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Eco-friendly lifestyle advices are the main topic of many publications and Internet pages created in the last years. Although being a Toronto real estate professional gives me plenty of changes to talk about the many ways of green living with my clients, my topic today will be a bit more specific. In this text, I will try not to repeat all the advices on eco-life, you have probably heard them dozen times before anyway. Instead, I would like to contemplate on groceries, water and electric current – as the three basic resources that we, who live in modern countries, tend to use without further thinking.

Food

Since most people (I would like to believe!) regularly recycle paper, glass and tins, most of your common litter is probably composted of groceries. The majority of this food rubbish is often still in its original packaging and in a good condition. The shocking reality is that between 20 and 30% of all groceries bought by Canadian families is dumped later. Together with the food thrown out in shops and restaurants, it makes between 7 and 14 billion tonnes of food wasted annually. In Canadian dollars, that’s $3 to 5 billion per year.

Now you are probably shocked by these numbers, aren’t you? With so many charities trying to help people affected by lack of food, while at the same time so much of it is being wasted right under our noses. Whereas it wouldn’t be too clever to pack unused foods and send it to countries hit by famine, there are other ways to prevent food being thrown away in vain. 1. Try using leftovers. For example if you had some rice remaining from last night’s dinner, you could have made stuffed peppers today. 2. A good way of preventing food going past the expiry date is sorting your food cabinet by this criteria: older food, that is going to expire soon, is stored in the front, while the longer lasting products can stay in the back of the shelves. 3. If you know you will not consume food that’s just about to expire and would consequently throw it out, just bring it to your local charity or soup kitchen or similar place while the food is still in good condition. Let some people enjoy it – hunger isn’t only to Africa. 4. Have you considered mulching the leftovers instead of wasting them? Maybe you will oppose that you don’t own a garden. But your neighbour might have one and may be able to help you to get rid of your leftovers.

Water

There are a lot of ways to prevent wasting water and you can probably name many of them yourself. But there is one remarkable aspect of family water saving – toilets, as places we use to get rid of our faeces. Nowadays, toilets are absolutely essential – when they are functioning alright, we don’t even need to pay any attention to them. But try to discover the amount of water your family uses every month just for flushing the lavatory. Wow, that’s a lot of water, isn’t it? But it doesn’t have to be that much, there are some methods of decreasing the amount of water needed for every flushing. There are two different methods to achieve that. 1. Substitute your old toilet by a new model that has been designed to use as little water as possible. You might think that there is not much to choose from when buying a new lavatory, but just stop by at your nearest store and see for yourself, you might be surprised! 2. Another way of decreasing the amount of water for flushing is to place a few plastic bottles filled with water into the tank of your toilet. It may take some time to find out just how much is the minimum volume of water for your toilet to keep functioning.

Electric current

You have probably already read a lot of tips and tricks on how to save electric energy. But now let’s talk about tumble dryers, as I identify these myself as one of the biggest energy-eaters in our homes. The popularity of tumble dryers comes from the fact that modern people want everything to be done in the minimum time possible, regardless of the volume of resources that are wasted in the process of speeding things up. Of course we no more want or have the time to wash our clothing by hand, and it is true that by using dishwashers we can waste less water. However, think about tumble dryers. Is it really socially unacceptable to wait a day or two for the clothes to dry? If you really want to “live green”, use your tumble dryer only in emergencies or get rid of it (sell it) altogether. This will have two advantages – you will become even “greener” and you will be able to spend less money on your electricity bills too.

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