Is being green a good thing?
Recently my friend bought his first brand new car, a 2011 Honda Fit. He got it because it is good on gas for the most part and because it gets a specific number of liters to the kilometer for fuel economy it qualified for a government rebate which made it cheaper than the competitive models. Here is the kicker though, he bought the manual transmission version but, if he were to buy the automatic transmission it doesn’t come with a spare tire. Why is this? The dealer said that the automatic transmission weighs more and if they added the spare tire too, that extra weight would push it past the limits for the government fuel economy rebate program. So here you are buying a brand new car with no spare tire, let’s just hope that you have cell service when you have a blowout in the country, he could however buy a spare for extra money from the parts department after he bought the car. This led me to thinking about the “green revolution” and if all of these products aiming to be “green” really worth buying? I was at the store the other day and I saw they were pushing shirts made of bamboo because they were sustainable and saved forests. Here is the problem with that, shirts aren’t made out of other trees, they are made out of cotton and therefore they have no affect whatsoever on deforestation. Also, cotton is a planned crop grown in fields year after year; in my mind this makes something sustainable, the cotton farmers are hardly clearing tracts of forests to plant more cotton fields. Another product I saw was Tupperware saying that it was biodegradable. That’s great but I already have Tupperware, should I go out and buy this Tupperware now because it is “green” that is just a waste of money. If I do buy it, what do I do with my Tupperware that I already have which is perfectly good? Do I throw it out? But maybe it isn’t biodegradable like this new one and that might harm the planet so I had better keep it but that will only take up cupboard space. Do you see where I’m going with this? Having “green” products are great but it is really up to the consumer to figure out if it is worth it to them to buy or are they just falling for a marketing ploy?