3 Reasons to Adopt a Sustainable Lifestyle

There are essentially three reasons to adopt a more sustainable ‘green’ lifestyle.

1. Resources
2. Health
3. Money

Resources: 

Looking at things from a holistic perspective, it’s pretty simple. We have one planet – just one. And Earth, as we call home, has a finite amount of resources such as water, minerals, land, etc.  Yet, since 1960, our world population has doubled to roughly 7 billion people.  The United States, while not quite keeping up pace with the overall population explosion, has increased its population by 70% over the same time period.

Given that we have a finite amount of resources, we can safely say we now have ½ of the world’s resources per capita compared to 50 years ago. That’s not taking into account that we are consuming those finite resources at record speed. That said it’s safe to say sometime soon, our population will outpace our consumption of natural resources leading to an even faster rate of consumption.  There’s no doubt about it – we’re going to run out.

The point? Our resources are not endless. At some point, this WILL affect your children or your grandchildren.

Take away: It makes sense to conserve the resources we do have in order to stretch out their availability for as long as humanly possible while we explore and develop alternative sources.

Health:

I’m pretty confident in saying we’d all prefer to breathe clean air and drink clean water.

A polluted environment leads to greater illness and higher health care costs.  Dirty air affects respiratory health and increased cases of asthma.  Water, polluted with chemicals from run-off, poses cancer risks. Contaminated soil contributes to cancer and other illnesses such as e-coli breakouts.   All of these cost a fortune to clean up. I won’t even mention the costs associated with treatment of related illnesses and death.

By choosing safer methods of treating our yards, fertilizing our crops and caring for our feed animals as well as more responsible manufacturing practices, we can prevent much of this in the first place.  Prevention is far cheaper than the consequences.

Take-away: Keeping our air, water and soil clean helps to reduce health issues and environmental fall-out

Money:

Remember how our grandparents used to remind us if we bought quality and took good care of our things that they would last much longer and cost us less since we didn’t need to replace them as often? That’s how I view our planet.  We pay a bit more upfront to ensure we have clean resources and save more in the end with less costs in clean up and health issues.

To bring it closer to home, let’s look at something as simple as our trash bill.

Our individual trash bill is based on our volume of waste and the cost associated of treating that waste. The bigger trash can we have the more expensive it is. Conversely, the more trash we either prevent, or divert through recycling or composting, the smaller sized trash can we need and thus a lower trash bill. This saves us money.

Taking that to the next level, each landfill only has so much space. Once a landfill is full there are two options:

1. Build a new landfill
2. Truck the trash to another landfill out of the area (this usually means out of state or out to sea)

Neither is cheap. Most folks I know don’t want a landfill built in their backyard (do you?) and so litigation ensues. Trucking trash to another location is very, very expensive and results in an increase in your trash bill. Not to mention it begs the question “Is it really right to make our problem (trash) someone else’s?”  As Julia Butterfly Hill once told me during and interview for our podcast, “There is no away”. Everything has to go somewhere. Isn’t the responsible thing to own up to it and find a solution?

Preventing trash through more responsible consumption on our part combined with earth friendly packaging and product design on the part of the manufacturers will help to keep costs down for everyone. And yes, that includes the manufacturer.

Take-away:  Take care of things. It saves you more money in the end.

And, for those that argue that the Earth takes care of itself – you are absolutely correct. The Earth will be fine. The larger question is will humans be around long enough to witness it?

http://blog.greenfeet.com/index.php/3-reasons-to-adopt-a-sustainable-lifestyle/reducing-your-footprint/806

-Duy Truong