Green Living

Discarding the throwaway mentality

I had coffee with a friend in the building industry — we bemoaned the prevalence of planned obsolescence in the production of so many materials and machines. Furnaces, roofs, refrigerators: Why are they designed to wear out so fast when we have the technology and resources to make them last?

A few years ago, a plastic part on the base of my blender broke. “Time to buy a new blender” was my knee-jerk response. But then sustainable logic took hold — why junk a perfectly good blender because one part was broken? In order to reduce my carbon footprint, I needed to reduce the amount of resources I consumed and how much I threw away — every blender base, cell phone, and analog TV adds to the growing stream of electronic waste.

So I set out to replace the broken part. First, I discovered that my blender model was no longer produced, and no store in my city carried a replacement part. Online research led me to a source that could mail the part to me.

Here’s the dig: That small component — with shipping — cost more than $30. I could have bought a brand-new blender for less than that!

But I didn’t. I stubbornly stuck to principle, ordered the replacement part, and vowed then to make repair my default, instead of replace.

Three years later and the blender still powers through its daily morning workout.

My clothes washer will be replaced with a high-efficiency frontload machine-as soon as I can afford one. Meantime, I’ve switched to cold water for all my wash loads. And I hang my clothes to dry-indoors in the winter and outside in warm weather.

But I’m still uncomfortable about laundry detergent. The greenest solution, it seems, is making your own. But I draw the line at shaving soap, which is part of the homemade recipe. My compromise for the time being is to buy a trusted Earth-friendly brand. (How can you tell if it’s Earth-friendly? More on that at another time.) And I choose dry powder rather than liquid.

Here’s my logic: Liquid detergent-of course-contains mostly water. It seems absurd to weigh down the cleaning agents with water when you’re inevitably adding it when you turn on the washing machine. And there’s a significant energy cost to shipping that heavy jug from the manufacturer to my neighborhood supermarket. Although I know that the powder version travels, too, I can rationalize that it doesn’t include a redundant ingredient.

The other reason I choose powder: It comes in a cardboard box - which I can drop off for recycling at a number of locations. The petroleum-based plastic bottles, on the other hand, are more of a challenge to recycle, especially if they’re not the most commonly recycled plastics #1 and #2.

Take-home tactics for restaurant leftovers

You won’t find a paper towel or napkin in my home, much to the disbelief of even some of my most sustainably minded friends. I use cloth napkins-often for several meals in a row. (Honest, I’m not a slob-in fact, this is a practice observed in some upscale hotel restaurants in Europe.) And paper plates? Toss-away cups? Not even for my granddaughter’s birthday party.

But when I go out to eat, I risk undoing all that good if I clean up with handfuls of paper napkins or I take my leftovers home in a  polystyrene shell: a virtually unrecyclable plastic vessel that archaeologists will puzzle over in future millennia when they dig it up intact.

Green table manners: Be judicious with napkin use. Skip the straws in drinks, and choose a ceramic mug over a paper cup in the coffee shop. And bringing home your leftovers is a great exercise in sustainability; but greener yet if you skip the Styrofoam container and ask for recyclable aluminum foil or one of those Chinese to-go cartons. I’ve found that even restaurants that typically use the plastic will wrap your dinner remains in foil if you ask. And if enough people reject polystyrene, more restaurants will switch over to the more sustainable option.

Don’t toss your old computers. Those motherboards, megabytes and other components are laced with hazardous substances including lead and mercury, which can leech into soil and water systems. Other electronic devices—TVs, VCRs, CD players—also pose an environmental threat when abandoned to spend eternity in a landfill. (more…)