Going Green!

I have never really been an environmental activist, yes I recycled and did try to use less resources whenever possible but I probably could have done better on that front. The other day, two of Sindhu's older friends, Uma and our neighbor, Maitri dropped by for a school project and had me fill a survey on my usage of plastics. Although I'm not an abuser by any means, I definitely could do better. Here are some of the green initiatives that fell into place after we moved here without much effort.

1) I was surprised to see how many solar panels are used in India. In the house we're renting, all the hot water geysers are powered by solar panels, and I see the same panels on the rooftop of most of the houses in our community. I wonder why we don't use solar panels as prevalently in California, we get plenty of sun over there too.

2) Our community harvests rain water at the clubhouse and reuses the water for the gardens. Our neighbor also harvests rain at her home, unfortunately our house was not designed that way. Not everyone thinks it is a priority.

3) Although plastic bags are given at the super market and vegetable stores, we reuse them as garbage bags or for other purposes so I don't purchase separate bags for garbage. At the beginning, I was annoyed that all the vegetables would get dumped into one bag at the vegetable market rather than each vegetable type separated out like in the US, but it's far more environmentally friendly as less bags are used. There is a growing movement for folks to bring their own bags to supermarkets and vegetables stores the way it used to be. Many of the clothing stores go with paper bags and I would say more stores go with paper here than in the US.

4) Although you see many places where people collect paper and plastic, separating all the recycling items from the perishables is not that common here. No one comes by to pick up recyclable items but I guess we have the choice to drop the items off at one of the paper and plastic collection centers. Something I need to improve on.

5) We produce less garbage here. Although the amount of packaging has increased ten fold in India in the last few years, we still produce less garbage here than in the US.

6) We consume less water. The kids and Prasad take "bucket baths" and I've mentioned this before, the geyser only provides a limited amount of hot water so no more long showers. No dishwasher and the gardener waters the plants by hand rather than with automatic sprinklers and we have smaller gardens and less grass.

7) We don't use a dryer except when it rains. The clothes tend to be stiff but we're used to it now.

8) We certainly save on gas (petrol) We only have one vehicle, the kids use a school bus, we both live near our workplace and we carpool to work.

I can obviously do better and will work on it. Any suggestions, please let me know!