Rethinking Lifestyle

There have been quite a few posts recently in this blog and on the SETI website about waste. This is another but with a slightly different angle.

As everyone knows these days, burning fossil fuels (from oil, gas or coal) results in global warming emissions that in turn affect the climate and weather patterns.

Consider paper. It is everywhere. Probably 90% is used once and thrown away, and we don’t think about it anymore. Recycling may ease our conscience, but what is the true cost? Huge machines (burning diesel fuel) cut down the trees. Trucks (burning diesel fuel) haul the trees to a paper mill. Enormous amounts of energy are used to smash up the wood, turning it first into pulp and then into paper. More trucks (burning diesel fuel) bring the paper to a printing factory where huge amounts of energy are used to turn that paper into things such as advertising flyers, magazines or newspapers. Of course manufacture of the printing machines themselves and the inks also used lots of energy to produce.

After the newspaper is printed it is trucked (burning more diesel fuel) to various points for distribution, or even delivered door-to-door.

Huge amounts of time and effort are put into producing the articles, the reporting, the advertising and other features such as the crossword or comic strips.

What happens next? You receive your newspaper, spend about half an hour reading the bits you find interesting and then you throw it away. All that energy, all those global warming emissions, all that effort, all that forest cut down for thirty minutes of reading. And many flyers end up going straight into the garbage without even being opened. This is crazy.

All across the world the battle is on between the traditional newspapers versus getting news online, via TV or by radio. From the environmental point of view obviously online is favourite by far, but from an economic point of view, how many jobs would be lost in forestry, papermaking, transport and printing if newspapers were to go the way of the Dodo.

Paper kitchen towels are another total waste of resources. People previously used cloth towels and washed them regularly. Toilet paper is another extravagantly used product though hard to replace in our modern society. Paper plates: paper napkins: all total waste of resources, but jobs for some. It would be an interesting challenge for families to attempt, say for one month, to use half of the usual amount of kitchen towels, and if you are really up for a challenge half the toilet paper too.

Sorting out this sort of environment versus jobs conundrum is of course what politicians of all parties, whether Federal, Provincial or municipal, are paid to do, but are they up to the task? Are they showing leadership in this area? So far it is not noticeable.