Being environmentally friendly

Remove all ads!

With the recent election here in the United States, I got into various discussions with friends. One thing that came up was how a friend said he didn't vote because he felt his vote didn't count. We somehow changed the discussion into environmental issues because a lot of people think, "Why should I recycle, one person recycling doesn't help much." The same mentality people have on voting.
The thing is is that one person can do a lot. If everyone did something, a big difference can be made.
Another reason people don't recycle, buy recycled products or products that are environmentally friendly is because the cost can be too high. A ream of recycled printer paper costs almost twice as much as normal paper. "Earth Friendly" products can cost twice as much as normal products.
Why? Well oil companies, lumber companies, etc have their hands in congress through lobbyists. They make large donations to politicians. It costs more for companies who make recycled products or earth friendly products to produce thier products. Oil companies and lumber companies get tax breaks, they don't. They have to keep their prices high to produce their products.
The thing is if you, the consumer, spend a little extra money, these earth friendly companies can afford to lower their prices. You can vote for politicians who support recycling and helping the environment. There are a lot of products out there. And some are not that much more expensive, if at all, than other products.
If everyone did this, then we'd notice a difference.
What do you think? What kinds of things do you do, no matter how small or big, to help? Do you recylce?

 

Isn't there a "recycling truck" that comes weekly like your regular garbage trucks? Here in Vancouver, we do, so actually it's very easy to get involved in environmental cleansing. Just put all your recyclable materials out on your driveway in a "recycling bin" and it gets picked up every week. I don't know if other North American cities have such a service...

And like your garbage disposal, this recycling scheme is funded by the government.

Another thing that I do a lot is save as much paper as possible (use a blank sheet as originally intended, reuse it as scrap, then recycle).

 

A lot of places do. Where I grew up in Chicago they do it a lot. Here in Alabama, not as much.
We're moving to California next week. I know there will be a lot more options out there.

 

Down here in Aus, our normal garbage is collected every week, and our recycling every second week.
In major cities (Sydney, Gosford, Melbourne, etc), it`s collected a bit more, and there`s more bins- ie, compost, paper, plastic, aluminium, etc.

 

I'm all-for-it. I try to recycle lots and I have a worrying obsession with trees... worrying my parents that is

Teeny
( )

 

A lot of waste is just uneccessary... at the office where I work there are people who print every single email they get, whats wrong with reading the thing off the monitor? There are others who will print an entire 100 page document everytime they make a change to 1 page. All totally uneccesary. These days I would use the printer about twice a year and print about 10 pages total a year.

 

You'll find that along the entire Eastern Seaboard, and around the Great Lakes area, recycling is very common.

Compared to the mid-east states. New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, and the majority of Texas have either no recycling, or very, very sparse. Many will have, for a city of 25,000 people, a single area with two or three large trailers divided into bins for recycling.

There's several places which *charge* you to recycle your motor oil.

This all goes back to Federal and State legislatures. They have other, more pressing matters to attend to right now.

Oh, and chain gangs. We need more chain gangs. Every single prison and jail in the entire United States should be run completely, and totally, using the chain gang methodology.

 

I live in Nashua, NH. We have city recycling. They pick up our trash, recyclables, and lawn clippings/leaves/branches.
Additionally, I try to use as little plastic and paper as possible. I almost never print stuff out on my computer (home or work). I drive a ULEV (ultra low emissions vehicle) rated vehicle, 2000 Honda Accord.
We have to take care of the planet. It's the only one we have.

 

Here's a little bad news you might already know but will probably find interesting if not: A National Wildlife Federation study- I think this was about 1990 but someone more earnest than I could look it up- showed that recycling 100 tons of paper produces 40 tons of toxic sludge, and that 13 of the 50 worst hazardous waste dumps in North America were actually recycling facilities. So the moral is that the key phrase in "reduce, reuse, recycle" is REDUCE. The garbage that goes into the recycling bin is as bad for the environment- or maybe evenworse- than the regular kind. But take heart, there are distributors that know and care about this and will help. You can buy both beer and milk (the staples of a healthy diet!!) in bottles that will be washed and re-used, and most organic grocery stores will sell you foods sold loosely in returnable crates to avoid plastic bags and boxes.

