Not sure about that -- With modern pollution rain water is not likely to be safe to drink (depends on your location)
> 9. fuck sugary drinks
Massive yes! Amazing for your own health too.
Also washing, showering can be done with rainwater if you are really a minimalist.
Professional car wash places are require (depending on location) to collect and dispose of their waste water in a safe way. When you wash the car in the driveway, the waste water will either go into the ground or the storm drains, neither of which will ensure that the waster is cleaned before reentering the environment.
If the rain is falling on your car it will have the same issue, no?
Water availability is also very different from country to country, region to region, and even town to town. How your water usage affects the environment depends on so many things.
Air pollution does change abruptly, but on most places it tends to not do that frequently.
There are lots of "grey water" uses that don't require drinkable water, like watering plants, flushing toilets.
Yes. I've heard/read grey mentioned many times in permaculture articles.
I like the fact that permaculture takes a systems or holistic approach.
Another nice, small but useful example of permaculture design is the concept of guilds, when it comes to planting crops around a house.
They plant by category, in concentric bands called guilds, with the guild nearest to the house having most commonly used plants such as herbs, then vegetables, then grains, then fruit trees, etc.
So you have to walk less tend or harvest them.
Guilds are about companion planting - they're combination of plants that form a small ecosystem where they provide benefit to each other. E.g. comfrey is often used around fruit trees to break up subsoil (it has very long taproots, to 10 feet or so), and as a prolific mulch producer (cut it back every couple months, and chop and drop the leaves in place). Nitrogen fixing plants are common, as a way of providing nutrients. Etc.
So not really "free" at all, and rather expensive enough that nobody does it...
You can also skip that entirely with a composting toilet. Again depending on your local laws, gray water can often be drained directly outside, potentially through a leech field if required. Plenty of areas allow this for specific uses like washing machines, the only reason it can't be done with standard toilets is because of the solid waste.
Do you have land on your own, or is there some public land where you can plant trees?
Which is why I asked, what OP actually did.
I know folks who have planted trees on public land and on land owned by corporations, which seems cool but also kinda stressful.
Why is copper better than stainless steel?
You can usually tell if the water in your bottle is going bad / filled w bacteria..
If this is not possible, take in mind that your immune system can take care about bacteria. In 99% of the cases after a learning period, local bacteria will stop being a problem. Unless your live in areas with very unsafe water sources or particularly dangerous organisms this shouldn't be a main factor in the choice.
> If you have been drinking water that has been constantly stored in copper bottle or vessel, chances are high that you might be at the risk of copper toxicity. It can cause severe nausea, dizziness, abdominal pain and can result in liver and kidney failure.
No thank you. I get the struggle to not use plastics, I try to avoid it myself too (especially buying water in plastic bottles in shops is something I never do), but alternatives are subpar, either very heavy, fragile and overall impractical for outdoor sports (ie glass), or some other issues. What happened to stainless steel? Heavy but at least should be inert and nearly indestructible, no? I mean those without some crap BPA lining inside, like thermos but single walled.
(For some hints, see the sketches of the Dwarven Kama Sutra found in JRR Token’s estate)
It's toxic…
Copper pots are not copper on the inside because of this reason.
A bit less minimalistic: ride your (non e-) bike, scooter, skateboard, kayak, sled, basically anything non motorized. Use best tire quality so you don’t change then often.
A bite more minimalistic: prefer walking barefoot anytime you can. Shoes are tire that wear out.
King of related: still looking for shoe/soles that last. My grand mother used to wear wood clogs, not sure where to find some that fits me.
How are you going to transport heavy goods without some kind of motorized or motor-assist vehicle? Unless you want to keep horses or donkeys.
Ebikes are a godsend. Without one I'd have to get things delivered by van.
This is the problem with environmentalism-as-actually-practiced -- the conversation starts with plastic pollution, you look away for five seconds, and suddenly there are a bunch of ascetics one-upping each other in the "LARP as a third-world peasant" game. There is no social defense mechanism against it. Normal people look at this and think "no thanks". It's all about focus on minimizing downside and (implicitly) self-flagellation for the sin of living in a rich country; there is no focus on things with upside potential, like "how do we increase the supply of clean energy so we can have cheap material abundance".
I don't want to live in squalor. I want to enjoy a hot shower of crystal clear desalinated water, heated by electricity made in the searing heart of a nuclear reactor, and it all costs a fraction of a penny to run.
It’s not about copying thinks third world but about health, resource management and public space enjoyability.
There's guides for making huaraches with tire rubber.
And there's also barefoot sandals that claim to last a life time (but cost like 100 bucks).
The most environmentally friendly would be used shoes if possible, even if they don't last that long.
