Originally posted by Stratman What i would like to see done, and this really has nothing to do with photography, is to OUTLAW junk mail. If you didn't ask for it, you shouldn't have to deal with it. I bet we'd all be astounded to know how many tons of paper is wasted on this crap...Plus all the ads in the Saturday papers, i would say 75% of the Saturday paper here in St Louis is Ads...
IIRC, you can go to your local post office and stop delivery of junk mail. No idea if it just gets tossed, or if they stop sending it at the bulk mailing level because you are on the list.
Beyond that, I wish that a lot of the feel good environmentalism was scrutinized more as a lot of it is neither efficient nor good for the environment.
For exmaple, most of our paper comes from farmed trees, which are sustainable, suck carbon out of the atmosphere, and require less energy, labor, and chemicals to process into usable paper compared to recycled. Recycled uses less trees, but consumes more energy, and leaves you with more pollutants to manage at the end of production. So unless we are running out of trees, why bother? Then upon further thought, I REALLY have to ask myself why we don't just burn the paper. Nobody will pay more than it costs to recycle for manufacturing, so why not sell it to burn for power. It might not be much, but it would be a carbon neutral renewable power source. WOn't power a city, but might be usable in a co-gen plant or something, and someone might actually pay to haul it away rather than just burning local tax dollars to pay someone to take it. Oh yeah ,ad after paying them to take it, if they can't find anyone to buy it, it just goes in the landfill anyway.
Glass is damn near worthless to recycle. Aluminum is a pretty good deal though, especailly cans (because they don't need to be sorted and have the alloy determined), which is why most beverages come served up in plastic now.
Another false economy is avoiding mail order. It's not like eating local seasonal food where I replace an apple from argentina with a zuchini from 25 miles away. I live within about an hours drive of B&H. I could plop my butt in the car, probably by myself, sit in traffic, drive an hour there, and an hour back. Or my item can car pool with a thousand other packages and one driver in a vehicle specially engineered to maximize UPS's profit by being fuel efficient, easy to repair, etc. Explain to me how mail order ISN'T more efficient for something that isn't around the corner. On top of that, my mail order product comes from a super efficient no-frills warehouse rather than some big box store with lots of lighting that is empty most of the day, every day, but still lighted and heated at great cost.
Compact flourescents in the home rock. As do 7-day programable smart thermostats. Both of which will pay for themselves in short order. Switching to LCDs from CRTs saved a fair ammount of electricity as well.
Then, of course, there is the best "green" producst of all: used durable goods. Because re-use beats recycling any day of the week as far as efficiency goes.
The best environmentalism pays for itself, and if you don't take advantage of it, you are just throwing money away. If the "green" product costs a lot more than the normal product, it's probably not really efficient, and thus not really all that environmentally friendly taken as a whole, but likely makes one area more efficient while making another less so. Usually with a net greater negative impact.