KeepGreenGoing

Local or organic? What’s more important? Supporting the farmer’s market or ensuring you have the USDA stamp? Both types of food make a great impact on the environment and both are worth buying. Here’s a little more info on each:

Local Food

Buying local food, such as local produce, meat and dairy is an exceptional way to support your local economy. By purchasing food from local farmers, business owners and local coffee shops, more of your money will get reinvested back into the community. Locally grow food is often produced by small farmers, many which follow organic farming methods but may not be able to afford organic certification.

Another benefit to buying local food is you don’t have to pay as much for the food to be packaged and transported to you. The average piece of produce sold in the United States travels 1500 miles before arriving on the shelves. If you buy local you help decrease the demand for shipping produce from far away.

Ultimately, buying local means buying fresh. Local produce usually tastes great and it hasn’t been sitting on a truck for the past couple of days. Buying local is a great way to support your local economy and keep money in your own community.

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I’ve been thinking about this topic a lot lately, especially after some of the articles we’ve written on packaging. Should you buy conventional CDs or purchase digital downloads? Which method is more environmentally friendly? Which method is more beneficial for the artist? Let’s take a look at the two different processes:

Purchasing CDs

1. A band/artist records their album
2. The music is pressed onto billions of CDs
3. The CDs include artwork, inserts and are individually packaged and shrink-wrapped
4. The individual packages are placed in larger boxes for shipping
5. The larger boxes are shipped out across the world via trains, planes and automobiles to retail stores and online distributors
6. Retails stores often place stickers on the individual CDs
7. Online distributors place the CDs into other individual shipping boxes for order deliveries
8. From this point, two things happen:
   1. You drive to the retail store to purchase the CD
   2. A truck (UPS, FedEx) deliveries the CD to your residence

Digital Download

1. Log on to iTunes, Amazon or any other online digital distributor
2. Make purchase
3. Downloading begins

Obviously, from an environmental standpoint, our second choice seems most logical. But is it really that simple? What about the graphic designer who lives off designing CDs? Is his/her career simply turned into a JPEG format of an album cover? What happens to the value of the artistic approach poured into the layout, design, photography, packaging, typography and printing of conventional CDs? How much money does an artist make from the digital download? What happens when going green ends up cutting others out of jobs?

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The United States is the world’s top consumer nation. Americans spend about four times more per person than any other country. And let’s face it - we do it largely by shopping. On average, every American shops everyday for about 24 minutes. Per year, we spend somewhere around $4 trillion. That’s a lot of money. And think about this… A new car is made every second, 2.3 million shoes are purchased every day and 2. 6 billion toys are bought every year. Through marketing and advertising (I should know, I work at an advertising agency) the psychology of shopping is embedded deep into our brains. The real question I always wonder - where does all that stuff go?

Each of us produces about 4.54 pounds of trash every day through our consumption and disposal habits. This amounts to 1657 pounds per person per year. That’s a lot of disposal. Also consider that every month 100,000 CDs are tossed and 50 million pounds of toothbrushes are scattered throughout the country’s landfills every year. It can easily be said that we’re a disposable society - we use tons of materials, water and energy to make the things we buy - only to discard of them later.

With over 6.6 billion people on this earth doing lots of buying, shopping poses a real threat. So where does all “this stuff” come from? It’s manufactured. The manufacturing industry alone sucks 1/3 of the energy and 13 percent of the water supply in the United States. With all this in mind, here are three simple steps from “The Green Book” to keep green going when shopping:

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With its new men’s line hitting stores, Aveda, the Minnesota-based hair care company, is keeping things pure with Pure-formance. The line has been positioned as a sub-brand of Aveda and the packaging features high levels of post consumer recycled content. The package was designed by Minneapolis design firm Duffy & Partners.

This product is yet another example of a more sustainable product line from a company that has always pushed to keep things green and pure.

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