I have a pair of ENIX Sandals I bought 6 years ago that I wear when it's really hot. They're also great.
1. Buy less stuff
2. Buy secondhand stuff
3. Ride a bicycle
4. Eat less meat, more local produce
3. 4. 5. 4. are barely positive if positive at all (considering environment, some are definitely healthy)
For most, it would require living in a smaller space, in a more urban area and is probably the most people can do to reduce that impact on the environment.
The energy spend that comes from living in detached single family home that multiplies all the distances mass has to travel back and forth from that home (and subsequent homes) dwarfs everything else.
But, for example, preferring walking to more energy efficient cycling means you need more calories => eat more => affect environment more.
Very often living healthy is at odds with being environment friendly. I do not say you should live unhealthy but lets not confuse those two things.
I guess a more accurate descriptor is “non car dependent living”.
And that’s just one event.
Being politically active and pushing for a carbon tax would do far more than any amount of individual lifestyle choices.
Would this not incentivize offshoring even more and artificially lengthening supply chains to "hide" emissions?
Sure, for walkable destinations. Having a bike is more efficient (calories per mile) and hugely increases the practical range. Commuting, even grocery shopping, and being social is hugely more practical on a bike then walking.
…and neuropsychiatric symptoms. Wilson’s disease is surprisingly common at 1 in 30,000.
You should reevaluate what you consider common. Schizophrenia, a condition you probably rarely witness in every day life, is around 1 in 100. You don't interact with 30,000 people even over the course of a year.
silica -> iron -> aluminum -> copper
With a logarithmic scale unit between each step or so. We ingest and tolerate much more aluminum than copper in our daily journey and we could drink water with much more iron oxide dissolved on it than aluminum oxide without suffering permanent problems
Fortunately, it is pretty much impossible to come in contact with pure titanium, because whenever it is exposed to air it becomes immediately covered with titanium dioxide.
The ratio between electric charge and radius of the titanium ions is such that titanium dioxide is one of the least soluble oxides. It is practically inert in water or blood.
This inertness of the titanium dioxide ensures that titanium is one of the safest materials for making implants that will have to stay forever in a human body or for making objects that will be in contact with food.
While glass remains the best food-contact material, titanium is a decent choice for applications where glass might break, e.g. spoons.
On that scale, titanium would be placed between silicon and iron. It should be kept in mind that the position on that scale actually refers to the behavior of the oxides, not of the pure elements, because all the elements mentioned are oxidized quickly in air and they are oxidized even faster in a living body.
Titanium dioxide is more inert than silicon dioxide, so less of it can become dissolved, but once the two oxides are dissolved, the silicon dioxide is safer, because most living cells have mechanisms to deal with it.
They both have issues, but the latter is still worse than the former.
Most homes have copper water pipes. That's probably more important to test as corrosion in water bottles should be easy to spot. There are test kits one can buy to test their water at home.
Especially when they come in plastic bottles and not glass ones.
I dont think cooking at home necessarily produces less plastics. Most (in Norway) veggies, meats, some spices, sauces, etc come in plasticcontainers.
This is good since it preserves the produce, so it has a longer shelf life. but the drawback is plastic.
Not being a fan of sugary drinks is fine, but as long as people buy water coffee, etc in pastic it is not a clear win for the environment. It is a win for a persons health.
10. Eat plants.
Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding...
If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares (and free an area as big as Africa for wildlife/reforesting) https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
Eat more plant-based foods https://www.un.org/en/actnow/food
Biodiversity conservation: The key is reducing meat consumption https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26231772/
Global food system emissions could preclude achieving the 1.5° and 2°C climate change targets https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aba7357
Which Diet Has the Least Environmental Impact on Our Planet? A Systematic Review of Vegan, Vegetarian and Omnivorous Diets https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/15/4110/htm
World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/70/1/8/5610806
Your pet is more harmful to the environment than your car.
12. Less or no children.
All of the above, combined.
IMHO the best way to limit our negative impacts is
- stop exploiting other countries (there are almost no poor countries, only overexploited ones)
- urbanization ( https://i.redd.it/fl28yusb1r5b1.jpg )
- abandoning fossil fuels (so far we're not making a dent https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/renewables-growth-di... )
- stopping animal agriculture (destruction of the environment, biodiversity, pollution, overfishing ...)
Here is the unsolvable problem of the climate activism. They can't save the climate, but they are capable of destroying their own homeland, playing right into the hands of those authoritarian monsters.
> Good luck trying to convince Russia or China
Whataboutism. Best way to avoid doing anything.
> the unsolvable problem of the climate activism. They can't save the climate, but they are capable of destroying their own homeland
That's incredibly foolish.
