First off, you have to drive everywhere. Because there is nothing to do in your suburb but sleep and watch TV, you need to drive all the time. You drive to work, to school, to the gym, to the stores. Because your house is stand-alone, and likely way too big -as that is the main attraction of suburbia- you need to buy more goodies to fill it up. (People always fill their houses to capacity no matter what the size).
You also need to heat your mansion more in winter and cool it more in summer. Because your neighborhood home-owners association enforces it, you likely need to keep a useless green lawn and waste tons of water on it. Furthermore, you need to mow it regularly spewing out inordinate amounts of greenhouse gases.
Second, you cannot easily change this pattern. It is built-into your life-style. You cannot really walk to the store even if you wanted to, because there is no store, and because it probably isn't safe to walk outside of your development. There are no side-walks, only wide streets with people driving SUV's at very high speeds.
Believe it or not, but infrastructure is foiling elegant solutions like re-usable shopping bags. Today's WSJ has a long article entitled "An Inconvenient Bag." They discuss the failure of the reusable shopping bag. They highlight how stores like Walmart and Home Depot have given out millions of free bags. Bags that cost a lot more to produce, generate more pollution, and take up more space than the ubiquitous evil plastic "t-shirt" bag we all use.
The problem, we are told is that people do not reuse the bag. And it is easy to see why. Such bags do not mesh with suburban shopping habits, where people drive to the store a few times a week and load up. A reusable shopping bag works best for an urban user who walks to the store everyday to pick up necessities for just that day.
When you get to your regular supermarket, you need a cart. You will haul so much heavy stuff that you do need the cart. Instead of shopping with your bag as city dwellers would, you need to put your bags in the cart. It is easy to forget. It is also inconvenient as you don't know how many bags you will need.
Then when you get the bags home and unload them you need to remember to put them back in the car for your next trip. Even with your bag, items come with so much wrapping that your gains are rather minimal. Unless you can put your veggies straight in your re-usable bag -which does not work easily and which some shops won't let you do- you will need tear-off plastic bags in any case.
I am afraid these partial "solutions" do more harm than good. What Walmart and Home Depot and others should do, is sell bags. Make people pay. The more people pay the less they consume and the less waste there is. That unfortunately goes against the whole supermarket philosophy. But then again, as yesterday's WSJ hinted at, shopping at supermarkets does not really save you money. It just makes you consume and waste more. The excess far exceeds your meager savings, and you would be better off buying less, better quality, items at your local grocer.
You would spend the same amount, but be leaner, healthier, and less wasteful. You would also support a sustainable and sensible infrastructure.
1 comment:
Goodness. You have just described EVERYTHING I hate about living in the suburbs. The nearest bus stop from my house is over a mile away, as is the closest supermarket and convenience store. Plus, when you walk anywhere, you stick out as an oddball and people think it is charming and delicious of them to yell at you from their cars or, perhaps, throw stuff at you if they are in a particularly frisky mood. And when I say, frisky, I mean asshole-ish.
The positive part of having a yard is that you can grow much of our own produce. But then again, how many people do you see doing that in Suburbsville?
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