Book Review for Plastic Free by Beth Terry

Practical Advice Delivered Without Smugness

I picked up a copy of Plastic Free at a screening of Bag It last week. I’m not a documentary buff and didn’t think this one was particularly compelling, but I had the pleasure of meeting Beth Terry of MyPlasticFreeLife. She answered questions about plastic after the film in the same friendly, unassuming, and thoughtful way that characterizes her blog. Plastic Free is pretty much what you would expect it to be: a guide to why plastics should be avoided and how to do it. Most of the information is practical, with lots of useful tips derived from personal experience, lists of actionable content, and interviews with activists. There are also some thoughtful meditations on burn out, whether individual actions matter, funny anecdotes (my favorite involves red wine in a Kleen Kanteen), and more.

I’ll admit right now that I have zero intention of gnawing on neem sticks for toothbrushes, and while I am deeply concerned about the environment, do not see plastic as the most pressing issue. I’ve already switched to reusable bags, water bottles, food storage, and bulk bins, but my life will never be plastic free — and I’m OK with that. Wherever you are in your green journey, Beth provides great tips and motivation to keep pushing yourself a little further.

Chapters cover subjects like plastic bags, disposable water bottles, grocery shopping, recycling, eating out, cleaning, and personal care. Some of it won’t be new if you’ve already made the switch, some of it won’t be relevant depending on your lifestyle (I skipped the entire section on diapers, thankyouverymuch), but it’s all quite readable and you’re likely to learn something new or pick up a good tip. For me, the section on recycling plastics was particularly eye-opening. That little triangle you thought meant something was recyclable actually doesn’t mean anything, and I am finding myself looking aghast at my yogurt tub and a lot of other things that I thought were being tidily recycled. The author also discusses bio-plastics and silicone.

Plastic Free obviously has a lot of thought put into it. Every time I thought of an objection, Beth magically anticipated and addressed it — from the way plastic is really more symbolic of our wasteful lives than anything else, to the fact that reusable bags are frequently made out of oil-based fabrics like nylon or polyester, to the bigger lifestyle and ethical changes that going plastic free entails. Yet it’s not didactic, smug, judgy, or simplistic, and that is quite an achievement.

Where Plastic Free loses me a bit is the science. There are a lot of ‘may’ and ‘can’ statements about plastic toxicity that have not achieved general scientific consensus. For example, Beth writes that “endocrine disruptors may actually have an increased effect in very small doses” and then cites an article that analyzes an EPA study in which the panel of toxicologists actually “is not persuaded that a low dose effect of BPA has been conclusively established as a general or reproducible finding.” Something we should do more research into? Definitely. But we just don’t know enough yet. I’m also slightly leery of citing the EWG, which 79% of toxicologists in a survey conducted by the Society of Toxicology say overstates chemical dangers. Although I’m a cautious person by nature, I don’t embrace the Precautionary Principle to the same extent as Beth does, or recognize a binary between safe or dangerous, since the same substance can be either depending on the circumstances. Based on the available evidence, I’m likely to continue using my Teflon pan for omelets. And just as factual nitpicking, toxoplasmosis in otters is linked to fresh water run off rather than municipal sewage systems, so keeping your cats indoors is a lot more critical than not flushing litter down the toilet.

But it’s not a science book, and even though I don’t find my health risks from plastic particularly alarming, Plastic Free offers plenty of environmental reasons to avoid plastic. I’m feeling inspired to take the Show Your Plastic Challenge and remember to bring my own take out containers.

Good read. Thank you, Beth.

Change the World Wednesday: My Plastic Free Week

If you don’t already know about Change the World Wednesday, it’s a weekly green challenge hosted by Reduce Footprints, and this week’s was to go a week without buying anything that involved plastic. (Not to live without using anything plastic, which would be much, much harder.)

