Here are a few ways you can "go green" and it will not be a hinderance on your life.1) Use Winco’s green fabric bags for your groceries (or your favorite grocer’s bags). They only cost $0.88 at Winco. If you notify the cashier that you are using them he/she will deduct $0.18 from your total. I will only need to shop 24.444444 times and they will pay for themselves. I probably shop at Winco around 25 times a year. If you are wondering, “What am I going to do for trash bags?” I would tell you to continue using paper bags because grocery plastic bags are too small for a customary kitchen trash can. I accumulate more bags then necessary to reuse anyway and more than half of them end up as garbage.
2) Recycle your used car oil or have it done at a local oil shop (they recycle).
3) If its yellow let it mellow and if it’s brown flush it down. I piss in my toilet at least twice before I flush it. Patrick can piss like ten times before I have to flush his.
4) Turn your lights off when leaving a room. Try to make it a habit.
5) Turn down your thermostat one little itty bitty degree lower. Chances are you won’t notice.
6) Start a recycling routine. It can be fun with the kids!
7) Bring one of your favorite fabric grocery bags with you when you go on your walk in the city park . There will certainly be some trash to pick up.
8) Buy a Prius!
9) When you chop down a precious Christmas tree be sure to plant two more. This is also a great one with the kids!
10) Try more outdoor entertainment. Hiking, skiing, jogging (not on a treadmill), Frisbee, basketball etc. These activities can be healthy and more refreshing then sitting in front of the boob tube.
I agree with a lot of these ways to save money as long as it is voluntary: 1, 3, 4, 5, 9, 10.
ReplyDeleteHere is a great article to read about how going green is being forced on us and how both your and mine desire to save money and to use our natural resources more wisely is being used to advance mostly socialist political agendas. http://mises.org/daily/4725
"Somewhere along the way, during the last 50 years, the critique of capitalism changed from condemning its failure to spread the wealth to condemning the very opposite. Suddenly the great sin of capitalism was that it was producing too much, making us all too materialistic, fueling economic growth at the expense of other values, spreading middle-class decadence, and generally causing society to be too caught up in productivity and too focused on the standard of living.[...]The current buzzword to show off this newfound love of lowering the standard of living and of forced poverty is sustainability. If you want a definition of sustainability, it is this: rolling back the advances of civilization by force.[...]This is a prevailing political ethos in our own time, and it is having an effect. We are being constantly told to cut back, consume less, buy locally, go green, carpool, and recycle and save, stop indulging. To this end, consumer products are constantly being banned, every day. We have ever-fewer choices in the area of medicine, chemicals, food, drink, and otherwise, in every aspect of life, sector after sector. All of this amounts to a regression of everything we know as civilization, all that we associate with living better, healthier, smarter, more prosperous, and more cultured lives.[...] On the return of the Bedbug problem, "In fact, bedbugs were almost completely wiped out all over the planet by the 1950s, due to modern, life-saving chemicals like DDT, a chemical invented by scientist Paul Hermann Müller working for a private Swiss company (Novartis) that has been widely smeared but has saved hundreds of millions of lives. Its banning in the early 1970s, under the influence of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, has been blamed for a global calamity. Thanks in part to this ban, malaria today kills between one and three million people per year. This is shocking but it is not entirely unusual in the sweep of history. It is easy to regard insects as the most dangerous evil on this earth, having killed far more people than gulags, gas chambers, and even nuclear weapons.[...]Now, every study ever conducted on recycling shows that it does not save money but rather wastes vast amounts of money and energy with recycling trucks and plants. Most cities have piles and piles of waste that cannot be recycled. There is nothing wrong with voluntary, profitable recycling, but there is much that is crazy and inefficient about centrally planned recycling. But what concerns me more here are the sheer decivilizing implications of having to dig through our trash with our hands, moving it from spot to spot and creating ever more receptacles for holding it for ever longer periods of time."
Nice pic ToeJamm! Yes, paper bags are just as good as plastic for garbage. You still have to get them though. How do you get them when using your green bags?
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely will not do 3. That's disgusting. And water doesn't disappear after you use it.
I've always told you guys to turn off your lights, so I'm down with that.
ToeJamm, I have a sneaky feeling you copied this from somewhere.