There are two possible answers to climate change: avoidance and preparation. Avoidance means that the world reduces its CO₂-footprint to zero or less to limit global warming or even to revert it. Preparation means that, if global warming cannot be avoided, states prepare for the changes in weather, sea level, agriculture, etc.
Avoidance can only work if all nations worldwide do participate to reduce their CO₂-footprint. If some big nations do nothing, or even worse, if non-consumption of fossil fuels by western nations causes a price drop and a shift of fossil fuel consumption to the rest (instead of an overall reduction), avoidance by the west is pointless and a waste of resources. All the world has to participate for avoidance to be successful.
On the other hand, preparation mostly works on a more local level. Nations with coastlines invest to protect those, nations threatened by water shortages invest in countermeasures such as maybe desalination or storages, etc. Even if the rest of the world doesn't care, preparation will mostly work for the local community.
Both avoidance and preparation need a lot of resources. But allocation to avoidance is only sensible if every nation agrees to it, otherwise those resources are wasted and far better spent on preparation.
- keep packing more fellow on your homeland, our children with them. Don’t change anything but wish them good luck, the Science and Industry will solve everything as it always did anyway, right ? Guess what, it won’t make the two giants stop being authoritarian.
- not doing (much) more children in your homeland so no descents will suffer from the density. The “authoritarians monsters” will probably profit of that.
Do you really value democracy and freedom (I value it a lot, me too) so much that you continue gambling with descents’s home habitability?
It’s not about giving up but about recognizing that adding more soldiers won’t stop the war.
I want people to think big. Instead of carrying a water bottle and use paper bags focus on how you can help a whole country like India or China or even a whole continent like Africa.
Set goal of stopping Coca-Cola from dumping their plastic waste in Afrika. This would include much more effort than just carrying a water bottle or sleeping 8h.
…Said the Easter Island native
…Said the XX century boomers
Would you elaborate on your thought? Why questioning the demography is “enemy of mankind”? Is there other subjects/sciences we should avoid completely to be friends with mankind?
as do their human companions. I mean if you're going to Modest Proposal pets, why stop there?
And here's #13: turn off your phone, your laptop, your desktop computer. Read a book if you want edification. Go talk to someone in person if you want to express your opinion.
Don't try to blame the first group for the sins of the second.
I’ve spent a lot of money on numerous steel and plastic water bottles. They all break and good luck recycling them. Most likely they end up in landfill.
PET bottles use less raw resources, are cheap, lightweight, extremely durable, and when they reach end of life they’re easier to “recycle” (downcycle is probably more accurate).
Modern PET bottles shouldn’t leach into your water. You can at minimum use them until the expiry date on the bottle. If you’re concerned about leaching, don’t take my word and do your own research.
You _ may_ be able to take steel to a resource recovery centre. However if the travel uses oil or electricity that comes from coal, I wouldn’t be surprised if this ended up being worse for the environment than a PET bottle.
With regards to leaching, the FDA has declared PET bottles safe for repeated use.
There's almost nothing worse than forever plastics at this point in time. They're everywhere, they're toxic, and we don't know how to fix it.
Steel is recycled as often as it's economically feasible to do. It's not hand selected by consumers because there's already a whole process for dealing with metals in general that's been in place for a hundred years. Which is ideal really, the less I have to select by hand the better.
Here it's scavengers stripping it out of refuse (and everything that's not bolted to the ground, really). In the US it's probably put on a barge and stripped in Mexico or something, no idea. It's rarely thrown out though, as it's very expensive and very useful.
The FDA is also cool with BPA, pfas, teflon, etc. Don't rely too much on it. PET is safe, ish. As i wrote: use it, avoid buying new. It does leach microplastic but those are everywhere so it's "safe", and by that I mean it's unavoidable "background pollution" these days, as there's microplastic even inside produce.
True, but they're also good carbon sinks.
That’s not my point and I think you’re deliberately misinterpreting it.
> In the US it's probably put on a barge and stripped in Mexico or something, no idea. It's rarely thrown out though, as it's very expensive and very useful.
This sounds like wishful thinking. Do you have any evidence to support this claim? “Don’t worry, just trash it and it’ll probably get sorted in Mexico” doesn’t inspire confidence.
https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2021/mcs2021-iron-steel...
PET is at 30%
https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-...
Is your particular bottle going to be part of the 20%? IDK... but it's more likely by definition that the PET one is going to be part of the 70%, and is also more damaging in every possible way.
Except when dropping it on your foot.
PET is a horror show in the failure scenario.
https://www.wasser-aktuell.com/products/1-0l-trekkatanka%E2%...
small dents, but no no issues with lid or seal
There’s replacement parts on their website to get worn out pieces which is convenient.