It was a good challenge. I blame the cat for my failure. She had to have some teeth removed and came home with antibiotics (glass bottle, plastic lid), a plastic syringe (that doesn’t even work except to spray both of us with horribly bitter antibiotics), painkillers (plastic pill container). Then, in an attempt to bribe the cat into taking her meds, I bought her some liverwurst, which also came wrapped in plastic. She sniffed it and carefully ate around the concealed 1/4 pill. Damn cat.

On the human side, things went better. I made my grocery list, looked carefully at each item, and either found ways to get around plastic or came up with reasonable alternatives. I noticed I was especially good about preparing for my trip to the grocery store this week. Knowing that I couldn’t take a plastic bag if I really needed it meant that I packed more reused bags and containers — enough for everything on my list and a few extras. Here’s some of the stuff that was on my list this week:

• Popcorn. Buy in bulk with reused container, pop on the stove. (Tastes much better than microwaved popcorn, by the way.) Toss with olive oil (glass bottle), sea salt (bulk bins), and garlic (bulk spices) and nutritional yeast (bulk bins).
• Fruit. I hated walking past the plump blueberries on sale, and the strawberries were just as tempting. But I missed the farmers’ market this week, which was my only opportunity to get berries without the plastic packaging. Instead I ate stone fruits (peaches, plums, apricots, and nectarines) which are in season locally and can be purchased without a bag.
• Salad and vegetables. My local market lets me bag my own salad greens as well as mushrooms, potatoes, leafy greens, and other vegetables. I don’t bag anything that doesn’t need it and often (but not always) remember to bring a bag for mushrooms, green beans, brussels sprouts, etc. I was good this week, so no new bags.
• Milk. Most dairy comes in plastic, so I used raw almonds (available from the bulk bins) and made almond milk. Sadly, my almond milk yogurt experiment fell through. No [new] cheese or other dairy this week, though I had some on hand.
• Snacks. Most snacks are heavily packaged, so you can either buy them from the bulk bins or DIY your own kale chips, applesauce, or granola. And did I mention popcorn?

Apart from some produce stickers and the cat stuff, I brought no new plastic into my life this week. Preparation seems to be key. I often find that consciously identifying problems (forgetting produce bags) and then coming up with solutions (keep them in a more prominent place) helps me improve.

At the same time, my no new plastic week was only possible because it was the right week. I didn’t need contact solution or dish soap or toothpaste.  The cat didn’t need new litter, my shoes didn’t wear out, my computer didn’t break. Point is, there are lots of situations in which plastic might be hard to get out of, or in which I don’t want to do reasonable alternatives forever.

Still, it was a great exercise in being more conscious about how much plastic comes into my house, and I’m now in the mindset of always asking what my alternatives are to buying something that involves plastic.

Did you try this week’s challenge (or would you)? How did you do?

When the greener product just doesn’t work

My two year quest for an effective, all-natural shampoo is over. It ended last week when I noticed that my newest bottle of all-natural shampoo (this time from Etsy…probably should have known better) seemed to be causing my hair to fall out. My panicked reaction:  I went to the store and bought a $3 bottle of Citre Shine. Sodium lauryl sulfate? Check. Artificial fragrance? Check. Sigh.

Kevin raised his eyebrows when I brought home a bottle of something that didn’t have a speck of green on the label. I felt slightly uneasy about all the chemicals I was choosing to reintroduce to my life. (It ranks a 6 on the Cosmetics Database.) In the end, I decided I was more fed up with natural shampoos than I was paranoid about a small amount of synthetic chemicals.

No joke —  my hair feels softer, cleaner, and shinier than it has in years. It stopped coming out five strands at a time. That made me wonder: is it reasonable to expect people to pay up to 20 times as much for an all natural product that works half as well just because it’s greener?

Probably not. For the most part, I’ve had pretty good luck with natural products. I love my Seventh Generation dish soap and laundry detergent. Sure, Palmolive has better lather and Tide might be able to get things whiter, but the green versions work fine for everything but shampoo. I tried everything from the light green drugstore versions to the expensive stuff that had to be ordered online. The expensive stuff worked…okay. The bad ones were fairly awful, and most of them still had synthetic chemicals.

