More junk for the landfill, or green choices?

There was a good article called “Going Green? Good Luck” about consumers really going green versus just thinking they are in the Star Tribune on Sunday.  It was based in part on an article in Discovery magazine by Thomas M. Kostigen about water use.

“Water is a precious resource, and there is embedded or “virtual” water in everything we consume. According to a Discover magazine article by Thomas Kostigen, “Virtual water is a calculation of the water needed for the production of any product from start to finish.”

Kostigen goes on to quote the virtual water for everything from a banana (27 gallons) to a cup of coffee (37 gallons) based on calculations from Waterfootprint.org, which has a virtual water footprint calculator that allows you to see how much water is in the food you are consuming.” — From The Lifecycle of Your Dinner, another related article.

Of course, American consumerism is a big source of CO2 emissions in the first place.  But our economic systems demands we shop or it all collapses.  So we should make choices in what we buy that are as smart as possible (or stop being capitalists, which is always an option).

The point of “Going green? Good Luck” is to show us how we never think of all the energy and water that goes into our great ideas that we think are “green”, when it turns out they are not.  For instance, in Canada there is a push, like everywhere else, to “eat local” food.  That involves eating locally grown tomatoes, which are grown in a giant 1,600 greenhouse covered in glass, even in the winter.  What they save in transportation costs to get tomatoes from California in the winter is completely overcome by the energy required to light and heat a greenhouse in Canada in the colder months of the year.  So there is a net rise in CO2 emissions overall from that locally-grown tomato.  “When you consider how much water is used in growing, processing, transporting and selling coffee, the virtual water use of a single cup of coffee is 37 gallons”.  That’s enough to make you think twice about throwing out that half pot of coffee that you don’t want to drink.  Maybe you could refrigerate it and drink it over ice later instead of making new coffee tomorrow.

How much water is used to make leather shoes?   This is shocking — 4,400 gallons.  Even the “green” shoes use hundreds of gallons of water to manufacture.  The greenest shoes are the ones you already own.  That goes for clothes, furniture, books, and other things that don’t use energy to operate.

Another example is going electronic with your books and other reading.  It seems like a no-brainer. With an e-reader you save paper, and trees,  and read on an electronic device.   It sounds like common sense.  But it’s not the greenest way to read [...]