I have been challenged! I went to a site that was supposedly going to tell me, the average joe, how to go green. The site was very simple. By that, I mean there was hardly anything there. All together I would say there were maybe 12 ideas for the average joe to become green. I was let down because I figured there would be a lot more to it than there was. I comented to the author that the site had way too little content and basically got an answer like, "Why bother. Nobody is going to read it if I put down too much." Then I was brushed off with some personal jabs that called me a fake and that I should mellow out and quit complaining.
I went looking for websites that offered some help to average home owners who couldn't afford to build an off the grid home or sink $50,000 to remodel my current home to make it more green. I had writen to some of the manufacturers of solar heating, windmill generators, and other alternative "green" ways to generate heat or electricity asking what a run of the mill guy like myself who makes under $50,000 a year could do to save money. Ultimately that is what it's really all about isn't it? Sure we want to save money and protect the environment at the same time, but when you are the average American, you don't have the kind of money that would let you plop down all the money it takes to convert your home to a gree money saving house. From the few companies that did get back to me I got a standard letter that said thanks for our interest in our company and that we all need to do our part to go green and blah, blah, blah. None of them actually offered me any ideas that the average guy could use to save money and "go green".
Exactly what does this "Go Green" thing mean anyway? I remember 20 years back when it was suddenly fashionable to not use a brown paper bag at the grocery store anymore. The big buzz was that we were killing biilions od innocent trees every year just to produce paper bags, and hat it was not environmentally friendly or cool to do so. So now we should ask for plastic bags at the grocery store in order to "Save the Trees". People were so serious about saving trees that they would chain theirselves to certain trees to kep loggers from cutting them down! SUddenly there were teeshirts and buttons proclaiming that we needed to save the trees by not using paper bags at the grocery stores anymore. It was amazing how many people got on board with this idea. I hate to say so, but we humans are suckers for any cause if it makes us look cool. The whole PC (political correctness) movement is based on this orm od insanity. We don't want out friends and neighbors to think we aren't as cool as the norm. Anyway, paper bags all but faded away from grocery stores and every other store we shopped at.
Now we fast forward to the present and find that it is no longer cool to use the plastic bags any more that we all thought were such a good idea back in the eighties. As it turns out, those trees turn out to be a renewable resource and for every one cut down another seventy new trees are planted. We had an argument for this earlier on though. We decided that to make what we were doing sound okay that we would introduce everyone to the concept of "old growth forests". Old growth basically meant that the trees in that particular forest were so old and had never been subjected to logging, and therefor those trees had a right to be protected. In reality though most of us have never and will never see an actual old growth forest. There was one forest that local green enthusiasts were trying to ban from logging based on the old growth argument. As it turns out, the entire forest had been wiped out by a huge fire that travelled nearly 100 miles 75 years earlier. There were no trees over 75 years old anywhere near the forest being fought over. Anyway none of that is important or pertinent to our current situation.
We find ourselves now asking which is better, plastic or paper. It takes 12 million gallons of oil to make the bags the US uses each year. It would take 14 million trees to make paper bags if that is what we used exclusively in that same year. So do we pick the paper because the trees are a renewable resource? That sounds logical, but in order to produce those bags we would create a carbon footprint that would be consideably larger than anything we would create using the plastic bags. so then we look at disposal of the bags once we've used them. Plastic bags do not biodegrade. Instead they photodegrade and even though the pieces of the bags may not be visible after a couple of years, in actuallity it takes a total of 1,000 years for the plastic bag to completely decompose. The paper bag decomposes in as little as one week. One week versus 1,000 years! Ball all of these factors together and it would sem the best thing to do would be to forget about the plastic bags, grwo some extra trees, and then go back to using paper bags exclusively. All of this doesn't really matter to this article though because what we want to know is how does the average American "go green".
We find ourselves now asking which is better, plastic or paper. It takes 12 million gallons of oil to make the bags the US uses each year. It would take 14 million trees to make paper bags if that is what we used exclusively in that same year. So do we pick the paper because the trees are a renewable resource? That sounds logical, but in order to produce those bags we would create a carbon footprint that would be consideably larger than anything we would create using the plastic bags. so then we look at disposal of the bags once we've used them. Plastic bags do not biodegrade. Instead they photodegrade and even though the pieces of the bags may not be visible after a couple of years, in actuallity it takes a total of 1,000 years for the plastic bag to completely decompose. The paper bag decomposes in as little as one week. One week versus 1,000 years! Ball all of these factors together and it would sem the best thing to do would be to forget about the plastic bags, grwo some extra trees, and then go back to using paper bags exclusively. All of this doesn't really matter to this article though because what we want to know is how does the average American "go green".
