It’s not Easy Being Green, But It’s Getting Easier: Tips on Buying Green

Photograph by the Author

We’ve been covering over-consumption and trying to be more conscious about our spending habits. Buying less and only what we need was our first step. As we continue to buy less, we need to also think about what we are buying. The best way to be earth-conscious when we go shopping is to buy recycled, green, used or vintage, or recyclable items.

Tip #1: Buy Recycled Items

Possibly a better name for this is Precycling, in other words being aware of how what we are buying can impact the environment. Buying pre- or post-consumer content (the higher percentage the better) helps to reduce waste. We can now find opportunities to buy more and more different products recycled. Even our ink cartridges (and this is one we should especially pay attention to) are offered recycled (labeled remanufactured ink cartridges). Office Depot’s Guide to Buying Green says,

“remanufacturing one toner cartridge keeps an average of two and a half kilograms of plastic out of landfills.”

There really shouldn’t be an excuse for not buying recycled ink cartridges as they are about 20-50% cheaper to buy than new cartridges anyway, according to GreenYour.com. Buying recycled products reduces pollution, conserves energy, saves landfill space, and preserves natural resources… all wonderful things for those of us trying to keep our mother earth beautiful.

Tip #2: Buy Green

Besides buying recycled items, another part of pre-cycling is buying organic, eco-friendly products. This reduces the amount of harmful waste that is manufactured and eventually thrown away. We will cover organic foods later, but in this section, I want to stress the importance of watching our consumption of chemical-based products. If you think you must use them for thorough cleaning or powerful pesticides, think again. Seventh Generation and Methods products provide powerful alternatives for cleaning your home, and there are plenty of organic pesticides available.

But you don’t even have to go out of your way to find eco-friendly cleaning solutions or worry about the extra expense on your budgeted shopping list (green products can often be a little pricier, unfortunately).  White vinegar can also take care of your all-purpose cleaner needs (1 cup vinegar to 1 cup water). Here are other useful ways to clean with vinegar. If you’re trying to get rid of chrome sink gunk, you can also cut a lemon in half and cover the open side with baking soda, then rub it into the chrome, making sure the lemon juice is mixing with the baking soda (apply more baking soda if you have to). Take a towel and wipe it down with a bit of your vinegar solution, and your sink will be nice and sparkly! Besides disinfecting, white vinegar is also an odor-absorber.

Which brings me to the next point… air fresheners. I understand that sometimes odors get trapped inside the house and it can get funky-smelling. But if airing out your home is not enough to get rid of the odors, then, a much better solution (rather than exposing ourselves to harmful chemicals from plug-in’s and sprays) is this: take an onion, cut half of it off, put it in a bowl with the cut-side up, and place it where the odor you are trying to get rid off is the strongest. I know this sounds counter-productive, but it really isn’t. Yes, your place might smell like onion for a little bit, but after a while, you will notice the smell of the onion fading  and voilá, it took with it all other odors! I usually do this overnight, and in the morning, I wake up to a fresh home.

Tip #3: Buy Used or Vintage Items

In this age of Amazon, Craigslist, and ebay (and I’m sure I’m excluding a number of other sites here, please feel free to comment and remind me or introduce me to new ones), you have easy access to good quality, used items. If you have things you need to buy that you can do without for a few days, try to buy them on these sites and buy them used. These sites offer a wide variety of items and keep things circulating, rather than ending up in landfills. Also, when you no longer have use for a product, think, before throwing it away, and post it, instead, on one of these sites or donate the item to your local thrift shop. For books, remember that your local libraries also would love to get your donations! You know the saying, one person’s trash is another person’s treasure…

As far as clothing is concerned, I know that organic clothing can generally be quite pricy (too bad there’s not a greater demand for them yet), but there is no shame in buying used or “vintage.” In fact, these items allow for you to brush up on your sewing skills and add your own creativity to the clothing. Also, there are more and more opportunities to buy already tailored,  repurposed, vintage clothing.

