Ecofrugality is now called "underconsumption core"

Once again, I find myself riding the wave of a trend I didn't know existed. A week or so ago, I read an article in Grist about how many TikTokers are now fighting back against the consumption culture popularized by many influencers with videos about a lifestyle they call "underconsumption core." This aesthetic, according to the article, is "generally about reducing and reusing." In their videos, creators show off their reusable bags, thrift-shop visits, minimalist skincare routines, and possessions they've bought cheap and kept for decades. Doesn't this sound a lot like the sort of thing I've been posting about for the last 15 years?

Of course, when I first started this blog, there was no TikTok and "influencer" wasn't a recognized profession. So I figured, if this new platform is now providing a forum for a lifestyle I've been promoting for years, why not jump on that bandwagon? Why not whip up my own little one-minute video, set to "soothing background music," about my ecofrugal—excuse me, "underconsumption core"—habits and contribute it to the conversation? And, seeing as it's December, why not make it all about the ways we practice underconsumption during the holidays, which are normally the spendiest time of the year?

So I filmed a few little clips with my phone, edited them together in the free ClipChamp program, found a public-domain musical track on Pixabay, and posted it on both TikTok and YouTube. If you have an account on either platform, I'd appreciate your popping by there and giving it a like. If enough people seem to enjoy this first video, perhaps I'll make some more in the same vein. I've got the software more or less figured out now, and it's not like I have any shortage of material to work with.

Happy holidays to all, and to all an ecofrugal new year!

Thrift Week 2024, Day 2: Raspberry canes

The second item in my "seven purchases that have paid for themselves" series is the topic of one of my most popular posts ever: our raspberry canes. We bought these in January 2013, planted them in March, and began harvesting our first few berries that summer. By September, I calculated that we were collecting about a pint of fresh, ripe, organic raspberries—roughly a $6 value—every week. At that rate, I figured, we'd get back the $41.50 we paid for them and then some in their first year alone, and we'd continue to harvest the same amount year after year.

As it turns out, that was a gross underestimate. The berries were more productive the second year than the first, and more productive still after we switched to a two-crop system. Production varies from year to year, but over the past three years, these canes have produced a total of 47.5 pints of berries. Meanwhile, the price of organic raspberries has more than doubled, reaching $13.85 per pint. That means in the last three years, we've harvested $658 worth of berries—about $219 worth per year. And we're just now getting to the point where we think we might need to replace a few of the 11-year-old plants.

The crazy thing is, these aren't necessarily the most productive crop in our garden. Last year, our plum trees yielded more than 94 pounds of fruit in total: 37.75 pounds of Opals, 21.15 pounds of Mount Royals, and 35.5 pounds of Golden Gages. The local farmers' market was charging about $2.61 per pound for plums at that time ($6 for a 2.3-pound basket), so our harvest was worth roughly $246, exceeding the value of the raspberry crop. 

However, the plums aren't as consistently productive as the raspberries; they seem to have fallen into a pattern of giving us one good crop every two years and nothing at all in the off years. Also, the three plum trees cost more up front than the dozen raspberry canes, and it took them several years to become productive. So we've definitely gotten more bang for our total buck from the raspberries than we have from the plums, though both have repaid our original investment (in money and time) many times over.

Which brings me to that popular post that the raspberry canes inspired. Most of it was about the process of building a trellis to support the canes so that we could more easily reach the fruit (and I'm pleased to say that after six years, that structure is still holding up just fine). But at the end, I waxed philosophical for a bit about the pleasure these raspberry canes had brought into our lives:

I was heading into the house with a bowlful of fresh raspberries I'd just picked for my lunch, and I was struck once again by the thought, "How incredibly lucky am I to have fresh berries there for the picking, right outside my door? What did we ever do to deserve this kind of bounty?"

Only this time, I realized immediately that I knew the answer to that question perfectly well: what we had done was to plant and tend the raspberry canes. With our own hands, we dug the bed; with our own hands, we planted them all in one chilly spring day; with our own hands, we mulched them and watered them and trimmed them and gave them a fresh dressing of compost every spring; and with our own hands, we built this new trellis to support them. And whenever we want to eat some, we go out and pick them with our own hands as well, braving the scratches for the sake of the berries. We earned this blessing.

And that, I think, sums up the ecofrugal life in a nutshell. It's a life full of blessings that have been earned. Home-baked bread, home-cooked meals, home-grown produce, hand-picked flowers, an abundance of clothing and furniture and books acquired by carefully picking through the offerings at yard sales and thrift stores. And I don't feel I appreciate these blessings any the less for knowing that I've worked for them, instead of having them gifted to me by some gracious and unseen Providence; on the contrary, I think being able to recognize in them the loving labor of my own hands makes me value them all the more.

I'll be back to count more of my ecofrugal blessings tomorrow, as Thrift Week continues.

Thrift Week 2024: Purchases that have paid for themselves

Since last year's abbreviated Thrift Week celebration focused on the least ecofrugal products money can buy, I thought it would be only fair for this year's to go the other way and look at some of the most ecofrugal products. Each day, I'll be looking at one specific purchase Brian and I have made that has paid for itself many times over. And I'm starting it off with one of the first purchases I ever discussed here on the blog: our pressure cooker.

When we bought this back in late 2011, it was kind of an impulse purchase. While visiting Brian's folks for Christmas, we saw an ad in the paper for a 5-quart pressure cooker on sale for $20 at J.C. Penney. On top of that, there was a $10-off coupon that reduced the net price to just $10. Even then, we came very close to passing it up, since we didn't "need" it, but we decided $10 wasn't too much to risk on a gadget that might be able to help us with a wide variety of cooking tasks.

Well, in the 12 years since, we have used this little pressure cooker countless times and gotten far more than our $10 worth out of it. In 2017, I was even inspired to write an article for Money Crashers about all the ways it has saved us money. For instance:

• It saves energy on cooking. It can make all kinds of things—rice, potatoes, barley, quinoa—much faster than a regular pot on the stove, reducing the amount of gas we need to burn for cooking. And the faster cooking time also means we heat up the kitchen less in the summertime.
• It helps us use dry beans. We used to use a lot of canned beans because dry beans, though cheaper, were too much hassle. In addition to requiring an overnight soaking, they needed over an hour of cooking to get them tender enough to eat—far more time than we could spare most nights. Now, we can soak the beans right in the pressure cooker in the morning, turn it on in the evening, and have them ready to use in as little as half an hour. Besides being cheaper, the dry beans produce far less packaging waste, and they take up a lot less room in the pantry.
• It makes homemade applesauce. Another product we used to buy fairly regularly was applesauce to go with potato kugel and other potato-based dishes. Not only did this produce a lot of packaging waste, but often the applesauce itself would start to grow fuzzy before we'd finished the jar. Now, with the help of our trusty pressure cooker, we just whip up a fresh batch of applesauce to go with every kugel. Pound for pound, this homemade stuff isn't necessarily cheaper than the kind in a jar, but it's definitely cheaper than buying a whole jar and having to discard half of it. And it tastes much, much better, even when it's made with the cheapest apples the store has to offer.
• 
  It doubles as a space heater. On cold winter days, Brian often fills up the pressure cooker with plain water in the morning and lets it come to a boil. Then he moves it to the office, where it sits on a trivet atop my desk and radiates heat throughout the day. It takes all day to cool off fully and allows me to stay comfortable without turning up the heat.
  

I'm so attached to this kitchen gadget that if we ever replace our gas stove with an induction model, we'll have to buy an adapter plate so we can keep using it. We could find ways to replace or get along without most of our non-ferrous cookware—our aluminum saucepans, our double boiler, even our big stock pot—but giving up the pressure cooker would be a deal-breaker.

Thrift Week (in one day) 2023: Stuff Green People Hate

If you've been reading my blog for several years, you may have noticed that I did not run my usual Thrift Week series this past week, as I have done every January since 2010. And you might reasonably have suspected that after 13 years, I had simply run out of good ideas for a whole week's worth of related posts. But actually, that wasn't the problem; I still had several possibilities in the pipeline that could have worked. The fact is that last Tuesday, when my birthday (which is also Ben Franklin's birthday and thus the official start of Thrift Week) rolled around, I happened to be busy with other stuff, and I just forgot.

