greenspree.ca at The Sietch

Over the last year my wife and I have been trying to overcome a serious and expensive habit. Eating out for lunch! We moved from a downtown apartment two blocks from our work to her folks place 26km from town. Before we would simply walk home for lunch, get something from the fridge, eat and head back to the office. No longer having that convenient option available to us we had gotten into the habit of meeting for lunch somewhere and paying 15-20 a day!

This had to stop so we decided we would start bringing our lunches to work. At first we would bring sandwiches in baggies, instant soup in disposable bowls, yogurt in disposable cups, some fruit or sometime veggies in another baggie and put them in a grocery bag. This inevitably led to much cost savings but much more waste. Our meal may have only cost us $4 but we were throwing out two containers, a baggie or two, grocery bag and whatever compost was left over. We started getting irritated at this and decided to look for solutions.

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Waste and inefficiency is by far the biggest contributor to climate change and pollution. If we still exploited cheap energy in the form of fosil fuels and still utilized man made amterials such as plastics for the last 50 years but used them efficiently and without waste and world would be in much much better shape.

The next time you go by a construction site, if you can (without putting yourself in harms way) look inside the dumpsters on site. Besides the waste from packaging you’ll vast amounts of still usable building materials simply thrown out because it is more cost effective to get rid of them than store them for future use on other jobs. I have taken 100′ coils of rope, pallets of polyicoanurate roof insulation, glazing units for windows ordered the wrong size, tools and more from job site dumpsters all over in my career in construction/design.

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