My company, f.a.c.t.s., for example, will soon be offering beautiful, vintage flex-wraps (multi-purpose silk wraps that can be worn as skirts or dresses in a variety of different styles) that are made from recycled sari cloth.

Tip #4: Buy Recyclable Items

Bottom on the list, but still meaningful: buy recyclable items. This is different from recycled items, in that these items have not been previously consumed. In other words, buying recyclable items is still consuming resources. The up side is that they can be recycled, so please remember to do so! No, recycling won’t stop our environmental crisis on its own, but it doesn’t mean that we should dismiss it all together. It does help.

To close today’s post, I’d like to share with you a TED talk I found rather illuminating and inspiring.  It is about a different kind of consumption, Collaborative Consumption, which is like the next step beyond buying recycled items from Amazon, Craigslist, and ebay. Basically, the idea is creating a large-scale online marketplace, where you can rent, barter, trade, or lend out items that you may own but don’t really use often. In her TED talk and book, What’s Mine is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption is Changing the Way We Live, Rachel Botsman talks about her idea in more detail. I have yet to read the book, but based on her TED talk, I really hope the idea continues to grow!

In my next topic, I will cover buying local. Please note, that in writing these tips, I am also holding myself accountable and progressing in my journey to being a more responsible consumer, and so, I welcome any other suggestions or innovative tips from my readers!

A Shot of Change: The 7 Bad Habits of People Who Can Buy Less

"The Shopping Cart" Modified. Original from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/coolmikeol/5046645416/

An old (2010) article from the Guardian talks about the “cult of consumption and greed” and how it

“wipes out any gains from government action on climate change…”

It goes on to note that, although over-consumption is often thought to be a Western problem,

“the consumer culture is no longer a mostly American habit… Over the last 50 years, excess has been adopted as a symbol of success in developing countries from Brazil to India to China.”

What does this mean? 1) The planet is in trouble, and 2) we can do something about it. This “cult of consumption and greed” may have been started by corporations and advertisers, afflicted with affluenza. But their secret is this: consumerism and affluenza spreads through people, through you and me. They have found a way to convince us that we need more or better in order to be stylish, to fit into a certain social status, to be looked up to… all so that they can make more $$ selling unnecessary products. This is the sad news. The happy news is that they need you and me to spread the word. And you and me can choose to stop spreading the word, and starting spreading a different message. It doesn’t have to be a pitcher of change, or even a cup of change. It begins with you and me sipping on something as small as an espresso shot of  change. It might be bitter at first, but the effects are powerful and go a long way. In yesterday’s post, I talked about the different ways to reverse over-consumption:

1. Buy less
2. Buy recycled
3. Buy organic
4. Buy local
5. Fight for a change in policies (This, I added today.)

This week, I will go over each one, so that we can see the big picture for change, and the little steps we can take to get there. Today, I invite you for a drink of espresso with me, as we look at the 7 bad habits of people (like you and me) who can buy a little less. Our first sip of espresso does sting a little. It means looking honestly at our habits. But it also means being realistic– being open to new ways of doing things, but gradually and avoiding burnout. You can’t run a marathon, after training for a week, otherwise you end up like Barney from “How I Met Your Mother,” unable to get up, let alone walk.  The key is to improve a little everyday, getting used to new habits, and then kicking it up a notch.

Bad Habit #1: A Bad Attitude

I know I said this before, but it really does start with how we look at the world every day. It is easy to ignore the problem, when it doesn’t seem to matter in our everyday lives, but it does in very real ways. Throughout the week, I will be posting clips and photos of the effects of over-consumption. You know this already, but let me remind you. Besides its larger impacts, over-consumption leads to our grumbles over high gas prices every time we go fill up our tanks. It leads to mass amounts of garbage, which means we get stuck with polluted water, air, and soil. It leads to debt, and general unhappiness. Now, that’s personal. I don’t care for debt…or unhappiness.