Having remembered about this just now, on what would normally be the last day of Thrift Week, it seems a bit silly to start a weeklong series at this point. So, for this year only, I'm going to compromise by condensing a whole Thrift Week into a single post. Instead of seven short-to-medium posts on a single ecofrugal topic, you'll get one long post covering all seven ideas in list form. And the topic I've chosen for this Thrift Week blitz is: The Seven Least Ecofrugal Things You Can Buy. (It's sort of the anti-ecofrugal counterpart to my Stuff Green People Like series.)

When I first jotted down this idea, I planned to lead off the series with a Keurig coffee maker. This seemed like the perfect example of an anti-ecofrugal product, since it's both expensive and wasteful. The machines themselves start at $80, while a drip or French press coffeemaker can cost less than $20. Then there's the cost of the K-cups: $19.99 for 22 K-cups of Starbucks Breakfast Blend coffee, or 91 cents per cup. Compare that with the cost of the same coffee in whole bean form at Walmart: $13.24 for 18 ounces, which works out to 25 cents per cup assuming 47 cups per pound. On top of that, the K-cups are neither recyclable nor compostable, while the leftover grounds and filter from a press or drip machine (or my trusty Aeropress) can go straight into the compost bin. And they don't even make good coffee.

But this week's Washington Post presented an article on the topic that contradicted this view. As I noted last week, you probably can't read the article if you're not a subscriber, but the headline sums it up: "Single-use coffee pods have surprising environmental benefits over other brewing methods." It points to an environmental analysis published in The Conversation (which you can read with no paywall) that compared the carbon footprints of different brewing methods and found that the biggest factors are the coffee itself and the energy used to heat the water. The least wasteful method, assuming you use the recommended amounts of both, is instant coffee (though taste-wise it has even less to recommend it than the pods). But the much-maligned pod machine actually comes in second, since it limits the amount of coffee and water used per cup. The most wasteful method is the standard drip machine, which both uses the most ground coffee per cup and uses extra electricity to keep the pot warm. (The analysis didn't cover the Aeropress, but it did list the amount of coffee used in each method: 25 grams per cup for drip, 17 grams for a French press, 14 for a pod machine like the Keurig, and 12 for instant. I just now measured the amount I use in my Aeropress and it was 15 grams, so I'm doing about as well as a Keurig without all the plastic waste.)

This just goes to show that figuring out a product's ecological footprint can sometimes be a tricky business. So for my Least Ecofrugal list, I'm going to stick strictly to things that are so clearly wasteful (of money and everything else) that there's no realistic chance some smart bunch of scientists is going to come along and prove otherwise. And by that strict standard, my seven choices are:

1. A high-end sports car. I was originally going to say an SUV, since these vehicles are not only gas-guzzlers but are also more expensive to own than most other vehicles. But I have to concede that the data shows they are indeed safer for drivers (though they make the road less safe for everyone else). Sports cars don't offer even that benefit. 

In a 2019 Insider article on the nine most expensive vehicles to own, five of the nine were sports models. And on a 2021 list of the least fuel-efficient cars you can buy, sports cars also dominate. Some models are more efficient than others, but unless you're going for an all-electric (and really expensive) Tesla, they're never going to compete with a fuel-efficient sedan.

2. A boat. Everything that's wasteful about cars goes double for boats. I'm not talking about a little canoe here, obviously, but a big boat that costs money to fuel, maintain, dock, and insure. A longstanding joke among the yacht set is that owning a yacht is like standing in a cold shower tearing up hundred-dollar bills.

How many hundreds are we talking here? Well, according to Deep Sailing, the cost of boat ownership can be anywhere from $450 for a speedboat to $250,000 for a big yacht—per month. However, Watercraft 101 puts the cost much lower, saying that a boat that costs $20,000 to buy up-front will probably cost less than $3,000 per year to own. And Born Again Boating splits the difference, saying that a 23-foot boat will cost around $30,000 in its first year and $15,000 per year after that. The cost seems to depend a lot on what kind of boat it is and how it's financed. 

But here's the thing: unless you fish or run a ferry for a living, you don't actually need to own a boat at all. Unlike a car, a boat is used mainly for recreation, not transportation. So both the cost of ownership and the environmental cost of the boat's emissions are entirely unnecessary.

3. Cigarettes. This one's a no-brainer. At an average cost of $8 per pack, a pack-a-day smoker would spend over $2,900 per year on cigarettes alone. But that cost is just the tip of the iceberg. Smokers also pay significantly more for health care, health insurance, and home insurance, and they're less productive at work, reducing their ability to earn. According to a WalletHub study, the lifetime cost of being a smoker can be anywhere from $2.2 to $4.1 million. And from an environmental standpoint, tobacco not only pollutes the air that nonsmokers have to breathe, it's also responsible for habitat loss; soil degradation; pesticide pollution; deforestation; significant costs in water, energy, and transportation; and, of course, discarded cigarette butts all over the place.

4. Diamonds. You know who came up with the "rule" that a diamond engagement ring should cost two months' salary for the groom? Big surprise: it was the DeBeers diamond cartel, which has kept the price of diamonds artificially high for decades by deliberately restricting supply. One hundred years ago, most engagement rings didn't have diamonds in them at all. Then DeBeers launched a successful campaign to convince husbands-to-be that the only proper ring was a diamond, and moreover, a diamond costing a month's salary. This was such a success that DeBeers later bumped the figure up to two months' salary in the U.S. and three months' salary in Japan.

By 2021, according to The Knot, the average cost of an engagement ring in the U.S. had reached $6,000. (Granted, this figure may be skewed upward based on the magazine's readership.) And what do you get for that $6,000? Not an investment that produces any sort of return. Not an asset that you can sell for a profit, since the recipient is obviously expected to keep the ring as long as the marriage lasts. And definitely not a happier marriage, since a 2014 Emory University study found that the couples who spent most on their rings (between $2,000 and $4,000 in 2014 dollars) had a 30 percent higher risk of divorce than those who chose more affordable rings ($500 to $2,000). 

A big diamond ring is a pretty ornament and a status symbol, but it provides no tangible benefits whatsoever. And given all the environmental and human rights abuses associated with diamond mining, you're probably doing both the earth and your wallet a favor by choosing an old-fashioned ring with a different type of stone—or a modern one with a lab-created diamond. Or, if you're willing to break with this not-so-old tradition, doing what we did and skipping the engagement ring entirely.

5. An expensive wedding. You know what else that Emory study found increased the risk of divorce? Expensive weddings. Couples who spent between $10,000 and $20,000 on their weddings were 29 percent likelier to end up divorced than those who spent between $5,000 and $10,000; couples who spent over $20,000 increased their divorce rates by a whopping 46 percent. By contrast, couples who spent less than $5,000 (like us) actually reduced their risk. Couples who spent even less than we did—$1,000 or less—cut their divorce rate nearly in half. (Having a big wedding, with lots of guests, did not pose the same dangers: the couples with the most wedding guests actually had a lower risk of divorce than those with the fewest. Apparently, the real mistake is spending a lot of money on each guest.)

A frugal wedding like ours also eliminates many of the environmental costs associated with traditional weddings: elaborate invitations, single-use decorations, pesticide-laden cut flowers, gas-guzzling limos, and even one-use-only wedding attire. We didn't have any of that stuff, and we're still together after 18 years, so it clearly didn't hurt us any.

6. Marble countertops. I've complained before about the ubiquity and price of granite countertops, but marble is even worse. It's even more expensive than granite, at $15 to $190 per square foot, and even harder to care for. Since it's porous, you have to not only seal it but also use special, non-abrasive cleaners to avoid scratching it. It's also vulnerable to chipping and etching from acid. And it has all the same environmental problems from quarrying and transporting the heavy stone that granite does.

7. The latest smartphone. After many years of not owning a smartphone at all, I've finally come to accept that the benefits of these little gadgets outweigh their drawbacks. But there's a big difference between owning a smartphone and buying a new top-of-the-line phone every year. 

The financial costs are obvious. The latest, greatest iPhone has a starting price of $1,100; the latest Samsung Galaxy model costs $1,200. You could get around half of that price back by trading in last year's model, but you're still paying over $500 per year for new phones (not even counting the cost of the service). By contrast, my first smartphone, a bottom-of-the-line Motorola, cost $130, and I'd still be using it now if it hadn't developed a problem that I was unable to fix. 

But worse still is the environmental toll. Producing all those new phones requires a lot of rare materials like lithium, cobalt, and gold. Mining these materials is environmentally destructive, and disposing of them is hazardous. And while old smartphones can be reused and recycled, many users simply discard them when they upgrade.

