State of the Greenhab Union Address

When the Browns first decided that something had to change in our lives, we took this little quiz online about our environmental impact. It said that, if everyone lived the way we did, that we would need 6.5 earths to sustain us all.

We made some immediate changes and cut that number down to 5.1 earths in just a few months. Those were the easy changes - we started recycling more, changed to wind power (from our utility company, we didn't build a wind turbine in the back yard or anything). After months of a few harder changes, we had decreased to 4.2 earths.

Today, if everyone lived just like we do, we would need 3.6 earths to sustain our lifestyles. We're heading in the right direction. A few things have changed in our lives. I now work at home 90% of the time, so there's a lot less driving on my part. Unfortunately our new electric company only offers "dirty" energy - no wind power, like our old one did. I find this astonishing in this day and age, but it's a small coop out in the sticks, not a huge corporation.

Here's how we fared (small numbers = good, large numbers = bad):

Waste - 0
This is always our lowest category. We don't have curbside recycling anymore. Instead our recycling center is behind our grocery store now. While it was much more convenient to have someone come and pick it up at our house, the center does take just about everything - steel & aluminum cans, tin foil, all plastic except for plastic bags, office paper, junk mail, paper board, cardboard, all colors of glass. I think it's a good trade off. We can recycle just about everything. Most food scraps still go into our compost, except for meat and dairy. So we make about one bag of trash each week, sometimes more.

Transportation - 1
Working from home helps a lot in this area. When I do go somewhere it's usually with my son and hubby, so they give you points for that!

Impact of Your Home - 3
This means, are you living in a space that's too big for you, have you made any improvements to it, etc. We live in a mountain house, which is built with lots and lots of huge windows to allow for natural solar heating in the long winter months. This is great in that we rarely turn any lights on, but bad because the home is 35 years old and starting to get pretty drafty. New windows would be a terrific energy saver and we hope to be able to afford it one day.

Impact of Your Use of Goods & Services - 3
Meaning, do we shop a lot, do we try to use items until they're no longer usable, do we buy second hand, etc. The short answer is yes. We've gone a little astray from the buy-nothing compact we participated in last year, but we do still try to buy only what we need (with a few new pieces of clothing here and there). We buy many things second hand and use Craigslist and Freecycle a lot. This is probably an area in which we need to refocus though.

Food - 7
Yes, 7. We knew it would be our weakest area for a few reasons. Marc has never been a fruit or veggie eater. He's more of a meat and side-dish-from-a-box kind of guy. Meat obviously has a huge environmental impact. I'm able to eat local, organic fruit and veggies in the summer months but, come fall, the options decrease sharply and we have to start to stretch our version of "local". I hope to combat this this year by growing more of our own food, freezing and canning it and, hopefully looking into purchasing locally raised meat. Meat is meat and it all has a huge impact but the reality is that we eat it and will continue to do so, so we might as well get grass fed, humanely raised meat, right? I'd also like to start making things that we tend to buy prepackaged like granola bars.

So there you have it. We are moving in the right direction for the most part, but we would like to continue to push and improve and see our impact drop further.