I understand that the planet is more important than my hair, which is an evolutionary leftover with minimal actual function. But do I really have to sacrifice every personal vanity to be green[er]? Can’t I keep one? How selfish is it to want hair that isn’t sticky, heavy, tangled, or falling out?

All of which is to say that I can kind of understand it when someone who wants to be more environmentally conscious tells me that she’s tried a green alternative and it doesn’t work as well as her beloved Brand X that she’s been using for the past y years. Sometimes it takes a lot more persistence to find a viable green option. Sometimes the green version really doesn’t deliver, even though it costs more. Sometimes it’s hard to make myself buy the green version, even knowing all of the environmental reasons that I should.

And every once in a while, I give up. It’s not ideal, but the world will not end because I switched back to regular shampoo. Two steps forward, one step back. No one said it was going to be easy.

What are some of the green setbacks you’ve encountered? And what on earth should I do with the rest of my hair-removing, all-natural shampoo? 

Lip balm obsessions & the problem with variety

 A perfect greenie, I’m not. I drive an older car that doesn’t get great mileage, my pottery hobby is anything but energy efficient, and it is entirely possible I will never be green enough to consider reusable toilet paper. And…OK, I’m kind of a lip balm junkie. At any given moment, I have approximately seven tubes of lip balm open. Currently that involves:

1. Gooseberry flavor by Birdy Botanicals (located by bed)
2. Pomegranate flavor by Soft Lips (located by desk)
3. Ginger-vanilla flavor by Blissoma (located by other bed)
4. Watermelon slushy flavor by My Lip Stuff (located in bathroom)
5. Neapolitan flavor by My Lip Stuff (located on dresser)
6. Lavender orange flavor by Badger Balm (located in purse)
7. Hopscotch sundae flavor by My Lip Stuff (also located in purse)

You don’t have to tell me that this is ridiculous. Along with ridiculous, it is also obscenely consumptive, wasteful, un-eco-friendly, and absolutely unnecessary. No one has ever died of chapped lips. And yet, although I am committed in other aspects of my life to reducing the resources I use, I can hardly wait to finish using one tube so I can tear off the shiny plastic seal of a new one. Any untried flavor is infinitely more exciting than anything I already have, so even though I quite like my Ginger-Nilly, I have a tube of zombie-flavor lip balm in the cabinet calling my name.

You know there’s something wrong when the rotting flesh flavor lip balm sounds more appealing than one that tastes like gingersnaps. (Actually, I’m told that zombie is a type of cocktail. But I prefer saying ‘rotting flesh flavor lip balm.’)

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the connections between variety, capitalism, and overconsumption. I’m starting to see that endless variety, paired with a complex set of emotional and cultural motivators to buy, is a bigger part of the whole overconsumption issue than I thought it was. Life was simpler when I had two Chapstick flavors to choose from (cherry or plain), prior to discovering kiwi-lime and blue raspberry in high school.  

I think the variety problem starts with a perfectly natural love of, well, variety. We get bored. Other animals get bored, too. I’ve got a whole bag of cat toys that Brie has gotten bored of. (Need any jingly balls?) But I feel like variety used to be something we created ourselves: a new recipe to cook, a new design to weave, carve, or sew. You know, an investment of time, energy, money, and resources. Your own. Now it’s more of a marketing ploy to keep us coming back for things we didn’t really need in the first place, and to buy more than we need. In fact, it’s as if the more choices we have, the more subtle differences we see, and the more we buy things that are, in the end, only slightly different from each other. I can’t otherwise explain why I want cinnamon popcorn lip balm after having had cinnamon roll lip balm. My primary weakness is for lip balm; my sister has a thing for baroque patterned damask blazers. Go figure.

Variety in itself isn’t a bad thing. After all, what would life be without new experiences as well as old pleasures? But too much variety, and and we can end up unable to appreciate what we already have before moving on to something new and potentially better.  (Like rotting flesh flavored lip balm.) In the process, we’re filling up our lives with things that don’t matter and trashing the planet, even if it’s only on the scale of a tube of lip balm.