It's clearly better for the environment to buy a decent phone, hang onto it as long as possible, and make sure it gets recycled when it finally becomes unusable. And it will clearly save you a bundle, too.

***

So there you have it: my selections for the seven least ecofrugal consumer purchases. If you think any of my choices are unreasonable, or if you think there's something even worse that I left off the list, let me know in the comments.

That's it until next Thrift Week, when I promise to be a little more on the ball about starting on the 17th. (This time, I'll get Google to remind me about it ahead of time.)

How weird are we?

I originally intended for this week's post to be about some more possible climate solutions that I've heard about in the past few weeks. (No doubt I'll cover these eventually, but just as a teaser, they include artificial trees that absorb carbon, small-scale nuclear reactors, carbon-negative concrete, advances in solar panel and wind turbine blade recycling, new battery technologies, and ultrawhite paint that makes surfaces absorb much less heat.) But yesterday morning, as I was hanging out the laundry, it occurred to me that there was another topic I'd rather discuss: Just how weird are we?

I don't know if ours is the only house on our block that has a clothesline in the back yard, but as far as I've ever been able to tell, we're the only people who actually use one. So for over ten years, our neighbors have been watching me hang our laundry on the line and have, quite possibly, been wondering why these weirdos take the time to hang their clothes when they could, duh, use this amazing modern device called a dryer that can get them dry in a fraction of the time, with much less work. And on top of that, if they're observant, they may have been wondering as well about some of the specific items in our wash that can be observed fluttering from the line. Handkerchiefs? Who in the world still uses cloth handkerchiefs when we have disposable tissues now? And rags? Bits of old socks and T-shirts that are clearly no longer wearable garments, yet these weirdos for some reason not only hang on to them, but apparently take the trouble to keep washing them over and over? What's up with that?

Thoughts like these have run through my mind on laundry day before, but this time they particularly resonated because of an article I'd been reading just before going out to hang the wash. It was a piece in the New York Times about how Uruguay is managing, practically alone among the nations of the world, to combine prosperity with sustainability. (Their population is overwhelmingly urban, and their electricity is 98 percent renewable.) It's an interesting read, but one thing that really stuck with me is the way the author opened the piece. As a contrast to what life is like in Uruguay, he outlines the lifestyle of a "typical American household," which according to him includes:

• A house of around 2,200 square feet
• Yearly energy use of 11,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity and 37,000 cubic feet of natural gas
• Six or seven plane flights every year
• Two cars, at least one of them an SUV
• At least one child
  
• A total of 25,000 miles of driving each year ("most of which you barely register anymore, as you listen to Joe Rogan or Bad Bunny")
• A couple of trips to Target each month for "six or seven things: double-sided tape, an extra toothbrush, an inflatable mattress"
• A carbon footprint of 25 tons per person
  

As I read those paragraphs, my jaw was, if not literally hanging open, certainly feeling a bit wobbly. I knew our ecofrugal household was a bit atypical, but are we really that far out of the mainstream of American life?

Our house is, in theory, a three-bedroom measuring just 936 square feet, although the finished basement expands the usable living space to more like 1,400 or 1,500 square feet. Our yearly energy use is 2,113 kilowatt-hours of electricity (all from renewable sources) and about 404 therms of natural gas. (That apparently works out to 40,390 cubic feet, so we're actually a little above average there.) The last time I went anywhere on a plane was for my grandmother's funeral 11 years ago. We have one car, which we drive about 11,000 miles per year (and we've never listened to either Joe Rogan or Bad Bunny, ever). We do go to Target occasionally, but more like a few times a year than a couple of times a month. And while estimates of our household carbon footprint vary widely, they're all between 4.5 and 12 tons per person per year — nowhere close to 25.

So, if the Times article is right about what a "typical" American lifestyle looks like, then we are indeed pretty far out of the mainstream. But is it? The author doesn't cite any sources for any of the statistics in his opening paragraphs, so can we be sure they're right?

Digging around on my own, I found that the true picture is a little more complicated than the author's figures suggest. Take housing, for instance. The article says says a typical American family has a 2,200-square-foot house in a "middle-class suburb." And Census data confirms that the average new, single-family house built in 2021 measured 2,273 square feet. But there's a problem with this statistic — two problems, in fact. First of all, not all homes are single-family houses, and second, not all homes are newly built. And anyone who lives in an apartment, or a townhome, or an older house like ours, almost certainly has less than 2,273 square feet of space.

For more accurate figures, I went to the 2021 American Housing Survey and ran a search based on square footage. And after a few minutes with a calculator, I worked out that the average reported home size (at least among households that did report it) was around 1,440 square feet. Pretty close, in fact, to the size of ours with the basement included. So as far as housing goes, we're not actually out of the mainstream at all.

Now, not all the statistics were this far off base. For instance, the Energy Information Administration says average household electricity consumption in 2020 was 10,715 kWh, close enough to 11,000 for government work. The average number of cars per U.S. household, according to Statista, is 1.88, which rounds off to two. And SUVs and other trucks do indeed account for most new car sales.

But some of the other figures were pretty farfetched. Gallup says that in 2021, 62% of Americans did not travel by air at all, and 23% made only one or two trips. (These numbers were a little lower than they had been before the pandemic, but even when Gallup asked the same question in 2015, only 10% of Americans said they had flown five or more times in the past year.) A majority of US households have no children living at home. And the average U.S. driver put 12,724 miles on their car in 2020 (down from 14,263 in 2019, but that's still far less than 25,000). So on balance, it seems like our ecofrugal lifestyle is actually closer to the norm than the "typical" American lifestyle described in the Times article.

As for line-drying laundry, it was hard to find statistics on that. The best bit of data I could find was from a 2009 Pew poll, which found that roughly two-thirds of Americans consider a clothes dryer a necessity. That puts us line-dryers in the minority, certainly, but not such a small minority as all that. Using handkerchiefs appears to be a bit farther out of the mainstream; based on this Reddit thread, the general consensus seems to be that they're gross and unhygienic (though based on my prior research, paper tissues aren't really any better). But hankies do still have their staunch defenders. And as for the use of cloth rags in place of paper towels, an informal survey by Family Handyman found that respondents actually prefer cloth dish towels by nearly two to one.

The bottom line? Being ecofrugal may be a little bit weird in 21st-century USA, but it's not that weird. And if Forbes and the Good News Network are to be believed, it's getting more normal all the time.

Now, if you'll excuse me, a bunch of those socks I just washed yesterday need darning.

The ecofrugal challenge I'm not taking

As regular readers know, I love a good challenge. I don't mean just something that's difficult to do, but a Challenge, something you basically dare yourself to do for a week or a month or whatever. In the 12-plus years I've been writing this blog, I've challenged myself to follow WWII rationing rules, eat on a food-stamp budget, and live on the minimum wage. I completed roughly the first half of the 52-week savings challenge before realizing that most of the weekly challenges weren't saving us any money, and that I had better things to write about. I've designed my own challenges as well, including two local shopping challenges (finding a new outfit locally and finding a different bargain in town every day) and decorating an entire apartment with a $1,000 budget at IKEA.

So in theory, the Take The JUMP challenge should be right up my alley. Because this challenge is all about ecofrugality: "Less Stuff, More Joy." It comprises a set of six specific steps you can take to "protect our earth and live with joy" — exactly what I've always said ecofrugality is all about. You can challenge yourself to take these steps for 1, 3, or 6 months. 

The six steps are:

1. End Clutter: Keep electronic products for at least seven years. Actually, the description on this one is a bit inconsistent; it says seven years in the headline, but within the text it says to "keep electronic products for 5-7 years - their full optimum lifetime." And in the video, it says, to keep them until they are "past repair, and aim to keep all electronics for at least seven years."
2. Travel Fresh: Get rid of private vehicles. Entirely. Simply switching to an electric vehicle isn't enough, the authors argue, because a big part of their carbon footprint comes from their manufacture, and because even EVs contribute to congestion and "cause pollution from tyres and brakes." (As you can see from the spelling of "tires," this challenge originates in the UK.)
   
3. Eat Green: Move to a plant-based diet. Eat everything you buy. Eat healthy portions. The full description of this one concedes that not everyone is willing to go full vegan, and that replacing "most" of the meat and dairy you consume is good enough.
   
