Set sprinklers to water the lawn or garden only - not the street or sidewalk.
Use the microwave to cook small meals. (It uses less power than an oven.)
Purchase "Green Power" for your home's electricity. (Contact your power supplier to see where and if it is available.)
Scrape, rather than rinse, dishes before loading into the dishwasher; wash only full loads.
Cut back on air conditioning and heating use if you can.
Turn off appliances and lights when you leave the room.
One week ago, I quit plastic bags. Cold turkey. It's harder than it sounds.
Plastic bags – specifically, the ubiquitous "T-shirt" bags in which we all bring the groceries home – are the cockroaches of the consumer-product world: durable, adaptable, and for every one you get rid of, a dozen more take its place.
In our home, they have a secondary use, which is disposal of what the cats leave in the litter box. Still, if we had a hundred cats eating a particularly, er, fibrous diet, we couldn't come close to using a tenth of the bags that find their way into the house. The rest go out with the garbage.
Cheap, lightweight and manufactured by the billions, they're the ultimate discard: festooned in trees, shredded on barbed-wire fences, dotting the highway medians like beached jellyfish, bunched in nasty drifts at the shorelines of lakes. They make ordinary trash look scenic.
Whole cities have banned them. Entire nations have fixed surcharges ("plastaxes") that have reduced their use by as much as 90 percent. Last week, Texas-based Whole Foods, that greenest of greengrocers, announced it'll quit using them completely by April.
So I quit. No bags in, no bags out, at least until our backlogged cat-box supply is exhausted.
If you want to, you can kick the plastic bag habit with a very grand statement. There are specially made designer "eco-bags"; "delightfully hip reusable grocery bags" are available online for $34.50; there's a "Think Green organic cotton Kermit tote" ($38.95), or an "eco-chic recycled rice tote bag" ("Each bag is a unique, fair-trade fashion statement!" – $48).
Here's the rub: I don't want to make a fashion statement or a grand political gesture. The idea is not to make anybody else feel guilty about how they get the groceries home or to make public a parade of personal virtues. I just don't want to use plastic bags for a while.
Besides, spending 40 bucks on a "Think Green" canvas bag seemed to defeat the whole idea of curbing wasteful consumerism.
So I rounded up all the canvas tote bags in the house, convention freebies and comes-with-purchase giveaways. It is not a delightfully hip collection: A few grubby bags that advertise "Vitamin World," totes from the state fair and from the bookstore, a roomy old canvas affair imprinted with the logo "C-SPAN," which might as well be "I'M A BIG NERD."
For the first big no-bag grocery shop, I forgot the bags and had to go back to the car for them. In the rain. I overloaded the biggest bag with canned goods and could barely lift it out of the cart.
On the way home, chicken juice leaked through the canvas and all over the back of the car. I can still smell it.
And here's a bulletin: They might give you a beaming round of applause for bringing your own bags to the Whole Foods, but at Kroger, you're just holding up the line.
Clerks who have refined scan-and-bag to a precision-timed art form have to be reminded that you want to bag your own stuff; if you set up a canvas bag on those self-checkout counters, the weight sensor thinks you're trying to steal something. You have to sweat more than a minor inconvenience – you have to be willing to make a minor nuisance of yourself.
The checkout lady at the sewing-goods store gave me a thin-lipped smile when I asked her to dump all the stuff out of the plastic bag she had automatically filled into my tote bag – other customers were waiting! I felt not like a virtuous friend of the planet, but like a supercilious pain in the butt. Why can't you be one without being the other?
That's what lies at the heart of ecological sensitivity and conservation. To get real results, a lot of us are going to have to alter our habits, not just the comparative minority who devote a lot of consciousness to being "delightfully hip."
I'm sticking to it. It's not to show off how eco-fashionable I am, because I'm not. I just think anything we've got tangled in trees and hanging on fences across the country is something we've got too much of.
So if you wind up fuming in a waiting line while I'm trying to wrestle a six-pack of Bud into a canvas tote bag, try to spare me a little patience.
It's not political, I promise. It's practical.