Also, apparently too much variety makes you fat. Worth thinking about.

Is there one thing you tend to buy too much, too often? Is the craving for constant variety a part of that overconsumption?

Cutting Down on Packaging

“Recycling means you’ve failed. You’ve failed to reduce and reuse.” – Gary Hirschberg, CEO Stonyfield Farms

If recycling means failure, there’s a whole lot of fail going around at my place. The recycling bag is like the cauldron of plenty. Empty it, wait a few days, and it’s full again. True, recycling is better than tossing, but it’s still not good that we generate this much.

Here’s an abridged list of what was in the recycle bag this week:

• Life cereal box, flattened
• Tom’s of Maine toothpaste box, flattened (why does it need a box when it has a tube inside?)
• Tresemme extra large conditioner plastic bottle (which took me over a year to use up and was bought pre-cosmetics safety freak out)
• Recycled toilet paper roll, flattened
• Plastic organic milk jug
• Oikos plastic yogurt tub
• Three aluminum cat food cans (rambunctious foster kitten ate a lot)
• One ripped plastic bag that can’t be reused and came from my parents
• This week’s grocery circulars, which I don’t look at anyway
• Voter mail, which I looked at for approximately .5 seconds
• Flattened cardboard mailing box
• Last Sunday’s Chronicle newspaper

Not horrible, but clearly we could be doing better. I sat down to think about how we could reduce our recycling output and came up with this list. It doesn’t address everything in our recycle bag, but it’s a start.

• Buy in bulk products that won’t go bad (or that you can use up before they go bad) like dish soap, laundry detergent, vinegar, kitty litter, recycled toilet paper. It’s cheaper and you’ll cut down significantly on packaging.
• Make packaging a consideration in choosing what to buy. If it has more than one layer of packaging, look for another option. Avoid single-serving anything.
• BYOC (bring your own container) whenever possible. Whole Foods sells shampoo, conditioner, and liquid soap in bulk, as well as milk in returnable glass jars, and a whole lot of bulk spices, grains, flours, and nuts.
• Use less. You don’t actually need that much dish soap/shampoo/toilet paper/whatever. The longer your supplies last, the less often you’ll need to buy replacements.
• Make more of your own food and cleaning supplies. Packaged food means, well, packaging. And making your own cleaners out of vinegar, baking soda, and lemons will cut down significantly on the number of plastic-bottled cleaning agents you buy.
• Buy less new stuff. Not only will you cut down on consumer demand that drives manufacturing, you’ll also be spared a new onslaught of styrofoam peanuts, plastic, and cardboard.
• Order less stuff online. Mailing anything larger than a letter requires boxes, padding, and tape. You can and should reuse packing supplies as much as possible, but reducing is always better. 
• Reuse old newspapers as kitty litter bags. Or cancel the subscription, although I think good writers and interesting articles are worth supporting. Maybe subscribe online?

What do you think? Any other suggestions for cutting down on packaging waste?

Stop Blaming BP, Start Taking Responsibility

Courtesy Chris Wilkins/AFP/Getty Images

OK, BP screwed up. Seriously screwed up, and seriously screwed over whole ecosystems, species, careers, and local economies. For decades. I don’t wish to diminish the magnitude of how badly they screwed up, and am certainly not going to offer them an apology.

However — and this is the point at which I get lynched — the oil spill ultimately isn’t so much BP’s fault as it is the fault of our national oil addiction which we all share to some extent. Some of it is choice; I choose to drive a car, I choose to have a carnivorous pet with a significant carbon footprint, I choose to occasionally travel by plane. But even if you make all the right environmental choices, other choices are taken away from you. From pacifiers to polyester lined coffins and embalming chemicals, our lives are steeped in oil. I am part of the problem. So are you. Get used to the idea.

