The Bee Hive

What is the difference between “Green” and “Sustainable” Products?

Well its pretty simple, Green is like the cool thing you can buy at the supermarket and Sustainable its like the thing you make with your own sweat and blood. Well maybe i’m being a little dramatic but you may begin to get the idea.

Sustainability implies a system that fits in comfotably with other systems and has very little or no disruption to the other systems. Lets take the Making of a piece of bread. Like a nice loaf of home made bread.

Well if you’re lucky and you may manage to make it will look like this:

To make the bread you will have to do the following. Find wheat, dry it, grind it to make flour. Get some eggs from a chicken, milk a cow to get milk, and this is the part where your recipe becomes modernized; baking soda. if you want fluffy bread you need to use baking soda. Now if you where McGuiver you know that you can easily replace baking soda with Natron and vinegar or lemon juice. But if you are not up to the challenge of finding a dried up lake and finding these dried up crystals, you may be forced to go to your local shop and… buy it.

So here are things that have affected us in a very dramatic way, the ability to know where in the heck these things we buy come from or are made. And here lies the problem for the difference in the things we consume. If you manage to get Natron by going to the lake and finding it and adding it to your mix, then you are on your way to making sustainable bread. Now here is an other tricky part; the baking of your dough. How do you bake something when you have no stove? Well you make a little outdoor brick oven! Its pretty simple, I remember making one when I was 8 years old that lasted about a year. It was made from medium size rocks that I found by the river and some mud/clay. You just stack them in consecutive circles on top of each other till you get a little dome looking thing like this one made by my Grandpa after mine fell apart.

So once you have your little brick/stone oven ready you get some wood and make a fire inside it to heat it up. eventually the wood burns out and all you have left are hot coals. this it the perfect time to use a stick or something to move the coals to the sides and then put your dough in the middle. after 20-30 minutes of baking plus the amount of time it took you to gather the ingredients and make your little oven, you will have delicious bread.

Now this system is pretty sustainable since you took things that will naturally replenish them selves. and you did not harm any systems to get and make your food.

If you don’t want to make your own oven, then you can… buy one at the local Sears, Home Depot or which ever store’s branding you find more appealing. This decision is where your bread becomes a little corrupt. A stove is not just found in nature. They need to be fabricated packaged and transported to a market place. This whole process takes a big toll on the environment, because unlike you and I who actually care about the periphery of the places we live, corporations don’t really care about the periphery of the area around their factories. The workers on the factory may care a little, but they have very little say on the matter because this is the way the industry works. So what ends up happening, a tremendous amount of energy needs to be used to make all of the parts that are needed to make this thing function, not to mention that an infrastructure to get the Natural Gas to your home needs to occur and then some company needs to dig out the Gas and pump it to your house.

Now there has been debates about what is more sustainable burning wood or natural gas, so lets say we omit this step into the making of our bread and say “maybe our new system is not so bad” well… lets just say its not.

So lets say you had to use the cheap baking soda, and maybe your milk was not from a cow you happened to have in the back yard. Maybe you went to the supermarket and got “Organic” Milk and “Organic” eggs. This is ok too, just make sure that your products are Certified Organic, otherwise you may be getting products that harm the environment and there fore are not sustainable. What about the baking soda, maybe you want to be fancy and use baking powder.

This simple decision just added a bunch of CO2 and has given a tiny bit of power to oil producing countries. Why because in order make the baking powder in mass quantities, package it, brand it and distribute it you just contributed to a new system that harms the environment ( wait, so what about the stove? uh, oh.) So your home baked bread is now a little less sustainable. But its still Green. So lets say you did not get Organic Certified products, you got your generic milk and eggs and flour, well you just contributed to animal cruelty, and more unsustainable systems and food production.

So now your bread seems a little less appealing, but its still Green because you made it your self, and that is a big plus. If you had not made that bread on your own, now you have to add an other system of mass production to the bread you buy.

Even if someone claims the bread is Organic, the systems that it took to get that bread to your table will already have spent massive amounts of energy, polluted the environment and no one knows about it because who cares… So this is probably why you have never seen “Green” bread or “Sustainable” Bread, because its almost impossible to have checks and balances for all the systems that go into bread production. So if you see a sustainable bread in your local market, you may want to laugh, unless you know the name of the guy that made the bread and he knows the name of the guys (and wife maybe children) who got the other ingredients, and they all used bicycles or horses to transport their products. With that in mind, lets think about that Green vs. Sustainability thing again. What we are really talking about is A. Energy Efficiency and B. Disruption of natural systems, like eco-systems.

How can we make a difference, it seems we are screwed. The only way that we can make a difference, is to get products from the sources that seem the least harmful (choose the better of the evils), in other words lets collectively use our power to get rid of bad systems. On that note, WTF is wrong with companies!
Seriously, a bike with a battery being labeled green!

Think about the impact of bread and multiply it by 100 and then you will get the harm being made by the production of these “green’ Bikes. I mean look at all the crap you have to manufacture for these things.

So I hope that made you think a little about the word Green. now the real way to go is with a Sustainable bike, made from sustainable things. A good alternative is the Bamboo Bike. Bamboo= !!! <3 <3 =)

Check these babies out:

there is even a tutorial online to make your own. Kinda like making your own bread.

now this prototype may still need work to be fully sustainable, but its a great start. So shame on green washing companies. “green” bike, LOL.

Summary:

I am not encouraging you to “buy” sustainable products or to “buy” anything at all! I’m encouraging you to see what stuff you can deal with out (story of stuff), and what things you should make on your own(how stuff is made). Instead of recycling that glass container, see if you can re-use it. Also it is good to tell your friends to not buy stupid stuff too. Like jeans that tell you to be stupid. Its time to be smart and its time to make sure that the people around us get smart too.

The problem is Cultural. Lets try to make our culture, the human culture better.

Don’t Be Stupid like Deisel:

This is an interesting post on livestock:
http://dianabuja.wordpress.com/tag/livestock/