The Casual Vegan » The Environment

Zero Waste Grocery Store

Greg — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 17:49:15 +0000

So you bring bags to the store, reuse your plastic, compost so you don’t use garbage bags, and recycle the trash that the city bin will take. Guess what?

It ain’t working.

Even if Every single family in the country spent the time sorting their garbage, we’d still be throwing millions of tons of waste into the fill every day… It would just be 250 million tons instead of 570 million. Recycled garbage creates air polution, water polution, waste garbage, and consumes massive amounts of electricity made from burning coal. That’s not change, that’s a joke.

Pre-Cycle is Real Change

The country’s first garbage free grocery store is opening in Texas. Check it out! I’d certainly spend all our food dollars there if they opened in Portland. Personally I’m still working on bringing my own container to Portland food carts, but I saw an awesome woman on her bicycle do it 2 weeks ago. It only takes one person to create change. Though my favorite Portland cart uses real dishes. Now if I can just get our junk food in jars at the store. Portland behind Texas for eco-friendly living? Ha!

Average Water Usage? What’s Yours?

Greg — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 16:49:35 +0000

Paying bills is always a chore. If I manage to get a check off before a bill is late, that’s a big success. I hate paying bills to faceless corporations that espouse values I don’t support. However, my water bill actually makes me happy to pay because I believe everyone should pay for their impact on the environment. This belief most especially applies to corporations.

Big corporations have a blank check from the government to consume, abuse, and destroy the environment without paying a single dime for the resources they squander. When I pay for my family water use, I’m paying for the resources I consumed. When my water bill goes up, I have no complaints.

How Much is Your Water Worth?

Today was the first time since moving back to California that I actually read the bill.

Last month I used 3000 gallons of water!

Water is so cheap I’ve never noticed the shocking volume of water I’m using. Water in California costs me about 1.4 cents per gallon. That’s about 5-6 cents to flush a toilet. This month, I’m going to make more of an effort to stop wasting so much clean, fresh water.

How much do you use?

This is where you come in, I could look up government statistics on the Internet, but I’d really like to know how much water like-minded folks use. I have a family size of 2 and we used 2992 gallons last month. Post a comment and share your numbers if you can find them. If you’re like me and you have no idea how much you use, please post that!

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Saving our Oceans

Greg — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 20:09:00 +0000

I could spend hours drafting a post explaining why eating plants is better for the environment than eating animals. I could follow John Robbin’s example and quote numbers that prove the inefficiency in producing cattle and fish (22 times less efficient). I could go on and on about how industrial meat production is creating dead zones in our oceans, but instead I’m going to let Ralph Nader do it for me.

This is a great post from 2006, the only thing that Ralph forgot to say is the single greatest thing any of us can do to save the worlds oceans is to stop eating animal products.

eat plants; save the ocean

Read Saving our Oceans by Ralph Nader, and instead of feeling helpless at the end of it, remind yourself that just by eating plants you are making the greatest difference for the environment. If you liked his post as much as I did, send him an email and remind him that eating plants helps save the world’s oceans, and the more of us who do it, the better things will be for our children.

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