The full list of everyday objects made with petroleum would be impossibly long, but just looking around my immediate surroundings, I see: sunglasses, ballpoint pens, laptop keys, CDs, cell phone, kitchen appliances, food packaging, candles, polyester towels, vitamin bottle, canned food lined with BPA, a styrofoam peanut that Brie has gotten ahold of and is playing with. And that’s to say nothing of the oil I don’t see, the oil used to transport virtually everything I eat, use, or own. The oil used to produce the electricity that allows me to type this entry. It’s not simply difficult to eliminate oil from my life; it’s actually, systemically, infuriatingly impossible.

If nothing else, the unspeakable tragedy of the oil spill should tell us something about the danger of this addiction, as well as its true cost. But if we don’t make the connection that this is our fault, too, we won’t have gotten anything out of this horrible, stupid, and totally unnecessary incident. And we won’t change. It’s OK to be pissed off at BP, but only if you’re also pissed off at your own reliance on oil and the system that makes it hard to have other options.

Instead of spending all this energy demonizing BP (not that this exempts them from paying the full tab), let’s put it towards cleaning up the mess and looking for ways to reduce, if not eradicate, our oil addiction.

10 Super Easy Ways to Be Green[er]

I watched An Inconvenient Truth for the first time last night. When it came out a few years ago, I wasn’t as much of an environmentalist as I am  now. Since then, and especially since joining Twitter, I have been bombarded with daily updates about How We Are All Screwed Why We Need to Act Now. The film didn’t really tell me anything I didn’t already know. At the same time, it was a sobering reminder of just how much work it will take to clean up our act and preserve not only us but also the species we share the Earth with.

If An Inconvenient Truth has a flaw, it is surely that it doesn’t directly empower people to act. Al Gore talks a lot about the need to lower our gigantic CO2 output, but doesn’t 1) make the problem seem small enough that an individual’s actions can positively affect it; or 2) give individuals ideas on how to combat their own lifestyles.

Now, I realize that that wasn’t the point of the film, which was to serve as a wake up call, but perhaps it would have been a good aspect to address. Individuals have to believe that they can make a difference in the problem before they’ll act. Therein lies the problem: our actions, individually, are pretty minute and difficult to measure. However, en masse, they can make a tremendous difference. (Or at least I kept telling myself, as I cut short my morning shower on a chilly autumn morning.) At the same time, most people don’t want to change any really fundamental aspects of the comfortable lives they lead.

So I offer this list as a compromise. They are all extremely easy and practical to do, and require singularly little effort. They might even save you money. They won’t make as significant an impact as, say, going vegetarian or giving up your car, but they’re a minimal-effort way to start making a difference

1. Quit the plastic water bottle habit once and for all. Plastic, for all intents and purposes, does not biodegrade. According to The World Without Us, every bit of plastic we’ve produced in the past 50 years, with the exception of the small percentage that has been incinerated, is still around in one form or another (much of it in the ocean). We simply don’t know enough right now about the longterm effects of plastic on the environment. Switch to a stainless steel or aluminum water bottle instead, which can be used for years and fully recycled at the end of it.
2. For the same reason, go for a reusable shopping bag instead of taking plastic ones at the store. You probably have a couple already stashed in your closet that were given to you free by various companies. Use them!
3. Swap paper napkins with cloth ones. There’s no need for virgin forest to end up as a disposable napkin. (Much less as toilet paper. Rather than use cloth for that function, however, you can opt for recycled toilet paper.)
4. Shop less. Every item you buy has a carbon footprint and uses resources. Unless you truly need it or truly love it, consider using what you already have or doing without. Consumerism is a big part of our use of land and resources and, inevitably, of pollution and waste.
5. Take shorter showers. The world is likely to face severe fresh water shortages within the next fity years. Your water footprint is no less important than your carbon footprint to sustainability.
6. Go meatless for one day a week. Industrial agriculture is a major cause of carbon emissions, to say nothing of obesity. Do yourself and the planet a favor by cutting it out once a week. If everyone were vegetarian one day a week, we could prevent 1.2 million tons of CO2, 3 million tons of soil erosion, and 4.5 tons of animal waste. It would also be equivalent to taking half of all American cars off the road.
7. Walk one of your errands each week. Even a Prius can’t compete with the near-zero carbon footprint of walking. Do yourself a favor, too!
8. Join Freecycle, a group committed to keeping things out of the landfill. You can keep your unwanted items out of the landfill and get ones you do need.
9. Turn off the lights when you’re not using them. (Better yet, unplug appliances or turn them off from the strip.) Unless you’ve gone solar, your electricity is still largely generated by coal burning and non-renewable energy sources.
10. Reuse before you recycle. This may come as a surprise: recycling isn’t actually that green. It still takes up energy and resources. Reduce waste by buying less and avoiding packaging and creatively reusing things you already have before you recycle.

