I love to shop.  I really do.  Recently I was scraping ice off my car, or trying to.  It wasn’t really working.  I thought, well I guess I should go buy a new scraper.  I thought, I can look around and maybe find a better version.  I’m trying not to buy things unless I’m really going to use them, so every time something like this happens, I’m kind of excited.  (Perhaps that makes my life a little sad, but mostly I’m just poor and like to shop.)  After being excited I realized something.  What I have isn’t working and I need an ice scraper that works in New England in the winter, but buying a new one means I’m going to be throwing out the old one.  It will be put on the curb, dumped in a garbage truck and taken to a landfill where it will stay for decades, maybe centuries.  The thing about it is there’s almost nothing I can do about it.  If I took my scraper to a hardware store and asked them to sharpen it and fix it for me, they’d look at me like I was nuts and tell me to buy a new one.  Our economy isn’t based on making things that last a long time and getting them fixed if anything happens.  Mass production has created an economy where we buy things as cheaply as possible and replace them when they break.

In order for this post not to be a total downer, I’m going to give a few pieces of advice, based on The Green Book by Elizabeth Rogers and Thomas M. Kostigen.  Try to buy things with minimal packaging, and as much recycled and recyclable packaging as possible.  Shop local because they won’t have spent a lot of energy to get the products there from far away.  Shop at secondhand clothing stores first.  Consider buying clothes made from organic cotton and natural dyes.  Use rechargeable batteries (4 rechargeable batters can replace 100 regular AAs).