Challenge 7: Nothing New in your Shopping Cart

Here is the story that will appear in Saturday's paper (written by me.) It's about one of my neighbours who I've written about before -- the ever-inspiring Mary-Margaret. I secretly think she's turning into too much of a media prostitute though and might have to cut her off soon. (Her two children appeared on the front page of The Saturday Star recently for a story on homework, of all things.)

Skip to the bottom, if you want to get right to the challenge.

Not counting ingestibles, this is all Mary-Margaret McMahon bought last month: stamps, heat packs for her purple, throbbing fingers, and a book on garbage she uses to teach children in schools about composting.

Her friend Karen Ingham has her beat. The only thing she purchased, shiny and new? A cane. “Does that count, since it is a medical device?” she asks in a confessional e-mail.
They’re part of a dozen east-end friends who pledged to not buy anything new for all of February.

No new dresses. No body lotion. No Valentines Day cards.

“The motto was `less stuff, more fun,’” says McMahon, a mother of two known affectionately as the “eco-witch” of her Danforth-Woodbine neighbourhood. “Consumption is terrible for the planet. All this stuff uses a lot of energy — creating it makes pollution, selling it, then using it and disposing of it. Do we really need it? Does it make us happy?”

The neighbourhood posse of mothers is part of a growing movement around the world that’s unplugging from the consumer grid. Instead of buying green, or buying recycled, they’re just not buying.

The idea started around a San Francisco dinner table three Christmases ago. After the discussion turned to how most Christmas gifts end up in the garbage, the group decided to participate in a social experiment. They would spend a year not shopping for anything new. At all. With a few obvious exceptions – food and drink, health essentials like medication, and safety musts, like new bicycle brake pads so coming to a stop didn’t mean diving for grass at every stop sign.

They called themselves `The Compact’ after the Mayflower Compact, signed by the pilgrims arriving to New England more than three centuries ago bent on building a new pure community. But that was tongue-in-cheek. What motivated most of them was the idea of living a less cluttered, more compact life. (As in trash compacter.) And contributing less to their country’s ever-growing landfills.

“It’s not easy for me to shop and feel good about it – engaging in mindless consumption,” says 27-year-old Rachel Kesel, one of the original Compacters who two years later, is still not shopping.

The idea hit an international nerve. From that dining room, the group found themselves on the Today Show and Good Morning America – deflecting criticism of their small plan as unpatriotic. And a movement was born, with new recruits joining their small on-line Yahoo group. Today, more than 8,000 people from as far as Australia and Taiwan have joined and committed to the same principles.

The idea’s appeal, says Kesel, is it's easy portability – anyone can do it. It’s also a one-stop shop for addressing global problems – sweatshop labour, climate change, deforestation, mining, she says. “People have a lot of anxiety about the future of the planet,” says Kesel, a professional dog-walker. “The compact allows you to address your own anxiety.”

Every week, Torontonians chucked more than five kilograms of garbage each in 2006. That’s not counting all the waste we recycled and composted. Over a year, that adds up to more than 280 kilograms of trash – on average – each. Across the country, each of us fill 30 green garbage bags a year with our garbage, according to Statistics Canada.

And for every garbage bin we pack, another 70 were packed to produce all that stuff we’re throwing out. That’s right: 70. A single gold wedding ring gleaming in a store window has a trail of 20 tonnes of mine waste, according to Annie Leonard.

She’s an environmental activist who spent 18 years digging through dumps and factories in places like Bangladesh and Haiti researching the international dumping of garbage for environmental groups like GreenPeace and Health Care Without Harm.

After three years of lecturing on the destructive nature of the disposable consumer culture, she condensed her talk into a 20-minute free on-line video called “The Story of Stuff” which is has become an underground hit – averaging 15,000 new views every day.

In it, Leonard shows how most stuff we buy is made to break or seem run-down and old fairly quickly, in order to keep us buying more. She calls it planned and perceived obsolescence – terms coined first by U.S. industrial designer Brooks Stevens in 1954 — and she reveals how it’s been enshrined not only in North American culture, but economic policy since the 1950s.

“It was a combination of the government and industry groups that decided to push excessive consumerism as the defining force in American culture, which includes where people gets their self-fulfillment,” Leonard says in an interview from her office in Berkeley, California.

But instead of fulfillment, North Americans are decidedly more miserable than they were 60 years ago, she says – trapped in a culture of trying to buy shiny new versions of happiness predestined to break.

Is not shopping the answer? Most compacters say it has given them more free time.
“It’s amazing how much time it takes to buy stuff,” says Judith Levine, a New York journalist who spent a year signed off not only stores, but movie theatres and restaurants for her book Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping. “You can spend three hours searching for a new printer part.”

Leonard says instead of requiring more work, her experiment with the Compact was relaxing. “I felt like I just got rid of a part-time job. I didn’t realize how draining it was to pay attention and stay engaged in the work-watch-spend treadmill. It’s exhausting,” says Leonard, who lives in a neighbourhood that shares ladders, yard equipment and even a pick-up truck.

Many say the unexpected benefit was feeling more connected to a community.
Less time shopping means more time in parks and libraries. It also means more borrowing, which requires getting to know your neighbours.

