The Sustainability R’s: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and More

This week I heard an educator for sustainability from the United Arab Emirates talk via skype at the CELF summer institute about the 6R’s of sustainability, rather than the more familiar 3R’s (reduce, reuse, recycle).  Respect and refuse were two of the additional R's she listed, but I could not recall the 6^th R.  I immediately googled 6R’s and found that rather than a standardized list of 6Rs, there are a whole slew of sustainability R’s offered on different web pages.  That got me thinking, how many sustainability R’s should we have?  Which are the most important? 

Here are some of the contenders I found (starting with the big 3):

1.     Reduce

2.     Reuse

3.     Recycle

4.     Respect

5.     Refuse

6.     Replenish

7.     Rethink

8.     Repair

9.     Reinvent

10.  Recover

11.  Responsibility

12.  Replant

13.  Restore

14.  Rot

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

The classic 3R’s of sustainability were on all of the lists I found. 

Reduce

By reducing the amount of “stuff” we obtain, we decrease the energy needed for manufacture, transport and disposal.   We also cause less disruption to the ecosystems where the materials originate, are transported through and are disposed.  Life on a finite world, with finite resources, always involves limits.

Reuse

The more we can reuse items and avoid single use items, the better.  Take a look at my earlier post on the humble handkerchief vs. the throw-away tissue.  

Recycle

There has been a huge shift across the country from throwing most waste into the trash, to recycling a large portion of it.  Single-stream recycling is changing the amount of recycling done by many households.  Check out yesterday's post on recycling.  

The new Sustainability R’s:

Here are some of the additional sustainability R's I found in my search.

Respect and Responsibility both ask us to think about the ecosystem, including the people who live around the world, and think about any effects our actions might have.

Refuse

To me, refuse fits within the category reduce.  By refusing items, we are essentially reducing our consumption.  This month of July, many in the sustainability community are encouraging others to refuse single-use disposable plastic items.  At ReduceFootprints blog this week’s #CTWW challenge is to refuse plastic bags.

Replenish, replant, restore, recover all seem to convey a similar theme: trying to leave the world as we found it for those who come after us. 

Rethink/reinvent promote divergent/out-of-the-box thinking.  As is often attributed to Einstein, "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them."  This is a critical part of sustainability and one that I think should definitely be highlighted.  By rethinking, we also make sure to view actions from different perspectives and consider how they will effect different constituencies of our planet. 

Repair/renew might be lumped together with the replenish  group in terms of repairing the environment for future generations.  However, they can also be thought of as repairing or renewing an item so that it may be reused. 

Rot – I found this on a list of R's  to represent composting, mulching and other parts of the cycle.  Growing up, my family collected kitchen scraps for our garden well before composting became remotely fashionable.  

Here are some more R's I’ve thought of:

Reflect, Realize, Relate, Rotate, Remember, Return, Remediate

I like Return, because it conveys a sense of a full circle, rather than a linear path.  I think ultimately we should be thinking “cradle to cradle” for all items we use, in other words, consider the entire cycle so that there is no “waste” product at any point.  This will be the subject for a future post.

What would your sustainability R’s be?

Are there any R's that are not mentioned that you would include?

(This post was shared on Healthy, Happy, Green & Natural Party Hop.)

Four reasons why you should adjust your shower colder

Now that the temperature is starting to creep up here in NY, it’s good to remind ourselves to turn the shower a little colder each day.   Turn your shower to its normal temperature setting and then adjust so it’s slightly colder than you would like.  For those of you with young children, do the same for their bathwater. 

Adjusting the shower/bath water temperature colder:

1.     Acclimates your body to colder water so that you will be all set for summer swimming in lakes, rivers, pools and the ocean.  A scientist I knew who worked on a boat in Alaska once told me that everyone on the boat jumped into the freezing water each day to make sure that if they ever fell overboard, their bodies would be acclimated to the cold water. 

2.     Saves energy.  Not only do you save energy by not heating up the water, but you also save energy by not having to cool down your house or apartment after heating up the hot water and having the hot water travel through your pipes.

3.     Saves water.  At least for me, the colder the shower, the quicker the shower, and the less water used.

4.     Is good for your hair and skin.  Folk wisdom has it that cold water is better for your hair and skin than warm water.  (Although, this might just be due to quicker showers (#3), rather than anything intrinsic about the water temperature.)

Of course, you could also try not showering for a while and growing your microbiome instead, as was described in this interesting NYT article:  My No-Soap, No-Shampoo, Bacteria-Rich Hygiene Experiment

(This post was shared on All Things Thursday and Healthy, Happy, Green & Natural Party Hop.)

Are free weekly newspapers a form of litter?

Each morning when I walk my dog, I see that more and more snow has melted.  While I love seeing the snowdrops popping up, I don't love seeing some of the other items that are emerging.

In a 20 minute walk, I spotted over 30 blue plastic bags filled with soggy, dirt-encrusted newspapers.   One house had over nine of these free newspapers, in various states of decay, on its property.  I ask you, why would anyone continue to deliver free weekly newspapers to a house that already has the previous eight weeks worth of newspapers covering its front lawn?

The newspapers are tossed out of a moving car window each week.  Some weeks the blue bags seem to be flung helter-skelter and end up on empty lots or midway between two houses.  During the winter, the freebies were often promptly covered by a snowfall before anyone noticed they had been delivered.
Usually I find them to be a nuisance - one more thing to pick up and add to the recycling container.  Upon occasion, I have found myself short of a dog poop bag, and the blue bags have come in handy.  I wonder if anyone reads these papers.  They are mostly a bunch of advertisements with only a single page of newspaper.

Several of these blue bags have found their way into the gutters that run along the side of the street, and I am concerned that they may clog up the storm drains.

Communities across the US have been faced with this same issue.  In many areas, newspapers are exempt from litter laws.

What do you think about having a plastic-wrapped newspaper that was not requested deposited on peoples' property?  Who is responsible for picking up the ones that end up in "unclaimed territory"?   Is it possible to opt out of these deliveries, so we can reduce rather than recycle?

Would you wear a “special occasion” dress twice?

So here’s the deal.  I’m not a big shopper; in fact, my natural tendency is to avoid shopping for clothes as much as possible.  With my niece’s Bat Mitzvah rapidly approaching, I feel the usual societal pressure to buy a new dress for the party.  But, I’m thinking of (gasp!) re-wearing the EXACT same dress I wore to her sister’s Bat Mitzvah party two years ago, which I, incidentally had also worn at my own daughter’s Bat Mitzvah party two years before that.   

Why is it considered taboo for a woman to wear the same outfit to more than one special occasion?  Men, in general do not feel the same pressure, and many regularly re-wear the same suits for special occasions, without mentally going over the who-might-be-there list, to make sure they are not committing a fashion faux pas. 

In the great mantra of sustainability, reduce, reuse, recycle, reduce comes first.   How many dresses do we need?  Especially for those of us who are not fans of shopping, how did we get to a point where we feel compelled to consume more goods rather than reuse and reduce simultaneously?

In an interesting post, Nadia Eghbal, writes about her experiment wearing one outfit for an entire year.

I’d love to read your thoughts on this!

(This post was also shared on Healthy, Happy, Green & Natural Party Hop and Frugal Thursday.)