4. Dress Retro: Only buy three items of clothing a year. Once again, the full description clarifies that this is not as extreme as it sounds. They're really recommending that you get most of your clothing secondhand and buy no more than three new garments per year.
5. Holiday Local: Keep short haul flights to one every three years. (Note the use of the British "holiday" in place of the American "vacation.") Again, the full text provides further clarification: you can take a short-haul flight (less than 1500 kilometers, or 932 miles) once every three-years, and/or a long-haul flight every eight.
6. Change the System: Make at least one life shift to nudge the system. This last step acknowledges that individuals shouldn't be expected to fix the environment by themselves. Thus, the most important changes are ones that push governments and big businesses in the right direction. Examples include switching to a green power provider, making your home more energy-efficient, moving to a green bank or investment firm, and writing to your political representatives (MPs for them, Congresspersons for us).

Now, in principle, I approve of all of these. In fact, I already do most of them. I did recently replace my first smartphone after a mere four years, but only because it was actually past repair (the battery just wouldn't hold a charge, and I'd already tried replacing it), and my last two computers each lasted ten. We've already given up nearly all meat and dairy, and our food waste is negligible. (You can argue about whether our portion sizes are healthy, but they're not ludicrous.) We currently buy most of our clothes secondhand, and while we don't limit ourselves to three new garments a year, we probably could if we had to. The last time I flew anywhere was for my grandmother's funeral in Florida over ten years ago. We're already using green power at home, and I not only write to my Congresspeople, I call them every month to push for climate-friendly legislation.

And yet, as you've no doubt deduced from the title of this post, I haven't pledged to Take The JUMP, and I don't intend to. The sticking point is #2: giving up the car.

It's not that I love driving. I dislike it, in fact. When I lived in Princeton, I routinely took the Dinky (the shuttle train from Princeton to Princeton Junction) to work, even though it was much more expensive than driving. I generally walk to doctor's appointments in New Brunswick, over two miles each way. And though Brian doesn't mind driving as much as I do, he still prefers to take his bike when possible.

But where we live, a car is often the only practical way to get around. Maybe in the UK, it really is true that "Depending on where you live, taking the train, tram or bus usually doesn’t take much longer than driving"; here, it emphatically does take much longer. And I mean, MUCH longer.

For instance, to get to Princeton for an 8pm dance practice on Thursday, Brian and I would have to leave the house at 6:40, walk a couple of blocks to the bus stop, catch a bus to New Brunswick, walk another couple of blocks to the train station, take the train to Princeton Junction, transfer to the Dinky, and arrive in Princeton at 7:48pm. And when practice ended at 9:30, we'd have to reverse all those steps to get home, except that the bus would no longer be running. We'd have to walk a mile and a half from the train station to get home, arriving around 11pm. That's over two and a half hours of travel for an hour and a half of practice, as opposed to a car trip of roughly half an hour each way.

And mind you, this would only work in summertime, when we practice in an outdoor location right near the Dinky station. In winter, we practice at a church at the north end of town. To get there, we'd have to leave home by 6:15 and take a different bus into New Brunswick, then transfer to another bus that would get us to the middle of Princeton, and walk a mile north to the church. But by the time we left practice at 9:30, the buses would no longer be running, and neither would the Dinky. There would be literally no way for us to get home short of calling an Uber to take us to Princeton Junction. Which means we would still be relying on car transportation — just in someone else's car, at considerably more expense.

And that's only one of the places we go regularly. Grocery shopping? Well, we'd probably have to confine ourselves to stores within walking distance of home, which would mean going without some foods and spending more on others. All other shopping? Guess we'd have to buy most things online. Concerts at the Troubadour in Morristown? Once again, we could only make the trip in one direction before the trains stopped running, so we'd just have to watch online. Visiting friends? We do have a couple of friends we could manage to reach by rail, but everyone else would have to come to us if they wanted to see us. Visiting Brian's parents in Indianapolis at Christmas? With both driving and flying off-limits, it would take over 26 hours each way by rail and bus. And visiting my parents in Hopewell, a mere 45 minutes away by car, would become literally impossible, because there is not one single bus or train that stops anywhere within walking distance of their house.

The creators of The JUMP acknowledge that for people who are disabled or "live in remote areas," a car may indeed be a necessity. But Highland Park is not, by any reasonable definition, a "remote area." It's smack dab in the middle of the most densely populated state in the country. A major highway runs within a mile of our house, as the crow files. We're within walking distance of two rail stations, and within two blocks of the nearest bus stop. In short, we are much better off as far as transit options go than the majority of Americans. And still, we can't go everywhere we need to without a private vehicle.

The simple fact is, the US as a whole is a car-dependent society. That is not my fault nor my responsibility to fix. The reason America is dependent on cars is not that there are too many people like me selfishly refusing to give up their private vehicles; it's because our entire society is built around the automobile. Convincing Americans to give up their cars will not make their lives more joyful; it will make them more stressful, because they'll have to spend so many of their hours on buses and trains — or figuring out which buses and trains can get them from one place to another — and so much less time doing things that actually bring them joy.

If the authors of The JUMP want to create a version of it that works for Americans, they need to change step 2. If they're not willing to get rid of it altogether, perhaps they could ditch most of the text and focus on this one little paragraph at the very end:

If you do need to have a car then try to keep it for a long time rather than swapping it out for a new model (and when you do swap it, choose electric!). Cars can last more than 20 years, and the shell and interior of a car can last even longer if well cared for. But if you replace it with a new one every 3 years you’re generating 5 or 6 times the amount of emissions involved in making these cars over that period. 

When and if there's a "JUMP for Americans" that doesn't require me to be car-free in a society built around cars, I'll take the challenge happily. Until then, I just can't. It would be making a promise I know I can't keep.

Craigslist for the win

When Brian and I bought our house back in 2007, the washer and dryer were not included as part of the deal. However, the previous owner offered to sell them to us for $200. This was a decent but not outrageously good price, since they were both old Maytags that looked like they might conceivably have been with the house since it was built in the 1970s. But it was still much cheaper than buying a new set, and it saved us the hassle of shopping for and installing replacements. And, being of an ecofrugal bent, we figured it made sense to keep them as long as they were still running. 

Although these old workhorses have served us faithfully over the 15 years since, I've grown increasingly dissatisfied with their performance. The dryer, for instance, has never worked reliably on the auto-drying cycle; sometimes it shuts off when the clothes are dry, but sometimes it just keeps running until someone shuts it off. So we've had to rely on the timed cycles, which aren't always easy to gauge. The washer doesn't make this easier, since it doesn't do a great job removing all the water in the spin cycle, so the clothes usually go in still dripping. Years ago, we started routinely running a second spin cycle to remove extra moisture, which also helped the clothes dry faster when we hung them on the clothesline. But even then, they were often too wet to dry completely even in a full day on the line.

So for several years now, I've had a hankering to replace these old clunkers with newer ones. I particularly liked the idea of replacing the washer with a front-loading machine. These newer models get clothes cleaner in professional tests, are gentler on clothing, and use less water and energy (even compared with new high-efficiency top-loaders). And most of all, they spin so fast that the clothing comes out nearly dry, so we would surely have no more difficulties with line-drying. But I just couldn't justify the expense of upgrading to a new washer and dryer while the old ones were still working — and despite their annoying quirks, both machines stubbornly refused to die.

Over the course of the past few weeks, though, the quirks turned into legitimate problems. The dryer started it by suddenly starting to shake violently whenever it was fully loaded. We got around this problem by drying only half a load at a time, but we knew we'd eventually need to repair or replace it. And before I got around to calling repair people for quotes, we started having trouble with the washer too — or rather, one of its long-standing problems became more problematic. 

We'd noticed for a long time that any time we washed anything large, like sheets, they tended to come out of the washer dirtier than they went in. This problem arose because they would cover up all the drainage holes on the tub and filter the dirty water as it drained out. Usually, this wasn't too big a problem, since the lint would come during the drying cycle and end up in the dryer's lint trap. (Even line-dried laundry would always get a quick spin in the dryer on the air cycle to remove dust and pollen.) But the last load we did, the sheets looked so bad afterwards that Brian decided to run them though an entire second wash cycle by themselves, and they were still dirty. 

