Save green by living green, part 1

Save Green - By Living Green 

*Here, you'll find a 2-part article that breaks down some of the many R's of waste management. Look for the second part of this article via:

Zero Waste Initiatives aim to create a more sustainable society by seeing “waste” as a resource that creates jobs and stimulates the economy. It is also one of the fastest, cheapest and most effective strategies for combating climate change. Did you know that as much as 82% of the materials in landfills are recyclable, reusable or compostable? Imagine if we found a way to help everyone in every community reduce that number to next to nothing! It would save cities millions of dollars in landfill related costs and create thousands of new jobs. If we could achieve this in the US alone, the environmental savings would be equivalent to closing 21% of the US coal-fired power plants. The most common R’s in Zero Waste, in the order they should be implemented are: Rent, Repair, Repurpose, Refuse, Reconsider, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and Rot. So let’s take a brief look at each of these and discover just how much impact it has on our own budget.

Rent rather than purchasing an item and reduce all the packaging and fossil fuels associated with that new item. We no longer have to have extra storage space and we don’t have to do any maintenance. Tool, office and household rental businesses are sprouting up in every community offering baby and toddler supplies, furniture, computers and every tool imaginable. Some of these have memberships where you pay a fee to access all of their products whenever you need them. So instead of paying out a hundred dollars for a drill gun, for instance, you can rent one for $5/day.

We can Repair instead of purchasing a new item – pretty much everything from shoes and books to lawnmowers and furniture has repair potential. The trick is finding the people locally who can do this for you, or acquiring the skills yourself. Like the first ‘R’, you avoid purchasing a new item and all the environmental costs that come with it.

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When we have decided that a new item really is eminent, we can be a little more discerning while shopping. We can Refuse to accept manufacturing standards by expressing our concerns or praises to the company listed on the packaging. We might Reconsider the product we were about to buy and choose one that has a lighter environmental footprint. We can Reconsider our importance and realize that we can indeed have a profound impact on the environment and our local charities, while boosting the community’s economy. When we learn this it becomes a part of our life, we aspire to do more, we seek out new opportunities from our choice of transportation to where we live and every day activities.

Continued on May 8th 

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