Tag Archives: shopping

Low-Tech

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In a culture where high-tech is synonymous with high-class, simple technology can seem irrelevant and outdated. After all, the low-tech lifestyle of horse-drawn carriages, weaving looms, and windmills hearkens back to an era predating our grandparents. Who wants to carry the stigma of appearing old-fashioned? Yet that desire to be modern — through new cars, computers, and televisions — has led to many social ills such as climate change, e-waste, and the obesity epidemic. Perhaps it’s high time to rethink high-tech.

The trouble with high-tech is that it prefers complicated solutions to simple ones. Take the problem of navigation, for example. Where a simple map and compass would do, high-tech prefers a GPS device instead. With the low-tech solution, all that’s needed is a piece of paper and a magnetized piece of iron. The high-tech device, however, requires batteries for power, integrated circuits for the computer, light-emitting diodes for the display, and hundreds of geosynchronous satellites for geolocation signals. Such sophistication, indeed, might come in handy for a truck driver or a mail carrier. But for the average commuter, the selling point of a GPS device is usually some minor convenience like voice navigation. How trivial, given high-tech’s record of wanton environmental destruction.

That pattern of environmental destruction is no accident. With high-tech products, wastefulness is built into the very design of its life-cycle. When a device requires electronics to manufacture, it is nearly impossible for an ordinary person to build it using scrap material. Any boy scout can print out a map using scratch paper and magnetize a compass made of scrap iron. Assembling your own TomTom — using only repurposed electronics, no less — is a superhuman feat (1).

So high-tech devices must always come from stores, which have little incentive to recycle. Repairs, when offered at all, are rare and expensive. That does not trouble shoppers as much as it should, since they have grown accustomed to devices that are not built to last. But will they ever grow accustomed to e-waste and landfills?

A pitiful trend emerges. Rather than empowering a person to solve his own problem, high-tech makes him dependent on outside infrastructure. A traveler must now rely on semiconductor factories, satellite networks, and coal power plants to figure out where he is. This forms the beginning of a vicious cycle: the more he uses his GPS, the quicker he forgets traditional navigation skills. Map illiteracy rates will rise, making GPS devices appear all the more essential. It is a likely situation, considering that only two centuries ago, our ancestors could navigate using stars alone.

Depending on a Rube-Goldberg machine is not cheap. Embedded in the price tag of every GPS device is the price of its specialized components: the processor, the LED display, the memory chips, the lithium-ion battery, the antenna, and the plastic surrounding the electronics. But the heaviest costs aren’t reflected in the price at all: they are passed on to future generations. Recycling e-waste is expensive, and no one wants to pay for the cleanup of space debris left by decomissioned satellites (2).

Alas, money can’t buy everything, especially not the infrastructure that high-tech demands. This is especially true in the backcountry, but even in the city, infrastructure can fail during an emergency. Satellite signals can grow weak, batteries can die, electronics can short-circuit, data can be erased, and GPS stores can close. When the infrastructure that sustains high-tech shuts down, so do the inventions. Modern technologies are not as robust as their primitive counterparts, so they simply stop working — often when needed the most.

It makes sense, then, to search for better technology — technology that is not highly complicated but rather highly appropriate. The ideal technology will be small in scale, easy to build, simple to fix, straightforward to recycle, low in cost, and highly reliable. This quest for appropriate technology, it turns out, often leads us back to the technology of our ancestors.

Besides, there’s no shame in being old fashioned. Horse-drawn buggies might draw unwanted attention, but other simple inventions, such as bicycles, vegetable gardens, and solar cookers, can even be stylish. You just need the will to get started — and maybe a little courage to deal with those curious neighbors and their impolite stares.

 

 

  1. Gpskit.nl teaches you how to build your own GPS using common hardware. The problem is that it’s difficult to recycle electronics.
  2. All those satellites produce a lot of space debris. Who will clean up all that floating garbage?
  3. Low-Tech Magazine has some great articles on low-tech inventions.
  4. Photo credit: Calsidyrose, CC BY.

Sustainable Means Cheap

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A solar cooker is sustainable because it requires no electricity to run. You can build one for about a dollar.

