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This week:
- Author saves $7,000 a year with greener habits at home
- Mountain guides’ close-up view of climate change
- Grazing cattle and growing crops on the same land cuts emissions
Author shares tips to save thousands of dollars with greener habits
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Why don’t you start by telling me what inspired your new book?
I wanted to give people the tools to navigate sustainable living. I wanted to dispel that misconception that going green is much more expensive. It absolutely isn’t.
I’m giving you tangible, practical things that you can do starting in your kitchen, which is one area where we create a great deal of waste. It’s also one area where we can have a really big impact individually.
Why was that your focus?
Well, I think because it’s very difficult for people to wrap their heads around, you know, going out and investing $25,000 in solar panels, for example. Or, you know, buying an electric car.
But I think that right now with inflation and grocery prices, I really wanted to give people options as to how to reduce waste. And it starts, you know, again with looking at what you have in your home and starting there.
Can you talk a little bit more about what you mean by that?
[For example] you know, a lot of people have trouble breaking up with the paper towel habit. It’s one of the cleverest marketing strategies because we’re buying something that we know we’re going to throw out.
But paper towels are not as effective as regular cleaning cloths. See what you have in your home. Most people have lots of dish towels lying around stashed in drawers. Do you have old T-shirts that you can cut up? Do you have old pillowcases? Old socks? I know it sounds very out there, but why would you buy that product when you already have it in your home?
You mentioned that you saved a lot of money following the tips that you give in your book. Can you tell me how much you saved?
It would be easy to save at least $7,000 when you look at the volume of paper towels that we buy, the volume of plastic baggies that we buy, and you take it from the kitchen, even into the bathroom, for example.
You know pads cost women thousands of dollars. When you switch those out to period panties, again, you’re going to see substantial savings.
Where do the biggest savings come from?
In Canada, the average family is throwing away almost $1,100 every single year in food waste.
I was throwing money in the garbage, literally. So I started to rethink my grocery habits. I started to really plan out what I was going to eat in a week, utilized recipes that didn’t ask for ingredients where you couldn’t buy just what you needed. And that’s when I started bulk shopping. I also eventually realized, OK, when I shop, I need to make sure that I’m putting all of the older food in the front, not in the back [of the fridge, freezer and cupboards].
What would you say is the biggest lesson that you learn from, you know, going through all this and writing this book?
Don’t be discouraged. Try try again and just keep doing it. Habits take time to break and habits take time to make. So keep that in the back of your head and understand that there’s no such thing as a perfect environmentalist.
— Emily Chung
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Reader feedback
A number of readers have also shared more tips about how to save money while living greener.
Judy Mcarthur wrote:
” 1. Catch the cold water in your shower before it heats up, to water your plants.
2. Wash your dishes in a pan, and then use the used water to water your garden.
3. If living on a small property, collect your cut vegetable peels in an old container with a cover, let [them] breakdown then mix with soil and bury in your flower bed. Great compost.”
Dave Thomas of Smiths Falls, Ont., wrote:
“We close drapes at night in the winter to keep the heat in and open them during the day to let the sun warm the rooms. Do the reverse in summer. Check ceiling fans for directions — down in winter up in summer. Every little bit helps!”
Bob Scott of Chilliwack, B.C., suggests saving on groceries by collaborating with neighbours to grow a range of shared crops. With individual gardens, “the usual result is using some and discarding or composting the remainder. Rarely do the multiple growers share, not because they’re stingy, but because they have not considered the idea of community.”
He suggests, instead, “Allocate specific vegetables to one or more home owners, each of whom will grow specific plants… The result will be astonishing.” When he lived in Sechelt, B.C., he grew potatoes and carrots, while his neighbours grew onions and squash. They both grew tomatoes, and all the produce was shared. He’s trying to set up a similar system at his new home in Chilliwack.
Please keep those money-saving, climate-saving tips coming.
For a future issue, we’re interested in your tips to live more sustainably and save money at the same time. Do you have some to share?
Write us at whatonearth@cbc.ca.
Have a compelling personal story about climate change you want to share with CBC News? Pitch a First Person column here.
