Category Archives: Green Ideas

Water of Truth

Great article on promoting tap water instead of bottled water in Italy.

I find the continued prevalence of bottled water unbelievable.  For many parts of the world, especially the U.S., the idea that water in a bottle is better than water from the tap is one of the biggest scams that millions of people bought into and it continues unabated.

Green rule: keep a reusable bottle or cup with you at all times (stash one at work, one in your car, one you can grab on the way out of the house, you get the idea) and take advantage of the lovely, free, potable water flowing from the tap.

Not one of the seven deadly sins

But still.  Idleness, or more to the point, idling one’s vehicle, ranks right up there.  If your car is stopped, and will remain that way for more than 30 seconds, you will save money and increase your green cred by turning it off.  It is either a myth, or only true for much older cars, that it takes more gas to restart the car than to leave it running.  30 seconds is not very long, so once you get in the anti-idling habit, you will be turning your car off when you’re parked and waiting for the person you’re picking up to respond to your classy honking or when you and yours are both in the car, about to pull away from the curb, and you realize that somebody forgot the directions and without them you’re going nowhere fast.

You should not turn your car off if you are stopped in traffic, say, at a red light because the following might happen.  Light turns green.  You reach out to turn the key in the ignition.  But it WON’T TURN.  And you have a green turn arrow and there are 10 cars behind you, drivers getting impatient and starting to use colorful language.  And you start to panic because “Why won’t the key turn?  Why can’t I start it?”  And now someone is honking at you.  And then your husband helpfully points out that the car must be in Park in order to start, and you left it in Drive.  So you slam the car into Park, start it, put it back in Drive, and manage to get things together just in time to make it through the intersection before the light turns red, stranding all of the other cars that could have made it through the light if you had not turned off your car.  Not that I’m speaking from personal experience or anything, but you never know, I’m sure this has happened to someone, somewhere.

Idling is one of my pet peeves, and I go to great lengths (see above) to avoid it when I am at the wheel.  When I witness other vehicles idling, my blood pressure immediately shoots up, especially if it is something that spews really nasty stuff from its tailpipe, like a school bus.  Fortunately, some cities and states (including my city) are adopting anti-idling laws as part of clean air measures.  This means that I have the law on my side when I go up, knock on their window, and politely ask them to please turn their vehicle off.  Yes, this is really something that I do, and it is much more constructive, and sometimes rewarding, than saying nothing and waiting for my blood to boil out of my ears.

Be Prepared

Sometimes being green requires advance planning and an awareness of opportunities to green a “not green” situation.  One such instance occurred over the weekend, and I was uncharacteristically unprepared.

We traveled to Chicago to attend some of the husband’s University of Chicago reunion events.  My standard M.O. when approaching situations where food or beverages may be served on/in disposables is to bring my own non-disposable option.  However, I dropped the ball on that when packing for the weekend, which is how we came to be at the “alumni picnic lunch” on Saturday faced with a sea of soon-to-be trash.  Since serving food directly from the buffet tables into my mouth would, for some reason, not have been acceptable behavior, I acquiesced to social mores and used the disposable plates and utensils.  At least we had our stainless steel water bottle with us and avoided the dreaded plastic cup.

Next up: Saturday night, for the $40 per person alumni dinner (well, young alumni only paid $20 per person, but the point is that a lot of people there paid a good chunk of change for the meal).  The price tag for this event caused me to assume that CERTAINLY they would serve this meal on real dishes to be eaten with real silverware with beverages in real glasses.  I was SO certain, in fact, that I did not even bring the water bottle.  Well, you know what happens when you assume.  We were faced with yet another meal of disposables, including the plastic cups this time.  Besides being bad for the environment, it was just plain tacky to use disposables in this situation.

I am looking forward to the “Please tell us what you thought of alumni weekend” feedback form.  If we do not get one of those, I will hunt down some contact information so I can tell them anyway.

For the sake of fairness, I will add that they were not using just any disposables.  The plates were some form of heavy paperboard that most likely made from recycled materials.  The plastic ware (both cups and utensils) were made from corn and were, theoretically, compostable.  (My spell check does not think compostable is a word, but I beg to differ.)  This is a nice idea, and might appease some environmental objectors, but the problem is that most of these “compostable” disposables end up in landfills right along with the rest of our garbage, in which conditions are not right for composting.

So your best bet is using completely non-disposable alternatives and being prepared.  For lightness and ease of transport, I prefer plastic plates (heavy duty, made for many uses), metal utensils, and a plastic bike water bottle or stainless steel bottle.  I keep a set in my office for work potlucks or other food-at-work opportunities and we have a set for two that we bring to picnics, potlucks, etc.  I met someone who always keeps a set in her car so she will not be caught off guard.  A little preparation and planning can go a long way.

Road Trip

Confession: Despite the fact that there were a couple of valid mass transit options for the trek from here to Chicago (namely, Amtrak and Megabus), we drove.  I feel somewhat guilty about this (not the losing sleep kind of guilt, though), although I could offer a few somewhat legitimate reasons for opting for the “not green” way.  But the bottom line is that we chose the car.  The next time will be one of the above-mentioned methods — no excuses.

However, once we arrived in Chicago, we snagged a parking space and then happily abandoned our car for three days of walking with a bit of public transit thrown in the mix, so things did get greener.  And there were lots of bikers, which I always like to see,  although most of the bikers I saw were college kids who were not willing to ride ONE BLOCK extra to go the right way on the one way streets.  ONE BLOCK.  My companions explained that when the average trip length was four blocks, this was actually significant.  Yes, significantly lazy.

There were some other “not green” highlights of the trip that will be the subject of another post.