Greenabe

I am inventing a new word: Greenabe, which is like “wannabe” but green. As in “I would like to live a greener lifestyle, I am a green wannabe," or “greenabe, if you will.

Over the years, I’ve become rather concerned with the state of our environment and wonder what kind of planet my nieces and nephews will inherit after I am done with it. As a result I have become a bit of a recycling nazi at home, and am constantly hassling Todd about what he throws into the trash. I make a loud, dramatic huffing noise as I reach into the trash bin and fish out whatever offensive, but recyclable, object he’s tossed in there. Then I passive-aggressively sigh as I open the back door and toss it into the appropriate bin on the deck outside. Admittedly he’s not bad about separating the trash by any means—it’s just that I am a pain in the ass about the very few times he forgets and lobs something recyclable into the trash.

But with all my concern, and all my huffing about recyclable items in the trash, am I doing enough so that my nieces and nephews will be left with a clean planet to live on? The answer is probably no—which is what makes me a greenabe. But the concept of being a greenabe has its own issues. A whole market niche has formed around being green. There are house paints that are made with green pigments, there are cleaning products made with green ingredients; there are canvas bags to be bought for carrying my groceries, notepads made with recycled paper, building material made out of sustainable bamboo and clothing made out of organic cotton and hemp. So it leads me to the dilemma of will buying more stuff lead me to dispose of even more stuff when I replace the non-green stuff I have. Which is greener? Buying green products and supporting the people who make them or sticking with the non-green stuff I currently have and not producing the demand for more stuff?

I don’t know the answer, but I do know that I can make simple changes in our lives, and take the changes one at a time. I’ve switched to a brand of cleaning product that is manufactured in a plant that uses sustainable energy. I carry reusable bags to the market, and I drive slower on the highway so that I use less gas. The current greenabe change we’re making is to our commute. We live in a town that I like to call Podunk, RI due to the fact that it’s in the country. Todd works in the big city, Providence, and I work in a waterfront town. My workplace is on the way to his, kind of, so Todd and I have been commuting in to work together. Because our marina is a few blocks from where I work we leave the Jeep there, so I can use it during the day if I need to. It’s saved us on gas a great deal because we only have one car traveling the one route we’d both normally be on, and his bitchen Acura is more fuel efficient than my Jeep.

The next greenabe thing I want to do is to recycle when we’re on the boat. At the moment we don’t recycle beer bottles and soda cans while on the boat. They call go into the same trash bin only because I haven’t found the space where I want to keep a recycling bin or a trash bag for the recyclables. And when we’re on a longer trip I don’t often see recycling bins at the marinas we go to, so then I am stuck hauling bags of empty bottles and cans around until we do see a bin. But I comfort myself with the idea that it’s only a few weeks out of the entire year that I don’t recycle those things and my inner nag pipes up with “But if the whole world took a vacation from recycling, where would we be in a few decades?”

Are you a greenabe? What greenabe habits have you been keeping lately?