Apparently I’m depressed too then, as I value my sleep.
without anyone changing their behavior, a massive collapse is guaranteed
with only a portion of people changing, eventually the world all switches over
even besides all that living healthy is to avoid disease, pain, low function, feeling like crap etc
Russian attack on Ukraine alone produced so much environmental impact it made the effort of your whole righteous life useless. Hell, if made the effort of millions of people like you useless, and it's still going.
You need to stop Russians from waging wars, to convince China from senselessly expanding their industry and to convince the third world from developing. That is what you need to work on instead of sleeping 8 hours and carrying a water bottle.
1) Create an authoritarian environmentalist religion and become its absolute leader. Gain absolute power over the minds of billions of people.
2) Create a single world Illuminati-like government and re-organise the whole world order, trade and civilisation.
3) Make the West so powerful it will finally destroy and conquer both Russia and China and dictate the third world how to live.
You don't like this solution? Well, then the planet is doomed.
I welcome you to propose a better solution than eco-fascism. I would be genuinely interested in hearing any other suggestions that could work.
Just saying "Let's all stop being nasty and live in peace" doesn't work, unfortunately.
These days, not so much. I believe in building communities via mutual aid and support, and that if people have their basic needs meet they will produce incredible results. People want to do good, but are often too tired or too afraid or too burnt out to do it.
1. Pour all your effort into becoming a kinder, wiser human, and watch as it rubs off on the people around you in surprising and far-ranging ways, amplifying itself into the world through "network effects."
2. Become cynical and bitter, and watch the opposite happen.
In either case, the world will present you with all the evidence you need that your way is the one true way and that everyone who sees it differently is clueless (though in the first case, probably not with so much disdain and contempt...).
This is such a insane way to look at it.
The constant fight for increased profit has offshored manufacturing and created a market for constant crap to buy. China isn't expanding industry in a vacuum, to suggest degrowth should only be for the third world, that historically was exploited for the growth of the first world, is honestly a crazy stance.
I like to tell people that eco-fascists are easy to spot, when someone says "we need less people", ask them who goes first.
The west has driven us to this current state for the sake of profit. We ship plastic bullshit across the oceans burning bunker fuel to shave 6 cents a unit off the margin.
The west has built a society so alienated and so dependent on endless, unsustainable growth. The perfect consumer is entirely dependent on capital for their every need. Yet you point out the issue is the third world looking for some dignity after a century of hyper extraction capital.
I saw a silly tweet today, it went "In a way, we're all in a rich dude's poorly designed submersible".
We're all dying for those bastards RPG min/maxing. The real path is anti-profit, durable long lasting items, and interconnected local economies.
Minor snag in your plan: "The West" cannot itself figure out itself "how to live". Witness Jan 6, 2020. And growing strength of Germany's AfD: https://www.dw.com/en/germany-far-right-afd-expands-politica...
The entire chain of things you listed are riddled with plastic. Tools in the manufacturing and shipping processes, to build the roads, insulation, loads of pipes for fuel, insulation, water, all the packaging for the food and products, packaging for shipping the products, metric tons of single-use disposable things, large and small, used in all kinds of industry, in our air, food, water. Fucking everywhere.
Oh but thank God I planted a tree and reused a little plastic shopping bag. That'll really hedge against the hell wrought by the plastic-industrial leviathan that's coiled around every part of our lives.
In a rock band, you have a guitarist and a drummer and a singer and a bass player. Not everyone does the same thing. We all need to contribute in different ways at different times.
Plastics are indeed everywhere and have made some aspects of daily life better while making other aspects worse. Neither of the extremes of overemphasizing personal virtue and nihilism are useful.
I would look into the mass production of these plastics and try to change some things there.
(there are two 4. on the grandparent post)
A lot of the classic list of feel good things do little or come with giant asterisks and this is a good example.
Potable water shortages are a very serious problem... that affects particular areas at particular times.
A little town on a tributary of the amazon in the rainy season can use as much water as they want to water their lawns or bath in and it will cause no issues, while a drought striken area must preserve all their water.
Here is what i have been doing for a decade and would receommend
1. Reusing plastic bags (i love cotton bags but not ideal). Fold and keep one or two in your pocket before you leave home
2. Support and use light software so you dont need to upgrade your gadgets (12y laptop i use)
3. Prepare and eat home cooked meal (its 360d in my life). Good for your health and the environment
4. Plant Trees. i plant one every month on average
5. Collect rain water and/or use less water
4. Prefer walking over any other transporation
5. Dont fucking care about trends.
6. Sleep 8hrs. less waking hours means less consumation.. lol
7. Prefer quality over quantity everytime.
8. Carry a water bottle (copper ideal).
9. fuck sugary drinks.