What I won't promise is "saving you time". If you're thinking about switching to Green to save on waste and pare down on your spending, then good! In my painting business I was given some good advice when dealing with customers:
You can only pick two: Cheap, Fast, or Quality. (Hereon referred to as the 2/3 rule.)
Same holds true everywhere, I've found. You can have convenience, thrift, or the job done right, but you can't have all three. Green only has one formula: we will be obliterating "convenience" from our vocabulary and sticking with quality and cost-effectiveness. It's a call to go back in time, not revolutionize the world with another invention. It's a change in lifestyle, one of quality that lives within it's means.
Think about the string of word pictures that come into your mind when you imagine convenience: Fast food, remote control, instant oatmeal, microwaves, freezer meals, quick dry, take-out... Take the 2/3 rule with the food you eat, which two are you picking? Please, let us stop skimping on quality for the sake of cheap and easy!
It also involves the other conveniences that our lifestyle dictates that we can't live without. Things like paper products. The invention suited for those who are not willing to wash their own dishes or towels. (Before you think I am being self-righteous- this comes from experience- earlier this year, with my husband in grad school, me working and going to school full time, two kids in elementary school, another in preschool- we were taxed big time. One luxury we afforded ourselves was the paper plates rule. It made life easier. We needed fast more than anything!) It concerns me that we are a generation who is not willing to care and clean up after ourselves on so many different levels. Shows like Clean House and Clean Sweep are now extremely popular because we can't own up to our own messes on a daily basis.
So convenience means: packaging, manufacturing, one-time use, disposable, marketing, consumable, etc. Grocery stores and big manufacturers like "consumable items". Especially the ones they think we cannot live without. Things like paper towels, napkins, shampoo, detergent, soap, cereal, bread. They all come in a package, they are not reusable in anyway, and cannot be refilled. Now, I am not saying stop washing your hair and quit using toilet paper. I am here to be a voice of reason and encouragement towards living a greener life, not hammer down a bunch of rules none of us can follow!
In our house, we have eliminated the paper plate and implemented our collection of inexpensive plastic plates for casual meals (bought at Target 4/$1). Because we no longer purchase paper plates which cost roughly $6 per month, we'll save about 70 bucks this year. The paper napkins have given way to cloth, which are not only nice to look at, but teaching the kids some table manners nearly foreign to them in this day and age. We have cut back considerably on paper towels by using bar mop towels to wipe down the countertops, and hand towels to dry hands. Granted with all this cloth, I am doing maybe an extra load or two a month, but the savings of money and waste make up the difference. We have walked away from disposable cleaning devices like Swiffer and opted to use the mountain of mismatched socks like my mom used to.
One product I really enjoy is Simple Green. It's been around forever, and is extremely concentrated and non-toxic. I keep a couple of spray bottles left over from countertop sprays and pour in a tablespoon of Simple Green and fill the rest with water. A gallon jug costs about $8 and will last your forever. Because it is concentrated, and comes in such a large package, the manufacturing and transportation costs are dramatically lower. If diluted, you may only buy one jug every couple months to clean your whole house. That is a TON of savings when you factor in how much household cleaners can eat up a monthly grocery budget. You can clean everything with it. Floors, toilets, counters. I used it in my painting business to clean baseboards and door jambs, spilled paint on carpet (oops), and soak my brushes in it. Actually, I recently found a stash of brushes that were not cleaned after a job and still had paint on them from 4 months ago. I soaked them in full-concentrate for a few days, and now are all workable and soft.
I have found that with just these changes in lifestyle, I can save a little bit of money and know that I am not adding to my garbage heap when I keep my house clean or cook a meal. Take a look at your habits, what is expendable? Could you live without the convenience of the dishwasher if it saved you money on water and electrical bills? How about cloth diapering? Sadly, my conscience wasn't swaying me strong enough to invest in cloth diapering until my third was already born and the disposable habit had been ingrained. I am going to look into fabric recycling to make sure that when these rags and cloths have had their wear, I can send them to be broken down to become home insulation or fabric shopping bags or some new boutique line of clothing.
Hopefully, we can move past creating new inventions that bring moderate change, and dig deeper to bring the change within us about by working hard and being responsible.
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