When I ran a search on "clothes come out of washer with lint," the Internet told me the problem was that the washer's lint trap needed cleaning. In fact, The Spruce said we should be cleaning it regularly throughout the year to keep lint at bay. Well, as far as I could recall, not only had we never once cleaned it in all the years we'd owned the machine, but I didn't think I'd ever so much as seen it. And when I checked all the places the sources said it might be — the top rim of the tub, the middle of the agitator, the end of the drainage hose — I found nothing. Brian, figuring it had to be somewhere, pried off the machine's front panel and felt around, but he still couldn't find anything. And then he couldn't figure out how to put it back on again. He finally managed it after about twenty minutes of wrestling with the thing, but by that point it was too late: I'd decided these old machines had become more trouble than they were worth. Even if they were both technically still working, they weren't working well enough for our needs.

Since ConsumerSearch no longer does in-depth product reports, I checked a few other sites, like Good Housekeeping and U.S. News, to find suitable replacements. (I focused on the washing machine, since these vary more in performance and energy use than dryers.) And here I ran into some serious sticker shock: nearly all the recommended models were over $1,000. Even the "best value" model at Good Housekeeping, an old-school top-loader, was $900. And a matching gas dryer would probably add another $1,000. (Electric ones typically cost about $100 less, but switching from gas to electric would require us to install a new 220-volt outlet — and since our circuit board is pretty full already, that might in turn require us to rewire the entire panel, which would cost more than the washer and dryer together.)

So I decided to take a quick look on Craigslist just to see if there was anything suitable there. And luck was with me: a post had gone up that very day for a front-loading washer and a matching gas dryer for a mere $300. The post said they were 7 or 8 years old and still working "great," but were being replaced because their kids had bought them a new set for Christmas. Of course, we'd have to rent a truck to pick them up and haul them home, but even with that extra expense, they'd still cost much, much less than a new set.

I knew that at that price, we'd need to move fast to get our hands on these appliances before someone else snapped them up. Unfortunately, we couldn't pick them up that very day, as we already had a commitment to be somewhere else in the afternoon. So I replied to the post asking if they were still available and offering to come get them on Sunday afternoon. At first, the poster hedged, saying he was tired of dealing with scam calls and lowball offers, so "The first person who puts cash in my hand gets them." In other words, we were welcome to rent a truck and drive over, but he couldn't promise the machines would still be there when we arrived. I made a counteroffer: If he would let us drive down tomorrow and confirm they were suitable, we would pay him on the spot, provided he would then hold the machines for us to come pick up later in the week. I added that we would also require a written contract saying that he had sold the machines to us and would not sell them to someone else later. At that point, he agreed to "go out on a limb" and hold the machines for us until today.

Getting the new washer and dryer here was, admittedly, a bit of an undertaking. First, Brian got the old washer and dryer disconnected and pulled out of the way to make room for the new ones. Then we rented a truck and an appliance dolly from the U-Haul just outside of town. Then we drove down to Hamilton and checked the machines to make sure they worked. Then, with the previous owner helping, we loaded first the dryer and then the washer onto the dolly, hauled them up the steps and out the milk doors leading out of the basement, hefted them onto the truck, and strapped them down. Then, after driving home, we had to repeat the process in reverse, now with just me and Brian: maneuvering the giant boxes off the truck, onto the dolly, down the steps into the back yard (with the aid of the ramp Brian built for our patio project), and into the laundry room, where we manhandled (and womanhandled) them into place. And since we had the dolly, we took advantage of it to haul the old washer and dryer out of the basement and up to the driveway, close enough to the curb to be pushed out there on the next trash day. (Fortunately, these old monsters contain no electronic components, so they don't need to be treated as hazardous e-waste.)

So, all in all, the process of deciding to buy, finding, buying, and transporting our new washer and dryer took up most of this weekend, and we still need to get them hooked up. But it also cost us a mere $429 total: $300 for the machines, $109 for the truck rental, and $20 worth of gas. That's less than one-quarter of what we'd have paid for new ones, and a more eco-friendly purchase to boot. (A new washer and dryer might have been a little bit more efficient than these 7-year-old models, but surely not so much more as to offset the environmental costs of manufacturing them.)

In short, we have confirmed yet again that Craigslist is the best place to shop for our home needs. The price is right, and shopping secondhand is the right choice for the planet. And if it requires more physical labor, well, we could probably use the exercise anyway.

Thrift Week 2022: The Ecofrugal Manifesto

It's been 12 years today since I first decided to revive the celebration of Thrift Week on my blog. Over the years, I've used this week of posts to highlight many different aspects of the ecofrugal life. I've done roundups of my favorite thrift-friendly websites, books, local thrift shops, and recipes. I've challenged myself with a week of vegan eating and a week of local shopping. I've discussed ways to ditch disposable goods and live more sustainably in general.

This year, I decided, it was time to take a step back and look at the big picture: the ecofrugal lifestyle itself. So for Thrift Week 2022, I'm presenting the Ecofrugal Manifesto. Each day will feature a different key principle of the ecofrugal life, one of the most basic guidelines for reducing your burden on the planet and the burden on your budget at the same time. Thus, the entire week will provide a complete crash course in how to live ecofrugally. And I'm starting with...

Ecofrugal Principle #1: Eat Plants

Eating less meat and more plants (veggies, grains, beans, etc.) is a perfect example of an ecofrugal two-fer. Eating plants is indisputably a more sustainable choice; plant-based sources of protein consistently have a lower carbon-footprint than animal-based sources, and with a few notable exceptions (such as nuts), plant foods have a lower water footprint as well. And in general, plant-based foods are also cheaper. A 2021 Oxford study found that for people in high-income countries, a fully vegan diet is the most affordable way to eat, cutting food costs by up to one-third over the typical diet. A 2018 study and a 2020 survey likewise found that meatless diets are cheaper overall than diets with meat.

Mind you, this is not the same as saying that plant-based foods are always cheaper than animal equivalents. Plant foods designed as substitutes for animal foods are almost always pricier. For example:

• Skim milk typically costs around $3 per gallon at our local supermarkets. Almond milk, our preferred nondairy substitute, costs $1.79 per half-gallon at Lidl, or about 19 percent more. (Notably, our homemade almond milk is significantly cheaper than the real thing, but it's lacking in vitamins and calcium.)
  
• The plant-based butter substitutes we typically use in baking, such as Earth Balance and Country Crock Plant Butter, typically cost us around $3.50 per pound. The pound of real butter we bought recently at Lidl for use in my birthday cake (a chocolate brioche, for which Brian was unwilling to trust the butter substitutes) cost $1.64, less than half as much.
  
• Shredded mozzarella cheese costs $2.49 a pound at Aldi, and we can often find the good stuff in block form for only $1.99 a pound. Our homemade vegan mozzarella costs about $7.46 per pound, roughly three times as much. And most store-bought alternatives (which aren't nearly as good) cost still more.
• Impossible Burger costs around $6.29 for 12 ounces, or $8.39 per pound, at Target. That's nearly 25 percent more than real ground beef at $6.79 per pound.
• We recently got a coupon for $1.50 off Just Egg, a plant-based egg substitute, at our local Stop & Shop. But when we checked the price, it was $6 for a container equivalent to eight eggs. Even with the coupon, that works out to the equivalent of 56 cents per egg. The Certified Humane eggs we buy at Lidl are $2.39 per dozen, or 20 cents per egg — and that's pretty pricey as eggs go.

It's these plant-based animal substitutes that give vegetarian and vegan diets an unjustified reputation for being pricey. But these substitutes aren't an essential part of a plant-based diet. If you focus on recipes that are naturally plant-based, or adapt meat-based dishes by simply leaving out the meat rather than using a meat analogue, your meals are likely to be cheaper and also more satisfying. Plant-based diets are only costly when they're really meat-based diets without the meat.

Moreover, if you eat a naturally plant-based diet most of the time, you'll save enough money that you can afford to splurge on these animal substitutes once in a while. That's what we do: our diet is mostly plant-based recipes like the ones covered in my 2018 Thrift Week (mushroom barley soup, pasta fagioli, skillet kugel, stir-fry with tofu), plus a smattering of animal food substitutes (faux mozzarella, Gimme Lean beef) and just a few real animal products (eggs, canned tuna). And if you need proof that this is a frugal way to eat, consider this: according to the 2018 study I mentioned above, "the daily cost of food for a healthy menu plan can be as little as $6.5 per day," yet our food expenses over the past year were a mere $4.50 per person per day. In other words, our healthy, mostly-plant diet comes in at around 70 percent of the USDA's estimated minimum, even with the occasional splurge.

In short, if you want to do just one thing that will save you money and reduce your ecological footprint at the same time, eating less meat is about the best choice you can make. (And if you want to do six more things toward the same goal, stay tuned for the rest of this week.)

