Happy Earth Month, everyone!
Co-op America’s Green Festival is coming to Chicago, and if you make an appearance you might be able to catch yours truly on Green Team duty. This excites me because our job is to try and divert as much waste as possible at the fest by helping people know where and how to recycle their things, encouraging them to compost their food scraps on site, collecting and sorting recyclables … basically, it’s trash duty with the goal of not having any trash. Apparently at the San Francisco green fest last year they only threw out like 25 percent of the total waste generated — the rest was recycled or composted. I think a lot about trash, because here lately it seems as though I’m on a one-woman mission to reduce the waste my apartment generates. It helps that the three-flat where I live has a landlord who’s very supportive of this: we have a compost bin in the back yard and communal recycling bins with blue bags provided. (and yes, I’m very aware of the problems with the blue bag program. I’m seriously thinking about finding a way to take our recyclables to one of the city’s new drop-off points, and I’m pestering my alderman to get my ward on the list to be one of the next areas to get the new blue carts. But there’s only so much a girl can do.)
This year, and especially after catching a few moments of Inconvenient Truth, I’ve been really thinking hard about ways to go a little greener.
For a very long time, I’ve been concerned about the link between our consumer culture, the environment and the fragmented and declining quality of life. It seems we buy more and more stuff, and throw away more and more stuff — stuff that requires resources to produce (petroleum, trees, water, minerals) requires resources to package (mostly petroleum and paper), requires resources to transport (mostly petroleum) and requires space to discard (landfills) or energy and resources to recycle.
You’ve probably heard that, even though recycling is the sexiest and most widely touted of the 3 R’s (and more about the ins and outs of recycling in a future post, specifically Chicago recycling. I’m getting my research together) the other two are actually more important. Reducing means cutting down on the amount of stuff you get in the first place, cutting down on the packaging your stuff comes in, and cutting down on the amount you throw away. Reusing means wearing things out before you get rid of them, finding as many new uses for them as you can, exploiting all possible avenues before you replace something or buy something new.
So, gentle readers, thus begins my quest — to create a lifestyle around reducing and reusing, to recycle as next-to-last resort and to throw away only if I can’t do anything else. I’ll post my list of steps tomorrow, along with updates along the way.
And a question: what have you been doing to be greener?
(** I use the phrase with apologies to Goodness Greeness, a wonderful Midwestern distributor of organic produce and other foods, and which places a strong emphasis on food from local producers and farmers. You can find out more about Goodness Greeness and where to get their products [hint, two of my favorite places, Stanley’s Produce and the Bleeding Heart Bakery] on their Web site.)
Maravichu Maravichu 