Here’s a little fun: “What did you throw in a trash can today? You probably did not give it much thought. But this week New Yorkers threw away 64,000 tons of garbage. That comes out to almost 7 billion pounds of garbage every year. Whisking off the detritus of our daily lives costs the city more than […]
Update from the land of the gray
Readers have been clamoring for updates on how we’re living in the No Impact household now that the official year is over. We’re in the stage, as I’ve said, where we’re no longer accountable to the rules but only to our consciences. First of all, let me say that the philosophy I hope to adhere […]
No Impact reentry and the lie of stuff
One thing Michelle and I really looked forward to as the No Impact year of environmental living came to an end was going to the movies. I’m not even a hundred percent sure why we cut out movies. Partly because we consumed them like, well, consumers. Partly because I was more interested in forms of […]
Where me and my No Impact Man blog go from here
One of the things I realized during my year of attempting to have no net environmental impact is that it really shouldn’t be so hard. By this I don’t mean to say that it was hard and miserable for me. If you’ve been a regular reader then you know that, for the most part, I […]
Picking up poo for Christmas and other sustainable gifts
I’m a big fan of Rachel of the original San Francisco Compact (the buy nothing new group), and not only because she is the only person I’ve ever known who has given, as a Christmas gift, the promise to pick up a certain number of piles of other people’s dog poop. To contextualize, Rachel walks […]
The human costs of consumption–a cool, new cartoon
Well, it’s not really a cartoon, but waste activist Annie Leonard‘s funny, hard-hitting and informative new animated short The Story of Stuff, about the effects of rampant consumption both on human health and the planet, does make you wonder if we’ve all gone Loony Tunes. Today’s No Impact Man homework is to watch the film […]
Why we enviros should be THE target market
People may not want to live the way we enviros live but they do want to buy the things we say it’s okay to buy. That is part of the power of the individual action of living environmentally many people underestimate. People want to associate with it. Enviro is in. We’re the cool ones. Companies that start […]
Toyota proves that winning eco-customer loyalty takes more than one green product
If you ask me, as the price of fossil fuels helps push sustainability into the mainstream, the eco crowd looks a lot like today’s early adopters for tomorrow’s mass market. That’s why, a couple of weeks back, I wrote (here and here) about how companies could win over the eco-conscious (hint: by not making uninhabitable […]