The rules are overall pretty simple. Choose reusable products over single or limited use products. Shop smarter (and less). And think before you consume resources. Don’t let anyone persuade you that you can buy yourself green — while you can and should replace necessary products with greener equivalents, buying new products, even if organic, sustainably produced, and recyclable, is never going to be as green as reusing what you already have.

The Four [Reusable] Bag System

Just about everyone I know has, and earnestly means to use, reusable shopping bags. Reusable bags are a fantastic, easy, and cheap way to make a dent in your plastic usage. My parents accumulated a closet full of them during the dot com era of conventions and freebies, and I not only inherited some of these sturdy and free (if undeniably ugly) canvas bags, I also picked up a few hippie bags of my own during my wild university days at Santa Cruz. Yes, they have Celtic knots on them.

However, many of the people who have and want to use their reusable bags don’t actually manage to do so on a regular basis.  There are two key elements keeping would-be greenies from achieving greater plastic independence:

• We forget to take them out of the car when we go shopping. (We are too lazy to go back for them once we are ten feet from the car.)
• We forget to bring them back to the car after using them for toting groceries into the house. (We are too lazy to make another trip out to the car to drop them off.)

Sound familiar?  Ugliness isn’t a contributing factor: forgetfulness and a streak of laziness definitely are, and none of us are immune. So dig out those dot com bags or get out your snazzy organic cotton ones.  We’re going to need at least four to combat these two banal but real deterrents.

Step 1: Take two reusable shopping bags (more if you buy a lot of groceries at the same time), preferably the more colorful ones, and plant them somewhere highly noticeable in your car. My preference is for the passenger seat, but if you actually have passengers, you can stuff them by the side of the seat, on the door, or where you put your purse – anywhere you will see them when you are in the car. Bright is good!

Step 2: Put the remaining two reusable bags in your trunk. These are your back-up bags and should not be needed unless you’ve been abusing the system.

Step 3: Use your front seat bags whenever you shop. Remember, they live on your passenger seat (or thereabouts), so only short excursions to the store and to the house are permitted.

Step 4: If you forget to bring your front seat bags back to the car (which is probably inevitable at some point), you may use your back-ups on the condition that those bags return to their home ASAP.

Step 5: If you get down to 1 or no bags in your car, gather up the bags languishing in your house and put your purse in them so you’ll remember them the next time you head out. (Do not forget that you have put your purse in them.)

And that’s it. Pretty simple, with ample allowances for forgetfulness and laziness. Tested and true by yours truly, and I am by no means more attentive or responsible than the average green-ish citizen. Let me know how it works for you!

Oh…and please don’t run out and get designer reusable bags if you have perfectly usable ones already. Sustainability is ultimately about consuming less.

