Greener...down the toilet

June 6, 2008

This journey to live more "green" is a process, often painfully slow. Sometimes the steps we take are large (can't think of any recent ones) but more often they are daily, small steps towards living a more earth friendly lifestyle, for lack of a better phrase.

One of this month's changes is....new toilet paper. Hardly worth mentioning but hey it's my blog and I can write about whatever I want.

Our family really appreciates trees. We hike every weekend in the mountains of Maine and never seem to get enough of the woods. The kids already understand how much humans and animals depend on trees for basic survival needs like, um, oxygen. The oceans produce a lot of oxygen as well, Laurent would pipe up if he were writing this.

So it just seems to make sense to try to use less of those virgin trees for wiping our ***es. Too bad we can't return to the good old days of outhouses and using well-read Sears catalogs and corn cobs for toilet "paper". We're trying to do second, third or maybe fourth best and use 100% (80% Post-Consumer) recycled toilet paper.

The ironic thing is that doing so costs more money. Why is making a better choice always a more costlier choice? At least initially, while there isn't enough demand. Sometimes I hate economics. For the past while we've been bumping up against the better choices cost more dilemma. And sometimes you can't choose the best for the environment or the best for your community or the best for your body because you simply can't afford to. But we are trying with each little step to move more in this direction. Which leaves us with less money for some stuff but then we realize in the end, we didn't need that stuff anyway.