Saving the extra mile

This past week we discussed transportation and its implications on sustainability. As a commuter, I already know that what I'm doing is completely unsustainable and this discussion session made me feel really bad about my current habits. But there are other ways to reduce my transportation footprint than just not driving my car. It would be really difficult for me to be able to get to school, work, and water polo without using my car since I don't live close to any of these places. So finding alternative methods to reduce my impacts was really helpful.

This week I decided to cut bananas from my diet because they travel a long ways to end up on my kitchen counter. Typically, I would eat one banana a day because they are the ultimate on-the-go snack and/or meal. So instead of grabbing a banana, I grabbed grapes in the morning before I left for work each morning. The grapes were grown in California, which means that they traveled far fewer miles to enter into my fridge than the bananas did to reach my counter. Grapes taste just as good as bananas, so the switch was definitely easy. Unfortunately, it takes a lot more grapes to fill me up than it would for one banana to. But I would like to think it is still better for me to eat the grapes than the bananas because of the less amounts of transport required and less packaging changes. However, grapes actually require packaging when you buy them from the store while bananas usually just have stickers. The grapes packaging is recyclable though, so maybe it is still okay and I would assume it undergoes fewer package changes. This switch was not too difficult for me to do and I feel like it made a difference.

On Friday, I arranged a carpool with my friend to school and to work. What made this carpool pretty supreme was that my friend's car is electric, making my impact even smaller! It's tough to give up your car for a day and be totally reliant on somebody else and be able to be flexible with their schedule. Fortunately for me, my friend and I have about the same schedule for work and school. This made it easier on both of us to actually go through with this. I chose to carpool with my friend because it made a lot of sense for me to initiate it since we both go to the same places and since I live on her route to and from school. To be honest, I think that this was more difficult for my friend than for me because she had to remember to pick me up. Usually she just drives to school without having to get off the freeway, but on Friday, she had to remember to get off at my street! This was a great way for me to reduce my driving impact because it took little effort on my part and allowed me to not emit much or any green house gases from my vehicle. It makes a lot of sense to carpool with someone who has an electric car because the benefits are just endless.

This week was not as challenging as I thought it would be. I'm glad I made some good life changes that I hope to continue to implement into my life as the days go on.