Ways I’ve gotten greener this year

Greenness is hard to quantify. (In fact, color is hard to quantify, within and without human perspective, but that’s a whole different story.) But in the last year, I think I’ve been hedging towards lime and away from lemon on the color wheel. Comparing this year and previous years:

• I did not take six (ouch!) transatlantic flights between California and England. Total carbon savings: several tons. I can only defend those flights by saying that for four of them (two in December/January and two in June/July) I was extremely homesick, depressed, and sick to death of my dissertation. 
• I shortened my commute from 12 miles to 3.  I haven’t given up my car, but I’ve made some progress towards driving less.
• My lunches no longer involve any packing materials that are not reusable and/or reused. My sandwich and snacks are now contained in highly reusable tupperware rather than plastic bags. Yes, tupperware is plastic…but it’s at least going to serve me for a good long time.
• My showers have gone from 20 minute soul-cleansing ablutions to 5 minute flings with soap and shampoo. Not entirely without regret.
• I pay more attention to where my produce comes from. California is one of the places where there is really no excuse not to buy local or at least state-produced food. I can think of a few things California doesn’t produce (bananas, Taiwanese bellfruit, pineapples), but it more than makes up for it with everything else.
• I have worked out the perfect four bag fabric shopping bag system. Two of my fabric bags live on my passenger seat. The other two live in my trunk and are to be used only if I have been very bad about returning my front seat bags to the car after using them. I can’t remember the last time I took a plastic bag.
• My lovely Sigg has replaced many disposable water bottles; at least 1-2 a week.
• I am now a solar enthusiast and can even bore you with the history of photovoltaics.

Naturally, there is much (very much) room for improvement…

Green consumerism

It seems a little ironic that the green trend has been deliberately misinterpreted by marketers to get you to buy more stuff.

Obviously, this doesn’t apply to greener alternatives of things you already use and need to replace. Buying organic strawberries instead of conventional ones may not do any favors for your wallet, but it will mean that fewer chemicals go into a small patch of Earth — and into you. Buying non-petroleum based cleaning agents — fine. (But if you want to take it a step further, go for baking soda in its elegantly minimalistic,  biodegradable orange cardboard box.) A canvas bag? Great, if it makes you think twice about taking plastic bags.

I might even get away with my stylish aluminum Sigg bottle because in the year that I’ve had it, I’ve completely stopped buying bottled water.

But overall, being green should not primarily be about buying new things. Remember the whole ‘reuse, reduce, recycle’ thing? It’s about lifestyle, not trendiness. It’s better not to buy those designer organic cotton cargo pants when you have many perfectly serviceable pairs of cargos — albeit not organic — in your closet. In other words, being green is about reducing consumption, not about shopping the green trend.

Unfortunately, consuming less seems to be a lot harder than shopping for ‘green’ products.  How do we even move towards more eco-friendly lifestyles?

It seems to go back to the three Rs.

REDUCE.

• Take shorter showers to cut back on your water usage.
• Bring cloth bags to the supermarket. Resist the temptation to use plastic bags for produce! Your apples and oranges can coexist in a cloth bag until you get them home. It’s OK if the lettuce makes the bag a little damp.
• Don’t buy what you already have and don’t need. (This is one I need to work on.)
• Look for things with minimal packaging. Manufacturing consumes incredible amounts of energy and resources, and for what? So you can have a little plastic bubble and square of cardboard around your lipgloss.
• Turn off power at the switch or go solar.
• Reduce greenhouse gas emissions by buying locally grown and made goods.

REUSE.

• Buy used: used books, used clothing, used cars — not only does it help your bottom line, if enough people did it, fewer new goods would be produced.
• Washable is generally better than disposable. Just be conscious of how much water you’re using to clean them, especially if your state is in a drought.
• Join Freecycle and you can get other people to take your useless junk away and get useful things you need — for free – from other people.

RECYCLE.

• OK, this one should sound pretty familiar by now. Glass, paper, plastics go straight in the big blue bin.
• Keep an eye out for electronic recycling events in your community. The Boy Scouts who hosted one near me actually seemed grateful for my outdated electronic junk. Check to make sure that the e-waste really will be recycled, not shipped to a third world country.

And no, I don’t do all  these things. To prove it, I have a regrettable new tube of lipgloss (that came in a cardboard box) that I bought yesterday when I was having a bad day. It contains petroleum. (But it was chocolate peppermint flavored…) I won’t swear it’ll be the last, but I will try to find greener coping mechanisms than buying lipgloss.