Environmentally-friendly lifestyle recommendations are the main topic of many publications and web sites created in the last years. Albeit being a professional realtor gives me plenty of changes to talk about the many ways of green living with my clients, my topic today will be a bit more specific. Most people have already come across the main eco-tips, so we are not going to try to summarize them here again. Instead, I would like to contemplate on groceries, water and electric current – as the three crucial resources that we, who live in industrialized countries, tend to use without further thinking.
Groceries
As most people (I hope!) regularly recycle paper, glass and tins, most of your household rubbish is probably composted of groceries. The majority of this food waste is often still in its original packaging and in a good state. The sad reality is that on average most households in Canada throw away 20 to 30% of food purchased in shops. Together with the food thrown out in stores and restaurants, it makes between 7 and 14 billion tonnes of food wasted annually. That is worth $3 to 5 billion Canadian dollars every year.
Now you are probably surprised by these numbers, aren’t you? And now think of all the charity organizations aimed at fighting hunger, and on the other side so much food being dumped right at our homes and neighbourhoods. Now you might think “OK, so I will take our leftovers, pack it and send it somewhere else where people are hungry.” But hold your horses, that is not the smartest thing to do, we have some more practical recommendations for you. 1. Do you have any food left from yesterday? Try to incorporate it into today’s lunch. For instance you can stuff some peppers with some remaining rice. 2. In your larder or food cabinet, try to stick to a simple rule: the groceries closest to the expiration date is always stored in front of the fresher ones. 3. It may happen that you know beforehand that there is some food you are not going to be able to consume before its expiration date. Instead of throwing it out, try to find a local charity or soup kitchen and bring your food there when it’s still serviceable. Let some people enjoy it – hunger isn’t only to Africa. 4. If you have some leftovers anyway, try mulching it instead of just throwing it out. Maybe you will contradict that you don’t have a garden. But your neighbour might have one and may be able to help you to get rid of your leftovers.
Water
There are plenty of ways to prevent wasting water and you can probably name most of them yourself. One problem that comes to me when thinking about responsible water usage is the way we manage human waste: toilets. We got used to using toilets so much that we no more think of them – as long as they perform the way the are supposed to. But do the math: establish how much water your family used in the last month through flushing. Big number, isn’t it? And has it ever occurred to you that this quantity is not inevitable, that flushing your lavatory can be done using less water? You can try these two methods to using less water for flushing: 1. There are new types of toilets available, that are using just the minimum amount of water necessary. You might think that there is not much to choose from when buying a new toilet, but just stop by at your local shop and see for yourself, you might be surprised! 2. Another way of reducing the amount of water for flushing is to fit several plastic bottles filled with water into the tank of your toilet. Keep trying to discover how little water is enough for the toilet to work properly.
Electric current
Here the situation is similar to the one with water and wasting it – there are a lot of advices on how to save electric energy to be found in books, magazines and on the Internet. What I personally consider being the biggest electricity waster is the commonly used tumble dryer. The popularity of tumble dryers comes from the fact that modern people want everything to be done in the minimum time possible, regardless of the amount of resources that are wasted in the process of speeding things up. It’s a fact that nobody has time today to wash clothes by hands and dishwashers really save water. But tumble dryer? Would it be such a great obstacle if we just waited 1 – 2 days for our clothes to get dry? For people who are trying hard to make their lives less of an ecological burden, using a tumble dryer is acceptable only in acute cases. Even a better solution is to dispose of the dryer at all, or sell it. Not only the nature will be happy for your decision, but also you will pay less for electricity.
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