Regarding 8, your own economic analysis in the last article shot down the Prius, but, see my next article for the final stomp down.
I felt that my economic analysis easily supported buying a Prius. Until you guys show me something otherwise I will have to agree to disagree.
ReplyDeleteSneaky feeling about copying what?
Your thing on water not disappearing is true but pointless. We are running out of potable water to use (see California). We should be mindful of it. America is a team. I'm a team player. All these suggestions are only suggestions. They are not supporting government mandates.
I use real trash bags. I always have. They are larger then the five gallon plastic bags that the store gives you. That is why my green bag effort is in fact saving plastic bag waste.
ReplyDeleteTechnically paper bags aren't allowed with Waste Management. Their rules are that they have to be tied at the top. You can not tie brown bags.
All your suggestions are good so long as they're voluntary.
ReplyDeleteHey Jeff, whats your beef with recylcing car oil?
ReplyDeleteRegarding real trash bags for your garbage, I think that the big expensive more durable bags that you use for trash blows the entire reason to use green bags! And you're spending money on it instead of getting free ones from your groceries! Polluting and more expensive. Hmmm...
ReplyDeleteSounds like a Prius.
ReplyDeleteNot true at all.
ReplyDeleteGrocery store trash bags rip easily, have holes that lick fluids, do not fit a trash can,and hold about a sixth of a real trash bag. These all need to be considered when making an economic decision.
These things may not mean a whole lot to you, but I live in a house with out a dish washer. I clean all my dishes by hand and do not have a garbage disposal. I have to scrape all plates in to the trash before I clean every dish with a slow drip (I set my faucet stream so low that it can barely hold a continuous stream...that's how green I am). If I use a shitty small plastic bag I would be in a real world of hurt. If I use a paper bag it would no doubt rip at the bottom with all the moist things I put in it (not to mention we are not allowed to use them anyway in accordance with WM rules).
Remember that these are suggestions. If they don't suit you then so be it. For people like me they make total economic sense.
I recycle my car oil the natural way, I dump it on top of a bunch of yard waste. It came from nature and I am just returning it. From the article I quoted above and others, I am against recycling because it wastes money and energy. Plus as the article notes, I don't think digging around trash is very becoming of an advanced civilization. I don't know the specifics though.
ReplyDeleteIf you roll those big green bags up like you would a newspaper, then you will see what I think of the going green movement: it is a big green government weeny.
On the Prius, I think the numbers point to the fact that in the most cases a Prius cost more money and wastes more resources. Driving a Prius like the whole green movement just makes people feel good while not really saving money or the environment. Like I said, I think people in the environmental movement need to get a new religion to replace their tree-hugging-earth-loving-human-sacrificing-pagan religion.
If you drive a car how it was intended to be driven then a Prius will be economically efficient.
ReplyDeleteIf you perform the proper preventive maintenance, the saving in gas over time will pay for itself. How many people change their oil every three thousand and who drives slow and smooth? Not many people. So most people probably never get their money's worth.
Everything came from this planet. Should we dump every toxin back in to our lawn? Not a very thorough argument. But I did a little research on the ramifications of dumping oil in the gutter. The best any hippie website could give me was that it contaminated ground water, and cost's the tax payer more to purify drinking water. The most persistent argument against dumping oil was that it contaminates drinking ground water. There is no solid argument against it though.
I don't think too many people just dump their oil anymore. I think that's an issue that is clearly sound policy.
ReplyDeleteBut 19.5 years before the economic break-even point is about 3 times too long to be a sound argument.
There is a fine line between using our natural resources wisely and limiting our usage of those resources as the expense of human prosperity and our quality of life. There is also a find line between wanting to take care of the Earth or nature and almost making a religion out of it and worshiping nature.
ReplyDeleteEverything came from the Earth and it will also return back to the Earth from where it came. The History Channel did a series on what would happen to Earth once humans are gone and given enough time, the remains of human civilization would be wipe out and everything would return back to its natural state. Natural resources are to be wisely used by humans for the sake of human proseperity. Humankind should always come before nature. Man is part of nature so who is to say that we are somehow an unnatural part of it and what we do to the environment is somehow not natural.
*an oil guzzeling car
ReplyDeleteMelkor, your points have merit.
ReplyDelete