Money Crashers: 5 Ways to Reuse Items to Save Money and Reduce Waste

Here's another Money Crashers piece on an environmental topic. This one didn't get published in time for Earth Day (or even Earth Week), but you could say it is sort of COVID-adjacent; according to the New York Times and Vox, the one-two punch of a pandemic coupled with a recession is encouraging lots of people to adopt new frugal habits that the green set has already been following for years. (Until I read the Vox piece, I literally did not know there were people who just threw out the ends of a loaf of bread rather than eating them.)

According to these articles, people reluctant to spend money and/or leave the house are becoming increasingly inclined to make the most of the stuff they have. They're rinsing and reusing bottles, Ziploc bags, and aluminum foil. They're putting the cut ends of scallions in water to regrow them (a trick I myself only learned a few years ago) and starting vegetable gardens.

So I guess this is the right cultural moment for this piece: 5 Ways to Reuse Items to Save Money and Reduce Waste. In it, I explore the five ways you can save money through reuse:

1. Replacing disposable items (e.g., water bottles or napkins) with reusable ones
2. Repairing damaged ones, from torn clothing to old cars, rather than replacing them
3. Shopping secondhand and/or swapping through sites like Freecycle
4. Taking part in the sharing economy, which lets you share anything from books to bikes
5. My personal favorite, creative reuse: putting waste materials to new uses, like blue-jean aprons and canning jar lamps

The articles in Vox and the New York Times aren't overly optimistic that these new frugal microtrends — the "novel frugality," as Vox calls it — will last long after the pandemic is over. But personally, I'd like to hope that maybe they can be not just a temporary blip, but the beginning of a long-term shift in behavior. After all, when this crisis is over, we'll still be facing an even bigger threat from global warming, and the more of these earth-friendly frugal habits we can hold onto, the better our chances are of surviving it.

Earth Week Challenge 2020: Appreciation Sunday

The seven-day Earth Week series draws to its close with "Appreciation Sunday." The challenge Before It's Too Late set for this day is to "Restore your sense of connection to nature. This is what you fight for." Their two suggestions for doing so are to "Try a meditation...Say Thank You for all your blessings!" (ugh, too sappy for me) or, "If you can, spend some time in nature." That "if you can" is a necessary caveat for more people than ever these days, since COVID has made getting out into the natural world a lot harder than it used to be. Here in New Jersey, all our state and county parks have been shut down; in my town, even the tiny local parks have all the playground equipment and park benches marked off with yellow CAUTION tape to prevent anyone from sitting down and, you know, appreciating nature. You're allowed to walk past as much nature as you can manage to see in the minute or so it takes to cross this tiny park, but no stopping.

Going out for a walk on the street is still allowed, and I'm lucky enough to live in a place where you can see at least some nature just by doing that. In addition to the trees and flowers in people's yards, there are plenty of "street trees" planted along the major roads in town, including many ornamental cherries that are in full bloom right now. But unfortunately, today just isn't that great a day for going out and appreciating them. It's chilly for April, currently below 50 degrees, and it's been raining off and on all day. Even the bit of nature appreciation we were planning to do in our own yard, digging up the bed for our new flower garden, has been put off until the next sunny day. (The plants I ordered from Wit's End Gardens haven't arrived yet, though they are supposedly on the way, so it's not an urgent need just yet.)

Yesterday, however, was a much nicer day — sunny with highs in the sixties — and we took full advantage of it to go for a long walk in town and appreciate as much nature as we could manage to take in while dodging around other humans. If we could count yesterday's walk as today's appreciation, we'd be all set. But unfortunately, that's not how these Earth Week Challenges are set up. What you did yesterday, or even what you do most days, doesn't count; the only thing that matters is what you do today.

And that, for me, is a fundamental flaw in the way this entire weeklong challenge is constructed. All seven of these challenges are things that we do nearly every day just as a matter of routine. But for challenge purposes, that's not good enough; you have to do them on the specific day the challenge is set, or it doesn't count. You have to avoid meat not most of the time, but on Meatless Monday itself; you have to avoid driving not most of the time, but on Transportation Tuesday. And so on.

The thing is, this isn't the way environmentalism works in real life. If you want to reduce the carbon footprint of your diet, the best way to do it isn't to eschew meat and dairy on one particular Monday in April; it's to reduce the amount you eat of them all the time. And it's the same for all the other challenges: driving less, reducing water use, producing less waste, writing to elected officials, supporting small businesses (when you can), and appreciating nature should all be part of your regular routine. Doing them habitually has much more impact than doing them just once in honor of Earth Week and then forgetting about them until next year.

In short, I think for someone who already has ecofrugal habits, these Earth Week Challenges just aren't very useful. If I were constructing my own Earth Week series, I might keep the same basic themes — food, transportation, and so on — but I'd make them about the whole week, not just one day each. So, for instance, the Meatless Monday challenge would be, "How many days this week can you go without eating either meat or dairy?" For Transportation Tuesday, "How many days this week can you go without driving?" I'd present them all at the beginning of the week rather than shelling them out one at a time, and each day's email would just be a reminder and tips about one of them. Not only would a challenge in this format have been much easier for me personally, but I think it would also be a much more useful way to teach eco-friendly habits for those who aren't used to them.

The real message of an Earth Week challenge, I think, should be that living an earth-friendly lifestyle is a marathon, not a sprint. It's not just about what you do today, but about how you choose to live every day of your life. In other words, we should make every week Earth Week.

Money Crashers: 3 new pieces, 2 updates

Several more of my articles have appeared on Money Crashers in the past few days — some new, some older articles that needed to be refreshed with up-to-date numbers. Some of these were meant to be published for Earth Day, but only one of them actually made it onto the site in time; however, they all appeared during Earth Week, at least, so that's sort of a win.

The new pieces are:

1. Latte Factor – Giving Up Lattes Won’t Make You Rich But Here’s What Will

In this piece, I quibble with financial guru David Bach's famous "latte factor" formula: the idea that you can become rich by just cutting out some small indulgence, such as a daily latte, and channeling that money into investments instead. The problem: the math doesn't add up. This piece show exactly why the latte factor doesn't work, and explains how to tackle the much harder jobs that actually will make a difference: minimizing your fixed expenses, maximizing your income, and choosing the right investments.

2. 14 Disposable Items You Can Ditch to Save $1.5K This Year – Alternatives

This is the piece that got published in time for Earth Day, though it had actually been in the works for months. It covers a lot of the same ground as last year's Thrift Week posts, showing how reusable alternatives to disposable stuff — water bottles, soda bottles, batteries, paper towels — can keep money in your pocket and help the planet at the same time.

3. What Is the Freecycle Network – Give & Get Free Stuff

An updated version of a piece done in 2012 by another writer, this one is also relevant to Earth Week because it deals with reuse. It sums up a lot of what I've said about Freecycle on this blog over the years in a single post: how it works, what it's good for, what kind of problems you can run into when Freecycling, and how proper Freecycle etiquette can make the process smoother for everyone.

The updated pieces are:

1. How to Save Money by Living Green – Saving Electricity, Gas & Trees

One of the first pieces I ever published on Money Crashers back in 2015, this article has been updated with new prices and other facts that reflect changes in technology and consumer behavior over the past five years, such as improvements to energy-efficient light bulbs, the continuing decline of paper newspapers.

2. How to Save Money With Your High-Speed Internet Service Provider

This 2018 piece is newer, but even two years have brought about significant changes in the spread of high-speed Internet and the prices people pay for it. And, with so many people moving more of our lives online in response to COVID, it's timely.

Environmentalists are not hypocrites

The other day, I read an article in the Christian Science Monitor that really ticked me off. Provocatively titled "Are environmentalists hypocrites?", it points out that wealthy people and wealthy nations are more likely to profess concern about the environment and favor laws to protect it—but they also consume more, thereby causing more damage to the environment. So basically, the argument goes, anyone who claims to be an environmentalist is too busy focusing on the mote in their neighbor's eye to deal with the log in their own.

Now, the article goes on to point out that it's really a misconception that poorer folks, and poorer nations, aren't concerned about the environment. They spend less energy focusing on environmental issues, sure, but they spend less energy on all types of political issues, because they're spending a lot more on just trying to survive. It notes that people in India and Latin America are more worried about global warming than people in "developed nations"—which makes sense, since they'll suffer much more as a result of rising sea levels. Likewise, in the United States, lower-income voters are most concerned about issues like water—which also makes sense, because guess where the water supply is most likely to be unsafe?