Green living can never catch on if people can’t afford it. Sustainable living, then, isn’t just about taking care of the earth; it must also be sustainable financially. It would be great news, then, if living sustainably could save us money. What better incentive could there be to care for the earth?

Logically, it makes sense why green living ought to be cheap. Money is a store of value, and part of that value includes natural resources like water, wood, metal, and oil. The more money we spend on shopping, the more resources are used to produce our products. All other things being equal, conserving money should result in conserving our limited natural resources, which in turn lowers our environmental impact.

But by now, we’re all too familiar with sustainable products that cost double or triple of what their conventional counterparts cost. Our logical analysis doesn’t seem to match at all with reality. If money is truly linked to resource use, why is sustainable living so expensive?

The truth is that sustainable solutions truly are cheap — so cheap, in fact, that they’re often not worth selling. Real green solutions are often completely free of cost, requiring only a little cleverness and some elbow grease. But because a lifestyle can’t be sold as a physical, tangible product, businesses can’t make profits selling it. As a result, we don’t see green solutions sold on warehouse shelves like conventional products would be. So lifestyle solutions are rarely advertised, which mean that, tragically, they go totally unnoticed.

What gets advertised instead are the imitations. These greenwashed products are similar enough to their conventional counterparts, but tweaked slightly so that advertisers can call them sustainable. A greenwashed product will use a little recycled paper here, avoid a few chemicals there, but otherwise remains essentially the same. It still wastes energy, produces garbage, and destroys natural resources. Yet because these imitators don’t require any real lifestyle change, they are profitable enough to sell.

The prices in this table are ballpark estimates. Notice how the sustainable alternative is often practically free.
Conventional Greenwashed Sustainable
Conventional electricity ($0.15/kWh) Solar electricity ($0.35/kWh) No electricity (free)
Tissue paper ($1/box) Recycled tissue paper ($2/box) Reusable hand towels (free)
Toilet paper ($0.50/roll) Recycled toilet paper ($1/roll) Bidet water (free)
Bottled water (soda) ($1/bottle) Recycled plastic (aluminum) bottled water (soda) ($1/bottle) Water fountain (free)
Disposable diapers Biodegradable diapers Reusable, cloth diapers
Cotton t-shirt ($10) Organic cotton t-shirt ($20) Second-hand t-shirt ($5)
Stove Energy-efficient stove Solar cooker ($1.50 to build, free to operate)
New hardcover/paperback book ($20) Paperless e-reader ($200) / e-book download ($20) Library book (free)
New car ($15,000) New electric car ($40,000) Used bicycle ($150) / Bus passes ($600)

A serious flaw with greenwashed products is that they are expensive, often double or triple the price of their conventional counterparts. Consumers then find themselves facing a false dilemma: pay extra, or walk out the store feeling guilty.

Why do we keep falling for the same old deceptive marketing?

From a young age, we’ve been trained to think of ourselves as consumers. Out of instinct, we view everything in life as a commercial transaction. Eventually, we become dependent on shopping to solve all of life’s problems. If it’s not shrink-wrapped in plastic and sold in a big box chain store, we don’t even consider it.

  • If I want to work-out, I’ll buy a new treadmill instead of jogging in the park.
  • If I want to read, I’ll buy a book instead of borrowing one from the library.
  • If I want some entertainment, I’ll buy a new game console and some DVDs instead of playing sports.
  • If I’m thirsty, I’ll buy soda from a vending machine instead of using a water fountain.
  • If I need to sneeze, I’ll buy tissue paper instead of reusing a cloth handkerchief.

Our gut reaction is to throw money at every problem in life. So it’s no surprise that we approach the issue of green living with the exact same consumer mentality: buy a solution from the store. We want to be able to walk into the mall, waste our money, and walk out with a shiny new trinket in a bubble-wrapped, styrofoam-packed, cardboard box. It’s reaffirming to our Western way-of-life.

