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| 99 Cent/Andreas Gursky |
At this point in reforming my shopping habits to make them more sustainable my main focus has been weeding out plastics. Here are a few strategies that have helped me along the way:
1. Produce is your friend and better than alternatives. Fresh produce requires no packaging. You may irritate the cashier or those waiting in line behind you as your loose oranges go rolling off the counter - I have - but that can easily be corrected for with a reusable bag. Furthermore, by committing to creating less waste your diet will likely grow more skewed toward fresh fruits and vegetables, which is hardly an undesirable side effect.
While you may be leaving the grocery store with less plastic and packaging, the question remains, however, whether those moves are good for the environment overall, especially if those oranges had to be shipped and preserved cross-country in order to reach your local vendor. To take it a step further and reduce energy demands and pollution stemming from food distribution you could start spending some more time at your local farmers market.
By purchasing from local farmers you can typically guard against the risk that your fresh produce polluted the environment more than the plastic-sealed variant would have. They are also one of the few places I know of that can offer dairy products that do not come in disposable plastic containers. This form of shopping moreover comes with the added benefits of supporting local businesses and developing a relationship with the entrepreneurs behind them, as elaborated upon in Colin Beavan's No Impact Man.
If you are interested in finding local resources for shopping sustainably, Sustainable Table's Shopping Guides are the best resource I have found so far. Although I have yet to decipher what rubric the site uses, if any, in deciding whether to include a business on it, each individual vendor provides specific information on the nature of their operations for you to decide for yourself whether they deserve your business. The site also provides links to online venues for identifying sustainable non-food products.
It is also worth noting that eating locally will only be an issue as long as our current energy economy does not fundamentally change. Once we make the transition to clean, renewable energy sources, the ecological impact of transportation and refrigeration will be a negligible issue and one of the few barriers to using it for the purposes of distributing food will hinge on whether those resources could be used more effectively elsewhere in improving the quality of our lives. In the meantime, choosing to consume locally will put pressure on transportation, refrigeration, and related services to utilize alternative energy sources and help make that possible future a reality.
2. If you can't get it fresh, get it canned. Or bottled. Just be sure the brand you settle on does not line its cans with plastic, as many unfortunately do. The beauty of cans and bottles is that they can be cans and bottles again. A plastic bottle almost never becomes a plastic bottle again.
3. Pasta boxes. Its ingredients may not be sourced locally, but pasta does come in paper boxers, which often contain recycled content and can then either be further recycled or thrown into a compost bin. Of course, substituting all our plastic with paper would not be much more commendable, so you also may resign yourself to purchasing grains from bulk bins with your own reusable bags.
4. Eggs. Somewhere I saw a graphic illustrating the general trend that the smaller the animal you consume, the smaller your carbon footprint (and those who consume no animals have got us all beat), which leads me to believe that eggs have even less impact. In my parts they come in recycled paper cartons, making the purchase that much more justifiable over the styrofoam and plastic-wrapped chicken further down the aisle. If you cannot give meat up or need the protein, you can usually get it paper-wrapped from a local butcher.
5. Baking soda. Is there anything this stuff can't clean? I am already using it in place of toothpaste and deodorant, with no adverse effects, mind you! Next is to test it as a shampoo, since it can apparently be used for that too.
It has been easy so far. I cannot say that I have felt particularly deprived at any point, but my feelings may change the longer I carry this on and the more I need to replenish diminishing stocks of other consumer goods, such as pens, my toothbrush and floss.
Luckily I am not pioneering this change in lifestyle. My Plastic-free Life is a blog documenting the author's own experience in this ordeal, one she has engaged herself in since 2007. I expect there is excellent guidance to be had there.
Interesting article. It's hard to be green in a big city like Philadelphia, where farmer's markets are rare if non-existent in the harsh winter, but it never hurts to try! I read an article about "green skyscrapers" in Wired a while back (1 or 2 years ago). The following link isn't to that article, but is to a similar one: http://wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?t=13203&page=1
ReplyDeleteI could never get the idea out of my head and I'm always hoping that something like it will eventually come to fruition.
I had heard of vertical farming before, but this is the first resource I have come across with this much background information. It's pretty interesting, thanks for the lead.
ReplyDeleteI think it'll soon become a reality. At the time of writing the visionary already had some potential financial backers and that was a few years ago, though his site has nothing on its status.
I haven't come across any year-round farmers markets in Boston either, but I have found that locally sourced goods are available through outlets like Whole Foods. Trouble is if you were to go exclusively that route in these parts you'd have to figure out how to do a lot of different things with an acorn squash. No Impact Man somehow managed it in NYC, however.