The Big Picture: Mountain guides’ close-up view of climate change
Glaciers in Canada’s Rockies are retreating rapidly, giving mountain guides an up-close view of global warming.
As the snow and ice melt, new hazards are emerging in the high alpine. From rockfall to variable weather, guides are re-evaluating how safe well-established mountain routes are and adapting in response: changing the time of day or year they’re choosing certain routes, choosing different locations and making last-minute decisions to alter the day’s plans as conditions change.
While people can adapt their mountain activities up to a point, guest books from a beloved alpine hut that succumbed to climate change-induced erosion show that there are things of cultural and emotional significance that will still be lost.
For more images and first-hand accounts of the dramatic changes underway in the mountains due to climate change, and their impacts, check out this beautiful multimedia feature.
.— Molly Segal
Hot and bothered: Provocative ideas from around the web
Grazing cattle and growing crops on the same land cuts emissions
Sally Bernard’s black and white cows wander over a field in Freetown, P.E.I., chewing on hay and basking in the warm April sunshine.
These are beef cattle, but their main purpose isn’t to make it to market — it’s to improve the quality of the soil beneath their hoofs.
“They’re feeding the biology in the soil, which is then helping to sequester carbon,” explains Bernard, co-owner of Barnyard Organics.
“It’s just doing a whole slate of things that we don’t even really fully understand yet.”
Bernard is learning more about how to graze cattle on her organic grain farm through research as one of this year’s Nuffield Canada scholars.
As part of the agricultural scholarship program, she’ll travel to different parts of the world to visit farms that practise both grazing and crop growing — and bring that knowledge back to P.E.I. to help her farm and others on the Island.
She says taking a combined farming approach comes with some challenges, such as avoiding soil compaction and needing to set up fences and water for cattle.
“Having a farm with one commodity is already a lot of management,” she said. “So incorporating those other things does complicate it.”
But Bernard and her husband believe the benefits outweigh the demands.
Beyond improving soil biology, their cattle herd boosts the fertility of their soil by providing free manure. And that saves money they’d otherwise spend on expensive fertilizer.
“This is a really timely topic given the pressures to reduce fertilizer use, and that the cost of all of those things are going up,” she said.
Although livestock contribute to climate change by producing methane, their manure can also reduce the need for chemical fertilizers, which also emit greenhouse gases.
Her own farm’s experiment is still in its early stages. Barnyard Organics is now on its fourth year of a planned eight-year grazing rotation.
Under their crop rotation plan, cattle stay in the same field for two years, and are moved twice a day so they can access fresh grass and graze the field evenly.
Then last year, the cows moved to a new pasture — and Bernard and her husband planted wheat in the newly vacated field. The crop sown there, they said, shot up.
“We could already see the huge yield boost in the field where they had been,” Bernard recalls.
By improving the soil biology, the cows also sequester carbon on the farm, which helps mitigate climate change.
“I think it’s a bit foolish to ignore the potential that farmers have to sequester carbon,” said Bernard.
Though grazing and cropping on the same land is still rare on the Island, there is growing interest in the idea, says Adam MacLean, a manager of climate adaptation at the P.E.I. Department of Agriculture.
“The beef farmer gets the forage, and the potato producer gets the manure, the cover-crop management and the soil health benefits,” he said.
Improving soil health is a major part of how farms can help mitigate climate change, MacLean says.
“If we have better soil health, more carbon sequestered, higher levels of organic matter — that soil will have a better ability to sustain a crop during periods of drought, for example,” he explains.
For P.E.I. farmers interested in adding livestock to their own farms, applications open Monday for a federal fund to help curb climate change — the On-Farm Climate Action Fund.
The P.E.I. Federation of Agriculture administers the fund locally, which can provide up to three-quarters of the cost of establishing fences and water systems for farmers who meet the criteria, says MacLean.
For Bernard, one of the added benefits of grazing cattle on crop fields has been increasing her farm’s biodiversity.
“Insects are inevitable, so then the birds are inevitable,” she said. “I’ve seen three new bird species since we’ve added the cattle.”
— Isabelle Gallant
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Editors: Emily Chung and Hannah Hoag | Logo design: Sködt McNalty