The consumer lifestyle will never be cheap, nor can it ever be truly sustainable. To be truly green, we have to step outside of consumer culture. Instead of purchasing new, we should be reusing and improvising. When we shop less, we spend less money and waste fewer resources. Not only will this lifestyle be gentler on the planet, it will be gentler on the wallet. It’s sustainable in every sense of the word.

  1. Photo by EBKauai, CC BY.

Don’t Focus on the Gear

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I became a minimalist partly because I hated moving. Everything about the process irritated me: from the decluttering of old belongings, to the packing of cardboard boxes, to the renting of U-Haul trucks. As a Greenimalist, I hoped to minimize the hassles of moving. If only my possessions could fit into a few suitcases, I could move in under an hour. I would simply pack my bags, load them in the car trunk, and drive away.

But like most minimalists, my existing belongings weren’t optimized for space. So when I tried to cram my belongings into a backpack, the bag bulged at the seams. I decided to turn to other minimalist websites to see how the experts packed.

As it turns out, many backpackers follow a similar strategy:

  • Purchase the highest-quality equipment that money can buy.
  • Optimize the usefulness-to-volume ratio of your belongings.
  • Choose versatile, multiple-use equipment over specialized items. For example, sharp knives are preferable to fruit peelers.
  • Buy equipment that’s custom-tailored to your needs.

These minimalist backpackers were extremely selective about the items they carried. In fact, they’ve turned light packing into an art form. I was especially impressed with one traveler, who explored the world for 6 weeks without a single piece of luggage (1).

But at times, these backpackers became obsessive about finding the perfect gear. They’d periodically update all their gear to reflect their latest research. For example, some digital nomads shun cotton fabric in favor of wool. Wool offers better insulation, wick-drying, and odor protection, making it a superior fabric compared to cotton. These digital nomads gave away their entire wardrobe and replaced it with Icebreaker woolens. Gear updates weren’t limited to merely clothing, of course. Every few months, entire sets of cameras, laptops, smartphones, toiletries, backpacks, and shoes would be obsoleted and replaced. Even underwear was intensely optimized.

As helpful as the gear posts were, I noticed something fundamentally disturbing. They were always encouraging me to buy new stuff. That meant more shopping — and more waste. The problem with shopping is that producing new stuff wastes natural resources. Raw materials must first be extracted from the environment, then manufactured into stuff in factories. This process wastes energy and produces pollution. And after a few short months, all this stuff would transform into junk, which is then tossed into a landfill.

The problem with specialized gear is that it’s so rare. For example, conventional people own tennis shoes, not Vibram Five Fingers. As a result, these shoes are difficult to find used. Even purchasing them from a local store would be a challenge; buying them might involve cross-continental shipping, which wastes more fuel. What’s more, limited supply makes these items outrageously expensive. Specialized backpacks, electronics, and clothing can easily cost thousands of dollars.

Greenimalist living is not about assembling the perfect gear. Instead, it’s all about conserving natural resources through minimalism. It would be ironic if, while protesting consumer culture, I spent half my waking hours researching what pair of shoes I should buy. So as much as I loved the cool gear, I had to pass.

Instead of constantly buying expensive equipment, I decided to use what I had lying around. Most of my gear was cobbled together from what I had already owned or what was donated to me for free. I wore old sneakers, put on old sweaters, and used an old laptop. It was less glamorous — my backpack still bulges — but I didn’t produce any trash or waste any money.

For this site, I try not to focus on gear. We already own too much stuff as it is; you don’t need me to tempt you to go shopping. Instead, I encourage you to focus on developing green living skills. Learn to use what you already have. Learn to cook from scratch, to bicycle commute, to fix your old computers, to grow your own garden, and to mend your own clothes. Convert your garbage into something useful. You’ll save time and money while learning self-sufficiency along the way.

You already have all you need — yourself. You just need to get started. The Greenimalist lifestyle is not about what you own; it’s about gaining a new perspective. The only trouble with perspective is that it doesn’t sell on store shelves — but hopefully we’ll realize that’s a good thing.

  1. Note: Flying is extremely bad for the environment. So please don’t fly like Rolf Potts does. However, his no-baggage challenge is pretty amazing.
  2. Photo by Fredo in (((Stereo))), CC BY.