Mindzle

Posts Tagged ‘sustainable’

Unless you have been living on another planet recently, you will know that environmental and sustainability issues have been a hot topic. Going back a couple of decades, not many people worried about where their grub tableware or other products were sourced from. It was a case of what do I want and where do I get it. Nowadays however, we cannot afford to live in the same manner, especially if we want to secure a future for the next generation and beyond. Taking some time to think about where you get and how you consume your food can have a surprisingly big impact.

Local Producers. We take it for granted these days that we can pop down the local shop and buy some fruits from exotic shores and wines from the other side of the world for example. However, a huge amount of these products are flown thousands of miles from other countries and this causes problems. Not only does the transport release vast amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, due to burning fuel and having to use a food and wine cooler to keep the produce chilled all the way, but also local food suppliers struggle to compete with low foreign costs. If you want to see the important businesses in your local area survive for years to come then make sure you use them whenever you can.

Fight Packaging. You only have to take a walk down one of the isles to see how much food packaging is wasted making products look pretty. A single cake might be singly wrapped, inside a little box with a plastic place-holder, which is cloaked in cellophane and transported within a cardboard box, with the other cake boxes. It is often the case that such packaging is completely redundant, so do your bit and try to buy loose or sensibly wrapped goods.

Green Accessories. Ensuring your meal times do not cost the planet means thinking about more than just your food. Everything from the cutlery you use to the little wine gifts bought for yourself or other can have just as much influence and the consumables themselves. Ask yourself where this product has come from, is it something that could be made from a more sustainable material, and is this a disposable product when I could be buying a reusable one? Disposable chopsticks for example cause thousands of trees to be cut down every day, when a good reusable pair can last a lifetime.

I recently came across a site that I find tremendously useful, ShopWiki. It reminds me of the game changer that Google was when it came into being, however rather than organizing the web into a search-able structure, shopwiki puts every product sold on the Internet in one place. This is huge, I am always trying to find gardening tools or hoses or a wide variety of other products needed in my quest to turn my home into a self sustaining “homestead” and this tool just made it much simpler to do that. it is a game changer.

The first question you have to be asking is “How is this green?” It is not overtly green, however not having to drive all over town to track down a particular product is very much a green shopping ideal. Another way this is helpful is giving the little store around the corner the ability to compete with large Internet retailers and big box stores. All the Mom and Pop needs to do is get their products online and there they are.

With the ability to search all products listed on the Internet you can find very specific things, and to me this is the greatest benefit. I want to find locally sold, owned, and manufactured products first. Better yet are they done in a sustainable fashion out of reclaimed materials? Just imagine how Google has changed the web, and now imagine finding tools, and products with that same unimaginable depth and refinement. That is exactly what Shopwiki.com is.

If you have been following along with my coverage of the “Everything Green Expo” here in Portland Oregon then you know my excitement about many of the products, services and ideas I learned of while there. This post is another in that vein. I expected to see new products from new companies and hopeful entrepreneurs. I was genuinely surprised to see the number of old established companies in attendance. In part 2 I talked of a local skylight company (Skylights NW) that now installs Solar Water Heaters. In this post one of the largest manufacturers on Earth shows there new Green wares!

The Portland Rebuilding Center