Reflections: How green the senior

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Ed Hungness

February 19, 2012

By ED HUNGNESS Local columnist The Record Eagle Sun Feb 19, 2012, 07:14 AM EST

While driving to town on a grocery run, I looked in the backseat to make sure that I had my green bags. They cost a dollar at most grocery stores and can be used time and again.

Green bags are better than thin plastic bags. Whenever I use plastic, I'm afraid the eggs will fall through the bottom as I carry the groceries from the garage into the cottage. The clothlike bags are sturdy, have good handles, and are handy for toting other things besides food.

While running my errands, I began to think about the "green movement." It is a good thing to be frugal, to conserve our natural resources and to be friendly with our environment.

Most of the younger generations think that this trend is a new concept, something that was created by existing environmentalist groups. In actuality, the original environmentalists were today's senior citizens and their parents before them.

There is a commercial appearing on TV that encourages the recycling of plastic bottles. It informs the viewer that it takes 500 years for a plastic water bottle to degrade in a landfill.

Most seniors are used to drinking from a water fountain or the kitchen faucet. Just think of how many plastic bottles they avoided dumping into landfills.

Before the creation of plastic containers, we drank our pop out of glass bottles. They were not crushed and remanufactured into new bottles. Instead they were hauled to the bottling plant, washed, refilled and shipped back to the retailer to be sold again. Now that was green!

Remember cloth diapers? My daughters who were born in the '70s, never wore disposable diapers, which are dumped into landfills after their one-time use. Supposedly they are biodegradable but I have no desire to dig around to verify that claim. In any case, cotton diapers were washed after each use and put back into service. When a child no longer required diapers, they made great dustcloths and car-polishing rags.

Many homemakers dried their laundry on clotheslines strung up in the backyard. With sheets flapping in the breeze, the only thing consumed was sunshine and fresh air. Today we use gas or electric energy-consuming clothes dryers. The clothesline was truly a solar-powered device. It didn't cost anything to operate and maintenance was minimal.

We are being encouraged to replace our incandescent lightbulbs with the new energy-efficient bulbs. My dad had his own energy savings plan regarding electric lights. We were taught and persuasively encouraged to turn out the lights whenever we left the room. "Why light an empty room?" he would ask.

The production of paper towels, zip-top baggies, plastic wrap, Styrofoam cups, bubble wrap, paper plates, aerosol sprays and countless other disposable products place enormous demands on our valuable natural resources. Some of these products are used once and are then discarded. Such is the cost of the conveniences we have grown to depend on.

Our environment is important to us all. We treasure our natural resources. To learn more about how you can help the cause, consult with any senior citizen. They were our original environmentalists.

Ed Hungness and his wife became full-time residents of Fife Lake in 2005 after Ed's retirement. He can be reached at edhungness@yahoo.com or by mail at P.O. Box 57, Fife Lake, MI 49633.