McMahon’s experiment proved exactly that, she said. She wanted a toilet seat for a presentation on recycled toilet paper. She put out an e-mail to her group of friends and voilà, she had two. When one member of the group needed special cake pans for a photo shoot, they were offered up by a neighbour. A request went out for Velcro stickers. Sure enough, they arrived.

“None of us are deprived. We’re living very well,” says Kesel, who sports second-hand rain gear for her wetter walks. “You can even find an iPhone used now. The fact that people are throwing things out at such a rapid rate is one of the reasons we found we could do this.”
There are times you have to get creative, she admits. For McMahon, it was a birthday party her 10-year-old son Liam was invited to. Instead of buying a present, she baked a lemon-poppy seed cake, the birthday boy’s favourite. And she sent along vouchers for nine others like it.

Next year, she hopes to convince her posse to extend the consumer fast to a whole season or even six months.

“It’s made all of us more mindful,” she says.

Starting today though, she’s free to shop new again. What does she plan on buying?
“I don’t really need anything,” says McMahon, 41. “Maybe a haircut.”

  The Challenge: Join the Compact for a week.
Motivation: Watch The Story of Stuff. It's a free 20-minute online video that will open your eyes to the damage of our disposable consumer culture.
Process: Don’t buy anything new – other than food, medical supplies or safety essentials. You can shop all you want at Value Village or the Goodwill, though.
Cost: Perfectly nothing.
Savings: It depends on how much of a shopaholic you are. Over the year she spent abstaining from shopping for her book Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping, New York journalist Judith Levine paid down her $8,000 credit card debt.

If you think this is hard-core, check out No Impact Man. He spent a year not only not shopping, but not driving, not using electricity, not even taking the subway.

-- Catherine Porter

On Patricia's sage advice, here is the webiste for Freecycle in Toronto -- it's a kind of free Craig's List.

Tree skyscrapers - Skyscraper trees

There's a great little place on Queen St., a bit west of Dufferin, called Cafe Taste, where you buy wine and they supply a plate of cheese that's selected to compliment the drink. Sunday nights, they also show films, usually with an environmental bent -- not surprising, since owner Jeremy Day is trying to make the cafe as green as possible. He even recycles the little aluminum candle cups. With the movies, he says, "we're doing what we can to reach out and shake things up."

I was there a couple of weeks ago to see a PBS documentary on climate change. It covered all the bases, with billions of pixels devoted to shots of belching smokestacks and raging storms.

These days, I'm far more focused on solutions than on adding to the warnings about what climate change will do to the planet and to us.  Fear isn't a great motivator for long-term change.

This movie was long -- two hours -- a series of talking heads that made it seem the only people involved in the issue are white males between 45 and 65 (but that's another story.) The main thing is that it raised all the potential answers, and then showed how none would work. In the end, the message was, we have to wait with our fingers crossed for some new miracle technolgoy, like giant (pie-shaped) mirrors high in the sky) to come along.

One of the things trashed -- and in about 15 seconds -- was the idea of conservation. It seems that it involves wearing a sweater, and that's too difficult so forget it.  Unfortunately, that's a pretty common idea. And it's wrong. After covering the environment for years, I've concluded that conservation -- simply finding ways to use less energy and resources -- appears to be the one thing with a chance of success.  But we have to go at it with enthusiasm and imagination. Some of the steps depend on new technology, but a lot are simply being smarter and less wasteful, not to mention learning from the past.

That's what this blog is about. Ideas and experiences. What works, and what doesn't.

At my place, a downtown rowhouse, three people, we've cut our Hydro bill be more than half without changing anything about how we live -- which means there's still a long way to go. Some of the stuff -- like a new furnace and windows -- was expensive, but the main change wasn't. We replaced an electric water heater with a natural gas model, and turned down the temperature a little. Since both heaters are rentals, there was very minimnal upfront cost, and the increase in gas use is a tiny fraction of the previous electricity consumption.

Long lists of these types of things are availalbe. For a start, try the Conservation Council of Ontario's Weconserve web site.

I'm also interested in bigger-scale projects, because we won't stop climate change with small, piecemeal actions like the one's I've taken. They're important, but not nearly enough. How can we construct houses and other buildings better, so they use little or no energy? How can we change the forces that continue to promote urban sprawl? I love things like the home being built by David and Cathy Braden, near Hamilton, which doesn't need a furnace and will use only about 15 per cent as much energy as the average house. Or others that I've heard of since I wrote about the Bradens last month. Or, potentially, the skyscraper, to be unveiled next week, that's supposed to do everything a tree does -- generate its own energy, create soil, support life -- except reproduce itself. Or the communities in Germany that produce more energy than they consume. Or the house in Thailand covered with paint that cools the surface enough that every day 80 litres of water condenses out of the air to be used for washing and toilets. It's described in Chris Turner's book, The Geography of Hope.

So, I aim to present, and I hope you'll add, ideas big and small, that are different and workable. What have you tried? What happened? What would you like to see? How can we make that happen?

Next up for me will be that tree-skyscraper-tree. Okay, soon up. Another challenge is coming first.

-- Peter Gorrie