Greening San Francisco
SFist Jon's plastic bag story from last week prompted such a good exchange in the comments section, we thought we'd expand on them in a post. The mantra "reduce/reuse/recycle" is something many of us in San Francisco already practice, but as consumers, we need to pull more weight in the effort to make San Francisco "greener." Please feel free to add your ideas and feedback in the comments.
Bring your own bag
Paper bags are just as bad as plastic in their own way, so whenever possible, bring your own bag to the grocery store. Pretty much every grocery store carries their own reusable bags for a small price, including Safeway. Trader Joe's offers a raffle where you can enter to win a $25 gift certificate every time you bring your own bag.
And be sure to tell the over-zealous baggers at Walgreen's when you don't need a bag. They'll have thrown your tiny tube of mascara in its own huge bag before you've even gotten out your wallet! The same goes for retail shopping in general. Bring your own tote bag or consolidate your items into one shopping bag.
On the occasions that you can't bring your own bag, reuse the plastic ones by lining your trash cans with them, donating them to your local dog park for picking up dog poop, or incorporating them into a craft project. Paper bags can be used to collect your recycled items, and hold up to being reused many times over. You can also recycle your plastic bags at Safeway and return the paper ones to Rainbow (and we're guessing this is the case with other stores).
By SFist Leanne
Food
Buy fresh, local produce and reduce your diet's carbon footprint: the energy used to grow/prepare, transport and package the food. San Francisco has some amazing farmer's markets where very affordable and fresh organic fare can be found, including meat. Industrialized agriculture is responsible for 18% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. By comparison, all transportation emits 13.5%.
When ordering out, dine in instead of taking out. Regardless of the recent styrofoam ban, there's still a great deal of wasteful packaging that goes into take-out and delivery foods. Bringing your own to-go container would be a novel idea. Hm, we'll have to think about that one...
Drink tap water instead of bottled water. San Francisco has some of the nation's highest quality drinking water, and studies have shown that bottled water is no healthier than tap water anyway. Bottled water is also more expensive than gas(!), and since most bottles are made out of polyethylene terepthalate (PET), which is derived from crude oil, Americans' demand for bottled water requires 1.5 million barrels of oil per year. That doesn't even account for the carbon emissions created from transporting the bottled water from France and other parts of the world.
Home
Turn off and unplug your electronics and their chargers, or plug them into a power strip and turn that off when not in use. Electronics still use power when they're turned off, which is called standby power. This wasted energy from combined households across the United States accounts for "87 billion pounds of heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year."
Use compact fluorescent light bulbs. From the Energy Star web site: "If every American home replaced just one light bulb with an ENERGY STAR, we would save enough energy to light more than 2.5 million homes for a year and prevent greenhouse gases equivalent to the emissions of nearly 800,000 cars." We know they give off a weird, creepy glow at first, but with the right fixtures and lampshades, you really can't tell a difference, and they last way longer.
Buy energy-efficient appliances, ideally those approved by Energy Star. According to Energy Star, "if just one in 10 homes used ENERGY STAR qualified appliances, the change would be like planting 1.7 million new acres of trees." In addition, PG&E offers attractive rebates when you buy Energy Star qualified products.
Travel
Carry your own travel coffee mug. Your daily double latte in a paper cup with a plastic lid and a little cozy really adds up after a while. Take comfort in drinking your joe from a stylish, stainless steel mug. (Although, we have yet to find that perfect travel mug. Either they don't leak but have complicated lids that are impossible to clean, or they have simple lids that hardly require any maintenence, but they leak like a mother-f*cker. And they're all made in China. All of them, even the ones at Rainbow.)
Walk, bike or bus instead of drive. Drive instead of fly. When you do drive and fly, offset your carbon emissions. A round-trip flight is equal to two flights. Yikes!