Frugally Green » Clothing

It’s Easy Being Green: A Handbook for Earth-Friendly Living

Tyler — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 12:00:09 +0000

A few years ago, a gal named Crissy Trask noticed that everywhere she went, people she met were excited and interested in the green movement. Everyone was talking about how important it is to live responsibly and be mindful of the earth. Then she realized that all these people that seemed so gung-ho about an environmentally friendly life weren’t actually doing anything about it.

After a bit of research and asking around, Crissy realized that the people in her life were excited and interested in the prospects of a cleaner, more sustainable world, but didn’t really know what they could do to help or even where to go to find out what they could do. That’s when she decided to write It’s Easy Being Green: A Handbook for Earth-Friendly Living.

Who should read this book: If you’re relatively new to the concept of sustainability, need some help navigating the lingo, or looking for some help figuring out what types of pursuits might fit your lifestyle, this book can offer some guidance as well as references that you can continually look back to.

Who shouldn’t read this book: If you’re looking for a matter-of-fact guide to tell you what to do, then this book isn’t for you. Also, if you’re looking for playful storytelling, this book won’t be a good fit – it’s very middle-of-the-road in its presentation.

It’s Easy Being Green is just what it says it is, a handbook. In fact, I prefer to think of it more as a reference manual as it is filled with definitions of commonly heard (but often misunderstood) terms from around the greenoshphere (I just made that word up so no, it’s not included in the handbook) as well as tons of external resources to get you going in the direction you want once you’ve read it and decided what that direction might be.

The real value in this book, in my opinion, is the 59 page list of tips (organized by topic) that allow you to define a roadmap of things you will do to improve your eco-footprint. At 59 pages, it’s a bit cumbersome, but it’s really comprehensive. Here’s how you use it (This process is also described in the book):

Read through all the tips, one at a time, making a check in the 3^rd box next to it if it sounds interesting to you.
Go through the list again, looking only at the tips you identified as interesting and place a check mark in the 2^nd box if you feel it’s something you’d actually like to pursue.
One by one, go through each tip and begin to accomplish them, giving yourself a time frame to complete each one. To avoid overload, don’t focus on more than one item at a time. Give each your full attention.
Using the 1^st box next to each tip, give yourself a rating of 1-5 to identify how you feel you performed implementing it.
Start over at step 1.

This section of the book has the ability to turn into a living document as you fill it out and pursue the tips you identified. Once you’re done, you might find it useful to go back and look over all the ones you chose, implemented, and scored yourself on. You’ll probably find that you performed a lot better in certain areas than others. It might help you to prioritize your green pursuits going forward.

I should also mention that Crissy understands that her audience likes to buy stuff as she includes 2 chapters in her book titled Buying Green and Green Shopping Online. Personally, I prefer the Don’t Buy Stuff method to getting through life, but that’s not exactly realistic and it’s important to know how to make the best choices when you need to purchase something, so I’m glad she covered it thoroughly.

Crissy also writes a chapter titled Getting Involved where she provides numerous tips and resources for easy ways to connect with organizations that promote sustainability in areas you may be interested in.

Overall, I can’t say that It’s Easy Being Green was a great fit for me. I feel like I’m slightly beyond the level of material that was presented, but I do appreciate all the external references provided. I’ve written down a number of them that I will eventually check out to see if they could fit into my pursuits. But like I said earlier, if you’re just starting out or need help finding direction, you might find a lot of guidance from this handbook – especially from the 59 page worksheet.

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Eco Dry Cleaning: Spiff Up Your Clothes and the Environment

Tyler — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 12:00:32 +0000

Ever since we terrestrials decided long ago to cover our loins with leaves, we’ve been on a mission to set ourselves apart with our clothing. If you work in a professional environment, dress code or not, you’ve likely found yourself the proud (or frustrated) owner of at least a few “dry clean only” garments. Myself? I do everything I can to avoid them for simplicity’s sake, but I do admit to owning a few pairs of pants that must be cleaned by a “professional.”

Once every few months (I don’t wear them often), I begrudgingly gather up these pants and march down the street to the local dry cleaner. Little did I know, the main ingredient in this process is a chemical called perchloroethylene or, more affectionately abbreviated, “perc.” Turns out, perc is a nasty toxin, classified as a Group 2A carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. In other words, it’s likely carcinogenic to humans. We already know it does nasty things to fish and other wildlife, causes skin irritations for many people, and is heavy enough to seep under the water table, making it a soil contaminant that is very difficult to clean. Did you know you might live next door to a future Superfund site?

Enter the Eco Cleaner

Given my increased awareness of these sorts of issues and an intense desire to avoid itchy legs, I decided to take my bi-annual load of dry clean only pants to a new eco-friendly shop that just opened up a few more blocks away. They call themselves ecodrycleaner and shops just like them seem to be popping up all over the country. They bill themselves as sustainable for these reasons:

Their cleaning solution is a liquid silicone that breaks down into water, CO2, and sand – no potentially harmful chemicals involved.

Their newer, efficient equipment allows them to harvest and recycle cleaning solution so that very little is wasted in the process.

They offset their electricity needs with investment in renewable energy.

Recycling of metal hangers, cuff clips, collar supports, and poly garment bags is heavily encouraged and promoted through their customer recycling program.

They reduce auto emissions by offering a free pick-up and delivery service that maximizes the efficiency of car trips to their business.

After chatting with the girl at the counter for a bit, she handed me my receipt and I was impressed to see that the cost was pretty comparable to other dry cleaners I’ve used around town. I suppose they might be better able to compete by being able to reuse more solution (most traditional dry cleaning shops I’ve frequented have pretty antiquated equipment) and by cutting costs on new expendables by encouraging their patrons to drop off unneeded hangers, garment bags, and other accessories.

Either way, now that I know that they exist and are competitively priced , I’ll continue to give my business to ecodrycleaner for my bi-annual laundry dump.

Cut down on your trips to the cleaner

At this point, you might be wondering how I manage to make such infrequent trips to the cleaners. Like I said above, I have very few dry clean only garments and I don’t wear them all that often, but I also wash them myself from time to time. That’s right, if it isn’t stained and just needs to be “freshened up,” I’ll hand wash an item to prevent a trip to the dry cleaners.

You might be surprised to know that many clothing manufacturers will label a piece as dry clean only when delicate hand washing is more than adequate. This is a marketing tactic they use because people are more likely to buy something they perceive to be less work to maintain. Turns out, most people consider going to the dry cleaner less work than hand washing. Now, you can’t do this with every item and different materials will require different types of care, but for many typical garments, some delicate elbow grease will do the trick. Check out this article for a more in depth explanation of how you can care for your dry clean only clothes.

All in all, we should act within our means whenever possible to reduce our impact on the environment. This is especially true when alternatives to what we are used to exist but require just a small investment of time to discover and implement. By rejecting the status-quo and committing ourselves to life long learning, we will continuously improve ourselves and the world around us.