Green Shopping

Why is green shopping important? The United States’ culture of consumerism has detrimental impacts to the climate and environment. It is essential to know about alternatives to wasteful consumption.

Here are ways to reduce your carbon emissions from shopping:

Use canvas or fabric shopping bags instead of plastic bags.

• Plastic bags are made from nonrenewable petroleum and take 500 years to biodegrade. Paper bag production requires that over 15 million trees are cut down each year for the United States alone.  Reusing or recycling 1 ton of paper bags saves 3 cubic meters of landfill space and 13 - 17 trees. Reusing or recycling 1 ton of plastic bags saves the energy equivalent of 11 barrels of oil.

For more information about the impact of your shopping bags, visit http://www.reusablebags.com/

Look for fresh, local, and in-season produce when going to the grocery store.

• Food travels between 1,500 and 2,500 miles from the farm to your table. Buying produce grown nearby minimizes the amount of fossil fuels and packaging materials used in transport, as well as the preservatives necessary to keep food fresh while traveling long distances.
• Find out which fruits and vegetables are in season where you live, or find a farmers’ market in your area.
• Buy fresh produce instead of frozen, processed, or prepackaged food.Processed foods consume more energy in their production. In addition, precooked meals often require significantly more packaging materials.
• When possible, buy food in bulk to minimize waste from packaging. For example, buy a large box of cereal instead of serving-size packages.
• See http://www.eatwellguide.org/

Eat less meat.

• A meat-eating diet has a much greater climate impact than a vegetarian diet. Most cows in the U.S. are grain fed and require 13 kilograms of corn for every kilogram of beef they produce. One kilocalorie of beef needs 54 kilocalories of fossil fuel input, compared with the 3.3 kilocalories of fossil fuel needed for one kilocalorie of grain. One kilogram of beef takes 100,000 liters of water to produce, compared with only 500 liters of water for a kilogram of potatoes.

Invest in a water filter and fill a reusable container rather than buy bottled water.

• The total energy required for every plastic bottle’s production, transport and disposal is equivalent, on average, to filling that bottle a quarter of the way with oil. Manufacturing plastic bottles requires twice as much water as will eventually be contained in each bottle.

Shop at thrift stores.

• Buying used clothes, books, and other products conserves energy and resources.  Recycling is great, but reusing is even better, as it reduces the total amount of material consumed.

For more resources, visit http://www.sustainabletable.org/ or http://www.epa.gov/epahome/shopping.htm