But nonetheless, the central "conundrum" remains: rich environmentalists cause more environmental problems than non-environmentalists. Except...do we, really?

Consider the opening paragraph of the article:

A common charge against environmentalists is that they’re hypocrites. They tell us to reduce our carbon emissions, the typical argument goes, yet they fly planes all over the world. They condemn Big Macs, yet they buy raspberries imported from a different hemisphere. They sneer at our plastic shopping bags, yet every year they buy a new iPhone.

Well, maybe I'm not exactly a typical environmentalist, but the last time I took an airplane anywhere was to my grandmother's funeral in Florida seven years ago. I don't buy imported raspberries; I grow my own, which is considerably cheaper as well as more eco-friendly. And as a late adopter, I've never even owned an iPhone—or any smartphone at all. And I make all these choices, at least in part, because I'm an environmentalist, and I want to live my live in a way that causes as little harm as possible.

I think the biggest problem with this "environmentalists damage the environment" problem is that it's comparing apples to imported bananas. It's true, as I determined back in 2011, that I have a bigger ecological footprint than a fictional character living in Botswana, but that's not because her lifestyle is more eco-friendly than mine; it's because the Ecological Footprint Calculator also factors in "societal impacts," such as roads and public services. Compared to other Americans, my footprint is considerably smaller than average. The recently retooled calculator puts my personal footprint at 1.6 Earths, while the average American's is a whopping 5 Earths. (In fact, according to the calculator, I'm even doing better now than the average person in South Africa or Brazil.)

So yes, Americans are more likely to be environmentalists than, say, Brazilians. And yes, Americans also consume more, on average, than Brazilians do. But it's a logical fallacy to conclude from this that environmentalists consume more than non-environmentalists. American environmentalists consume less than Americans who aren't environmentalists, and Brazilians who aren't environmentalists consume more than Brazilians who are (and, if the Footprint Calculator is to be believed, more than some Americans who are, as well). Compared to their peers, environmentalists consume less—even if they're richer.

It may seem like I'm undercutting the whole concept of ecofrugality with this argument, since the whole point of it is that if you consume less to save money, you will automatically live a greener life (and vice versa). Surely this implies that poor people are greener by default.

But here's the thing: there's no rule that, as you make more money, you must consume more. You can have plenty of money in the bank and still wear thrift-shop clothes, walk or bike to work, and eat low on the food chain. Plus, you can afford to make the few green choices that actually do cost you more money, like eating organic, as well as the ones that cost you money up front but save money in the long run, like using LED bulbs. And this, at least in my experience, is exactly what environmentalists typically do as their wealth increases.

In fact, because ecofrugality cuts both ways, there's a case to be made that being an environmentalist can actually make you wealthy. Think about it: if you care about the environment, you'll choose to consume less in a variety of ways (drive less, eat less meat, use less electricity, etc.). Because you're consuming less, you'll also save money. And the more money you save, the richer you'll become.

Maybe for Earth Day 2019, we should forget all about focusing on a specific issue, like plastic use or renewable energy. If we really want to get as many people involved as possible, our theme should be, "Save the Earth and get rich!"

Money Crashers: How Feeling Poor Hurts You – and How to Stop It

One of the keys to living a frugal life is to avoid feeling deprived. Many people seem to think that living frugally is all about "doing without," but to me, the whole point of frugality is to avoid wasting money on the things you don't really care about, so you can have more to spend on—or save up for—the things you do. A frugal life, lived right, should make you feel rich, not poor.

Now I've learned just how important this attitude really is. Apparently, there's a wealth of research out there to show that feeling poor makes you less satisfied with your life, damages your mental and physical health, and leads to risky financial decisions that can make you actually poor if you weren't before.

My latest Money Crashers article is all about the risks of feeling poor and how to counteract them. I discuss what can make you feel poor—regardless of your actual income—and the ways feeling poor can hurt you financially, emotionally, and physically. Then I discuss ways to break out of this trap by: 

1. changing your perspective to focus on how well-off you are already;
2. taking steps to strengthen your finances so you'll know you'll have more in the future; and
3. making yourself feel rich by indulging yourself with cheap luxuries and giving money to charity.

Learn more about these techniques here: How Feeling Poor Hurts You – and How to Stop It

Normal behavior is crazy

Yesterday, Brian and I were out in the yard, dealing with the long-delayed task of raking up this fall's leaves. We distributed most of them across our various planting beds—the rhubarb, the asparagus, the bush cherries, and the new flowerbed in the front—where they will provide a layer of moisture-preserving mulch and insulation from the cold, which we hope will help the plants get an earlier start in spring. The leftover leaves that the beds couldn't accommodate got scooped into the compost bin, along with the dried-out remains of last year's wildflowers and asparagus, to break down into free, organic fertilizer that will give next year's beds a nutrient boost without any harmful chemicals.

At some point during this process, it occurred to me—as it occasionally does while going about my ecofrugal life—that what we were doing was not normal.

What a normal person would do is use a leaf blower to corral all those leaves, scoop them into leaf bags, and leave them at the curb to be hauled off to the landfill. Then, having saved so much time and energy by substituting a noisy, fuel-burning, carbon-emitting engine for their own muscle power, they would hop in their fuel-burning, carbon-emitting car and go off to an expensive gym to get some exercise. And on the way home, they'd probably stop at the home center to pick up a few bags of mulch for the flower beds, and possibly some fertilizer for next year's garden.

Moreover, it would simply never occur to them that it was possible to do anything else. If they happened, while heading out in the car, to spot us in our yard raking our own leaves—saving money and gas, and getting some free, healthy exercise to boot—they would probably smile pityingly (or perhaps smugly) on those poor folks who "couldn't afford" a leaf blower to do the job for them. If we tried to explain that we were raking our own leaves because we wanted to, they'd think we were crazy.

But what's really crazy here? Our ecofrugal lifestyle—or the "normal" way of doing things? Are we crazy for doing a simple job with our own hands instead of an expensive, gas-guzzling machine, or is it crazy that we live in a society where that's not considered normal?

Once I had this epiphany—that normal makes no sense—I started seeing more examples everywhere. For instance, when I spotted the stack of holiday gifts in our guest room, all wrapped in reusable gift bags and reused wrapping paper, I realized that, if I were normal, I'd just go out and buy new wrapping paper every year and send it all to the landfill after a single use. (According to this Marketplace story, Americans spend more than $7 billion a year on wrapping paper—$21 for every man, woman, and child in the country—and most of it can't even be recycled.)

I noticed it yet again later in the day, when we stopped off at a Starbucks after doing some holiday shopping and pulled out a deck of cards to play cribbage, instead of each sitting down and staring at a screen like everyone else in the place. (Of course, I realize that some frugal folks would argue stopping at Starbucks at all, and spending $4 on a cup of coffee—even if it's a peppermint mocha—is itself crazy. But at least Starbucks is an eco-friendly business that I'm happy to support, and a cup of coffee from there is no more harmful to the earth than one brewed at home—with the exception of the disposable cup, but come on, it's a special holiday cup that doubles as a coloring book. That's a kind of crazy I'm willing to live with.)

The fact is, a lot of things we ecofrugal folks do are going to come across as weird to society in general. Heck, even an article about frugality on Money Crashers went so far as to attack "the crazy things some people do" to save money, like cutting Post-It notes in half (rather than wasting a whole square to write a single word) or doing the same thing with dryer sheets (thereby spending less money, wasting less material, and halving their exposure to the questionable chemicals these sheets contain). The author, who describes himself as a frugal person, nonetheless says anyone who has "ever thought of doing stuff like that" needs to "take a chill pill" and quit "living like you're an early primate."

This kind of judgmental sneering can sometimes lead us to question our ecofrugal choices and wonder if we really are being unreasonable—perhaps even crazy—for trying to save money and help the environment, instead of living a wasteful, "normal" lifestyle. At times like this, it helps to take a step back and objectively compare what you want to do with what the rest of society is doing, and ask yourself which one makes more sense. Then you can throw your head back and shout along with Suicidal Tendencies, "I'm not crazy! You're the one that's crazy!"

Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I need to get outside and start shoveling the year's first snow off our sidewalks. And if any of our "normal" neighbors show up at the same time with their loud, heavy, expensive snow blowers, we'll have fun seeing if they can actually get the job done any faster.

