Saving Earth became and is a top topic of the last 2-3 years. Let’s see a discussion with a woke family neighbor who blamed me for not following their steps but then agreed to compare with how my family does.
They are a family of 3, and we are a family of 5. The first observation is that their trash can is full every week, while ours is 1/3 empty or 2/3 full. At the time, we lived on the same street and had the same 60-gallon trash can.
A quick calculation brings my family’s trash generation to about 8 gallons per week per person, while theirs is at 20 gallons per week per person, or 250% more than mine!
Why is this important while trying saving Earth?
One of the most important things to note is that organic waste breaks down in landfills, producing methane, carbon dioxide, water vapor, and other gases.
Methane is a strong greenhouse gas that traps heat from the sun, and landfills contribute to global warming. These gases can worsen climate change and air pollution if not properly managed.
A large amount of the garbage found in landfills can require hundreds of years to break down, with plastic bottles taking up to 450 years, batteries taking 100 years, and metal taking between 50 and 500 years.
Landfills in the USA generate between 20 and 22% of the total methane generated.
How to fix that? Think before buying, trashing, and go the 3 Rs route:
- Reduce—reduce trashing by reducing buying, buying smart, and consuming smart. Why buy 10 lbs of potatoes every month when you consume only 4 lbs?
- Reuse—reusing easy things like plastic bags as trash bags, reusing older clothes for things like mowing…, and giving clothing to a church, the homeless, and families in need. We stopped giving to big names like Goodwill because they trash pieces of clothing with a low market value—this has been verified by 3 employees and 2 volunteers from different locations.
- Recycle—Instead of trash, recycle food waste, for example. We use a compost drum for all food waste—this one from Amazon is a 43-gallon system for $79. Free compost all year long. Recycling is not difficult; it just needs a little thinking.
Saving Earth requires us to shop wisely
The neighbors love avocados and eat some at least 5 times a week; they love pineapples and bananas… one small problem with those, none are or can be produced locally. Thus, over 2,000 miles of transportation by truck and/or boat.
They checked, and the raspberries they consume are from California—2,000 miles away when these are grown in our state!
The last time I ate at their place, they served pears in plastic cups. Pears from Peru, cooked and packaged in Indonesia… They were delicious but imagine the transport impact on the environment…
Same with bread, why buy bagged bread from 2,000 miles away?
Our Comfort and Saving Earth
This is another huge problem. These woke neighbors like comfort. Thus, their thermostat is always set at 72 degrees 24/7. In Winter, ours is set at 68 degrees during the day and 60 after 10pm. There is no AC in summer. We only use ceiling fans in the rooms we are present in; the whole-house AC systems cool down every room.
A 1.5-ton AC consumes around 1.2–1.5 KW of electricity per hour, while ceiling fans consume the least electricity at 0.0311 kWh per hour at maximum speed – that’s just about 40 times more!
As we moved to the countryside on a 5-acre, very wooded lot, we harvest fallen trees, cut and split them, we burn them the following winter. Our wood stove is 80,000 BTU with an 85% rating.
A fun fact: Joe, the woke dude, felt very sad about us freezing at night. Well, as my grandparents did, everyone sleeps under a goose-down duvet. It is very high-insulation and extremely breezable, thus, no cold, no sweat, and awesome sleep.
NO, Joe. Geese are not massacred to make these; their feathers are a by-product of geese farming. I KNOW, Joe. Goose meat is not common in the US, but goose dishes are found in Asian, European, and Middle Eastern cuisines. True, the down is imported, yet it’s better to use it (recycle) for saving earth than the ones made with polyester, which is a chemical-based product also imported.
Wood is 100% renewable energy. Our winter heating gas consumption is minimal and costs less than $20 per month, while my old woke neighbor has a $340 monthly gas bill.
As you can imagine… the woke family stopped talking to us lol they can’t accept being shown that saying “we are saving Earth” is very different than doing it.