I'm a composter, myself. I compost pretty much everything: the flyers that come to my door despite the "NO FLYERS" sign; most of the food scraps that aren't either turned into either broth, dog food, or both; the 8 tons of pet hair my family produces every hour; the little paper bags my flour and grains come in. The compost feeds my fruit trees and vegetable garden, which in turn feed me. The circle of life! My life will be complete when I install composting toilets and a grey water system.

 

We have a recycling program here for glass (clear and colored glass) and aluminum cans. But you gotta wonder how effective this is. I've seen statistics saying that most plastic is not recycleable, and it takes more energy to recycle something than it does to make a new one, which in turn makes the "environmentally friendly" stuff more harmful to the environment to produce.

I also think that our biggest pollution problems don't come from households, but from big corporations. Think of all the paper and plastic used in packaging, and how much waste is created just by making that packaging. Where I'm at, our Allegheny river is too polluted to swim or fish. There is a big steel company that dumps all kind of crap into the river from their steel making process. But, because this mill is one of the major employers in this area, they don't get fined or even reprimanded for this (at least not publicly).

It's the same story all over the US. A town becomes dependent on a big corporation that sets up manufacturing locally, and officials "look the other way" on any environmental problems the company may cause becuase they are afraid of losing thousands of jobs and sending the region spiralling into urban decay. After all, fish can't vote! And having "Drove Ralston-Purina out of town and setting new unemployment records" on your campaign issues list does not look good to the voters.

But, on a personal level, I read a newspaper every day. In about two months, that's enough to fill a dumpster. There are 3 other papers competing with it. That's a lot of waste for something that only gets read once. I wish there was something that I could do about this, since this paper makes up a significant amount of my trash. I could check the online sites for news, but I like reading the paper at work and on the bus. I wish they had clipboard sized readers with big screens on them that I could just download the contents of my newspaper to. I wouldn't have to throw anything away, and I would still have a physical, portable form of the news.

The newspaper would love it becuase they could still charge me for a download, and they could lower their costs (and my price, although not by as much ). Plus they could make money selling the screen readers. I'd love it becuase it would eliminate around 35% of my garbage.

 

As Sprite said, the key is to reduce your waste. It is not that hard to do.

 

Actually, most "environmentally friendly" companies get huge tax breaks and government subsidies.

The problem is that, even though people are willing to pay a bit more for "green" products, the cost is usually prohibitive and the product often inferior. But if demand continues then techniques will improve and they will become competetive.

Contrary to propaganda you may hear, the Bush government is actually increasing the subsidies for green power and energy saving items, despite the fact that it often takes decades for the savings in energy costs to payback the added capital costs of these devices. Not a prudent allocation of resources if you ask me, but there ya go.

 

If the demand for recycled or earth friendly products increases more and more, than perhaps the companies can afford to develop cheaper ways to recylce materials and reduce the amount of by-product waste associated with recycling.

 

If individual people stopped buying overpackaged and irresponsibly produced goods, the corporations would stop making them. It's easy to blame big companies for everything, but in a free market economy, consumers are in effect voters. Every purchase you make is telling the big powerful guys in the head office how you want them to do business - all the companies will imitate the one that sells best. You can protest and wave banners all you like, but at the end of the day, if you give them money for their product, they'll keep doing what you're paying them to do. As I shouted at the television just the other day, if you're wearing Nike sneakers, you have no right to wave banners protesting their third-world employment policies. You paid them to do what they're doing.

