid/libation) for the rest of that day, or for a couple days. Ideally, you’d eventually recycle it.
- Reducing the bottle would mean you don’t buy the bottle in the first place. I’m not saying you wouldn’t be able to drink soda or water, but you’d have to prepare a head of time to have some other container with you and get the water or soda from somewhere that dispenses it.
The entire bottle situation of course doesn’t take into account any thing else that could make the purchase of the bottle a “poor” green decision, such as the amount of energy and resources used to make the bottle or process the (eventual) contents, plus shipping, storage, etc. Sure, those are going to be factors, in one way or another, but there are ways to make them be not as bad. Moving on, with the above example, recycling is the easiest, and reducing the one requiring actual planning ahead of time, but even with the act of recycling being that simple, you can easily go out and witness someone throwing an empty bottle or can into the garbage when five feet away from them is a recycling bin. It just boggles my mind when I see something like that happen.
I titled this article “Green living: cost vs. reward”, as there is a point where sometimes it requires spending something, not necessarily money, to get the reward. Sometimes it’s time, such as the time it takes to prepare at the beginning of the day to take a bottle with you to fill up with water, coffee, etc as the day goes on, or to get up earlier to walk, bike, carpool, or take a bus somewhere. At other times it’s money that is the cost, such as buying a food product because it is organic, made from recycled materials, or eco-friendly. It may also be the cost of not getting something you want, but may not need, such as a bottle of soda, or a food item that is not eco-friendly.
However, I’d like to point out that a lot of what I have started to do in regards to green living has been done to decrease the amount of money I have to spend on things I don’t want. For example, I used to leave my computer on 24/7, sometimes even when I knew I wouldn’t be home for the weekend. But then I thought about this, and even though I liked always having the computer ready to go when ever I needed it, did it really need to be running while I was asleep or at work? No, it didn’t. So I decided that I would only have it on when I would be using it with any consistency, that is, in the evenings after work and the day time and evening on the weekends. Even assuming that I might have the computer on for 14 hours or so on each day of the weekend, I still would be hard pressed to have it on for more than 7 hours after work each day, so it averages out to only being on 8 hours a day in a given 7 day week; one third of the time as I had it on before. Once you factor in that if my computer was on, so was the monitor, the sound system, the cable modem, and the router, that’s quite a bit. Since I’ve been turning the computer off, and have it all going to a power strip to stop any energy vampires (devices that still draw power when on standby or while disconnected or off but still plugged in), we’ve seen a decrease in our month-to-month electric bill. Since we are paying less, we’ve opted to pay $5 extra each month to use electricity produced by the large turbines outside the city.
Sometimes green living can simply be taking a step back and asking yourself “do I really need to do what I’m about to do?”.