Green Gift Roundup 2016

In 2015, I never got around to doing a Green Gift Roundup for the holidays. For one thing, we didn't manage to give as many green gifts that year as we had in previous years; only about 44 percent of all the gifts we gave were secondhand, locally purchased, sustainably sourced, or energy-saving, as compared to 72 percent the previous year. Also, the green gifts we did purchase, such as books and toys, weren't the most successful gifts we gave that year. The biggest hits of all our presents were the "home spa treatment system" we got for my sister and the Dungeons & Dragons starter set we gave my oldest nephew—and while I was pleased that they liked the presents, there was really no way I could spin them as green. So I decided to let the subject drop for that year.

This year, however, things are different. We managed to get our green-gift ratio all the way back up to 69 percent of our purchases, and the most successful presents on our list were all sustainable picks in one way or another. Also, we received several presents—both large and small—that qualify as green. So I figured this year I could do at least a quick Green Gift Roundup to share which green ideas worked the best for us.

Our green holiday giving started early this year, on Thanksgiving weekend. My aunt had said that what she really needed this year was new clothing, since she'd recently dropped a size, so she was asking for gift cards to Macy's or Ann Taylor. However, I'd just finished writing my article on sustainable clothing, and I really didn't like the idea of turning around and supporting fast fashion. So I offered her an alternative proposal: while she was in New Jersey for Thanksgiving, I'd take her out to Greene Street Consignment in Princeton and buy her an item of her choice. This turned out to be a bigger success than I imagined; she had a blast trying on over-the-top party dresses for her Sister Goddess gatherings, and in addition to the dress I eventually bought her (a jazzy one-shoulder number in silver lamé), she bought three more for herself. She even suggested making the thrift shop an annual tradition.

We also bought sustainable Hanukkah and Christmas gifts for several other family members, including:

• A subscription to Yes! magazine for my mom. She often finds the news depressing (hardly a surprise) and calls me up to ask if I have any good news, so I thought a magazine filled with all good news—about the environment, social movements, and sustainable communities—was just what she needed. She hasn't received her first issue yet, as it's a quarterly, but she has already started reading and enjoying the online edition.
• Also for my mom, a book called NYPD Puzzle that we picked up at the library book sale. This is part of the Puzzle Lady series, featuring a crossword constructor and her crime-solving aunt, and it includes puzzles right in the book that provide clues to the mystery. Since my mom loves both mysteries and puzzles, it seemed right up her alley. So I told her I was giving her one present to distract her from what's going on in the world, and one to make her feel better about it.
• A pashmina shawl from the annual craft fair at the Morristown Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, where our favorite folk series is held. My sister had specifically requested pashminas this year, particularly in bright red, pink, and purple, and this one happened to have all three colors in a lush, soft fabric. Though it was a lot pricier than the ones at Target, it was also a lot nicer, and Fair Trade to boot, so I figured it was worth a splurge. And since she mentioned the "gorgeous scarf" in a recent e-mail, I guess she liked it too.
• Two books for my brother-in-law and sister-in-law. This is the same brother-in-law who, two years back, let me pick through the discards from his shelf of gardening books, so I knew he was interested in growing and preserving his own produce. So when my other brother-in-law requested a specific book on craft cider making (which I didn't get for him because someone else snapped it up), I decided it would make a good gift for this other couple. While I was at it, I threw in a second book called Drink the Harvest, which covers not only cider but also juice, tea, and mead. He only glanced at the books when he opened them, but she picked them up and became absorbed in them, so I think there's a good chance they'll get some use out of these. Maybe they'll even return the favor with a gift of home-brewed cider next year.
• Two more books for my youngest nephew. While we were in Princeton thrift-shopping, I stopped in at the library and browsed through their used-book section, where I picked up two little paperbacks from the "young readers" section: a Nate the Great mystery (one of his favorite series) and a biography of Neil Armstrong, since he's obsessed with everything to do with outer space.
• For that same nephew and his younger sister, a pair of "Magic Cloths." These are basically a homemade version of Playsilks, using low-end fabric from Jo-Ann Fabrics that we hemmed ourselves. (Well, Brian did it, actually, since I can't sew a straight seam on the machine to save my life.) I also threw in a little "instruction manual" to go with them: a poem illustrated with little stick figures (thanks again to Brian) that show all the different things a Magic Cloth can turn into: a superhero cape, a princess gown, a parachute, a pool of water, etc. I wasn't sure whether these counted as a green gift, since they're not all-natural silk like the originals—but they are a highly versatile toy that requires no electricity and encourages imaginative play. My sister said they were a "huge hit" with her kids.
• For my two craft-loving nieces, an assortment of beads that we picked up at the last town-wide yard sale. For a mere 50 cents, we got two boxes of beads: one with a variety of colorful glass beads, and one with tiny "seed beads" (which we urged our nieces not to open on the spot, since they are very easy to scatter everywhere). That should be enough to keep them in bracelets for a good few months.
• For their younger brother, the Big Book of Riddles, Puzzles, and Enigmas. This was another yard-sale find, and we weren't quite sure whom to give it to, so we picked this nephew almost at random. This turned out to be a good guess; when he opened it, his eyes lit up and he displayed the book to the entire room like Vanna White showing off a fabulous prize. He spent much of the day lying on the couch, poring over the puzzles and occasionally trying them out on his relatives. And a quiet child was a great gift for the rest of us.
• Finally, an experiential gift: a Chinese banquet on Christmas Day. This year, we weren't able to get the whole family together to open presents until the 27th, so on the 25th I offered to take those who were around—my in-laws and Brian's brother—for a traditional Jewish Christmas. Apparently, a lot of other people had the same idea, as the Formosa Seafood Buffet was packed. Afterward, we skipped the movie theater and instead went home to watch a DVD. We went with A Christmas Story, since I'd never seen it—and it turns out, that includes a memorable Chinese Christmas dinner as well.

In addition to the gifts themselves, I had the opportunity to use a few of the fabric gift bags my sister-in-law gave me in 2014. I used a couple of them for gifts to that same sister-in-law, since I knew she would use them again, and a couple for other people. The downside of this is that I didn't really receive any new gifts that were in fabric gift bags—so if I carry on at this rate, my stock of them will gradually disappear. I guess I'll have to get this darned sewing machine figured out so I can make some of my own.

We also received a few gifts that qualify as green. Brian's brother gifted us two bottles of mead from the local "meadery": a growler of strawberry-rhubarb mead and a smaller bottle of cherry. (The former turns out to be dry and slightly fizzy, so I'm toying with the idea of trying it in a Bellini.) His sister slipped some mysterious cardboard objects into his stocking, which turned out to be homemade fire starters made from dryer lint and candle wax stuffed into egg-carton cups. These might prove handy for the charcoal grill, or if we ever pick up the fire pit I've been toying with the idea of adding to our patio.

Her gift to me was a vegan faux-leather purse, which the salesclerk assured her was "really high quality" but was marked down because it was last year's model. This may make it the first purse I've ever owned from a brand that actually has different models for different years—but what I like about it is that it has a long strap so it can be carried cross-body fashion. A therapist I've been seeing advised me to switch to this type of purse because it would put less strain on my back and neck, so this was a particularly timely gift.

Brian received a couple of ecofrugal gifts from my family as well. My mom and my aunt both gave him silicone baking mats—something I suggested because we've been using such a lot of parchment paper lately for baking. And my sister gave him a handy multitool for bike repairs, which will make it easier for him to bike to work without carrying quite as much stuff.

Finally, during our trip to Indiana, we picked up a couple of eco-friendly items for ourselves. We visited not one, but two Goodwill stores in Indianapolis, where we found a pair of jeans for Brian and corduroys and a long-sleeved shirt for me, all for a flat $18 (including the small donation that we made to each store by rounding up to the nearest dollar). And after making sure no one else was going to give us one, we stopped by Fry's and bought ourselves a new tablet computer to replace the one that met with an accident last fall. Calling this an ecofrugal purchase is debatable, but we found after several months of going without one that there really were quite a few things we could do more easily with one, like reading online news and books from the e-library—which will mean fewer books to buy and clutter up our shelves. Yes, that's a bit of a stretch, but at the very least, it was a purchase that we thought out carefully and can be sure we won't regret. So if nothing else, it's a case of using our money wisely. (We also invested $20 in a good protective case to go with it, so this tablet won't meet with the same fate as the last one.)

And that wraps it up for our holidays. I hope yours were equally festive and green.