A personal example: The only commercially-canned foods I buy are sardines and tuna. Today when my grocery order arrived, I noticed my favorite sardine cannery (Brunswick) has started wrapping the can in a plastic wrapper. Presumably they do this because their market research has told them that customers like it. They wouldn't waste their time and money otherwise. So, I'm going to stop buying their product and send them a note explaining why. You think this won't work? When I was a teenager, you had to go to a health-food store to buy makeup that wasn't tested on animals. When the big cosmetics companies noticed all their customers had migrated to the health food store, they stopped animal testing. Today, it's almost impossible to find lipstick that *is* tested on animals. In a few short years, responsible consumers were able to completely change the way huge international corporations make their products.

Shralp- I understand your frustration at government dollars being spent on something with a low immediate payback. But I disagree with your assumption that ethically produced goods are inferior and prohibitively expensive. Is there a particular product line you've had bad experiences with? I find organic and "green" companies make excellent products and can't think of even one bad experience. Oh, wait- I had a worm in a cauliflower once. But that's it. And a Canadian study of organic farms earlier this year showed that the farms actually made a profit *faster* than conventional farms, because materials were reused instead of constantly replenished, lowering yearly expenses, which offset the fractionally smaller yield.

 

Not all, of course. And I wasn't thinking of food, even.

I was thinking about recycled paper products, which tend to jam in printers and copiers or -- in the case of sacks and bags -- fall apart easily.

Buying things with regard to your values makes a great deal of sense. But don't put away your flags and banners if you want to make a change: not all corporations are smart enough to realize why they're losing customers.

(Why were they wrapping cans in plastic?)

 

OK, fair enough. I do like the recycled paper bags that the Ontario Liquor Control Board packs booze in because - heh - they compost nicely, and turned inside-out and garnished with raffia ribbon make very pretty wrapping paper. But I tried recycled toilet paper once and it was very, umm, French (anyone who's ever used toilet paper in France knows what I'm talking about). So I can understand your point on that one. Food and clothes are the only things that usually come to mind when I think about ethical products so I didn't think about paper when I read your post.

My brother has always worn "Gap" clothes, and when I challenged him on this during the years they were getting bad publicity for child labour and horrific working conditions in the third world, he said he had to buy them because everything else was "inferior". I buy Canadian-made clothes and they are definitely cheaper than the Gap and good quality too.

God knows why they wrapped the sardine can in plastic. I'm still shaking my head.

 

It ain't the metal thats the problem.

It's the glass and plastic.

Those are plain crazy to seperate alone, not to even mention what all processes you have to use to recombine them. Polyethelyne just plain sucks completely, too.

But like everything else, it's going to have to get deadly nasty before people will do anything about it.

 

I just got back in town and saw this. Just here to mention that most pollution in the U.S. does not come from large companies such as steel manufacturers or car plants (the paints) etc. As a matter of fact, or industries are some of the cleanest in the world now because of the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, RCRA etc. The biggest polluter in the U.S. is the farmer. Huh, I can hear some say. It's true. For example, the Clean Water Act applies to what are known as "point sources" which will include discharge from manufacturers etc. Because of the political power of farmers in the U.S. they are exempted from much of the Clean Water Act specifically as well as often not meeting the necessary requirements to be considered a "point source." Rain water falls, hits the ground and runs to the water carrying with it the animal fecal matter and anything the farmer sprays on his fields and this is the single biggest water pollutant in the U.S. today. Of course, many farmers are large farming companies but usually when people mean industry they mean manufacturers and the like. The environmental laws in the U.S. are very effective compared to the rest of the U.S. because they are specific and have teeth. A good example of a nation with a good reputation for environmentalism but that isn't as effective as one might think is Australia. They have one massive environmental regulatory scheme which requires a tremendous amount of negotiation and compromise between the government and industry in case of a violation; in the U.S. if there is a violation the government can just hammer you no questions asked and if the industry thinks they've been given the shaft they seek legal redress.

So, while industry still has more work that needs to be done to reduce pollution, it is really farmers, municipalities (sewage bypass problems duting high water), and consumers who aren't really doing their part right now.

No, I don't work for industry.