Bad Habit #2: I Want, Therefore, I Need

We often think we need things, when we really don’t. It’s new. It looks cool. We have some money. Why not? Well, we don’t NEED it. I might need it one day. Well, I know that story really well. It goes like this: One day comes, you decide to move or your’re cleaning out your garage or you have to make room for new stuff, and you discover a lot of unnecessary things. When you need space, you realize the difference between want and need.

Bad Habit #3: Not Knowing What Lies In Your Closet

Have you looked in your closet, storage space, or garage, recently? Can you close your eyes and tell me everything that’s in there? Most of you probably can’t. I’ll be honest… I can’t either. We often buy things, and then, don’t use them often enough or need to make way for other things, so we stuff them in our closets and forget about them. Knowing what you have in there is really important. First of all, it prevents us from buying duplicate items (When I moved to Georgia from California a couple years ago and was packing all my stuff, I found a lot of lost items and also a lot of unfortunate duplicates.)

If you do need a duplicate item, because your old one doesn’t work (unfortunately, companies seem to make things so they break down every couple of years and you have to buy another one), then recycle the items or give them to Goodwill. Do not keep them stored away, because one day, you will get frustrated with all the unnecessary junk and end up putting it on the curb for the garbage man, instead of Goodwill. Yes, I am guilty.

If an item is sitting in your closet collecting dust, you probably don’t need it. So, don’t go buying any similar items. Take me and my scrapbooks, for example. I always had good intentions of doing art with my special memories. So, every time there was a sale on scarpbooking materials, I’d go and buy some and store them in my closet for the day I would finally have time to scrapbook. You wanna know what happened? Over time, I collected about a hundred and fifty dollars worth of scrapbooking material that, until recently, were still in my closet doing absolutely nothing. Please learn from my embarrassing mistakes.

Bad Habit #4: Buying When You’re Hungry

Bad things happen (like today, when I wanted to buy the whole store, and then, ended up with unnecessary things that I really should not have splurged on, and I wonder when I will actually eat all of it…). Enough said!

Bad Habit #5: Buying When You Just Got Your Paycheck

Remember that cartoon segment “Good Idea/Bad Idea” on Animaniacs? I used to love them, as a kid. Well, this habit is a perfectly bad idea. A good idea would be to pay all your bills first, then put some into savings (for emergencies and for those larger expenses you need to save up for), and then, you can buy other things. Also, remember that just because you have $$, doesn’t mean you have to spend it on anything that looks interesting. Choose wisely!

Bad Habit # 6: Winging It All the Time

Now, this one pains me to say, because I like to consider myself free-spirited and spontaneous… but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that I can’t be spontaneous all the time and be a responsible human being. So I’ve had to opt out for planned spontaneity– that is, allowing myself to break from the monotony of routine and do things on a whim as long as I give myself ample time to do things that will save me time and money (like packing peanut butter sandwiches for a mini-road trip, or planning out my trip so that I don’t waste so much gas– can you tell I like traveling? :P). A schedule, as odious as it might be, allows us to see the big picture of our bank accounts, and our time, helping us manage both and saving us from future frustration and wasteful spending habits.

Bad Habit #7: The Need to Buy Things Now

This is another problem with our consumerist culture. We have to have things, and we have to have them now. We would rather go to the store and pay for a new product (even though we might not need it new and we might not need it now), just because once we’ve convinced ourselves we need it, we want it immediately. There are times, of course, when we actually need it immediately (like when I’ve waited till the last minute to buy textbooks), but with a little planning (see bad habit# 6), we can usually avoid these last-minute needs and buy things on amazon or craigslist or any number of other sites, where we can buy used items, saving ourselves money and being a little more eco-friendly than before. 🙂

Remember, lasting change starts one step at a time, one day at a time!

Look for Tomorrow’s Post on: Tips for Buying Recycled