Forget The Car - Do It Online

At the top of any list of how to reduce pollution you will always find something about reducing your vehicle usage. Take the bus, carpool, combine errands, walk or bike there when you can, etc. - and they are all great suggestions that can save you in fuel and maintenance on your vehicle and reduce greenhouse gasses, but they are also inconvenient and time consuming. It can take over an hour to use public transportation to get somewhere that would take 15 minutes by car. Carpooling is great if everyone lives the same direction, but more often than not people live all over the place, not to mention carpooling can make you late to work and restricts your ability to stay late or leave early from work. Combining errands is actually more efficient, but forget that one thing and it's over. If you're looking for a long-term, convenient, time and cost saving and easy to stick to solution, why not order online and get the things you need take public transportation to you.

The US Postal Service is going to take the same route every day whether you order your products online or not, and the FexEx and UPS trucks will be out there regardless. It may be true that the additional packaging your products come in can be harmful, but the local store will receive and dispose of packaging anyway, and this way you get to ensure it is recycled. You can fill the extra boxes you get with other paper products and set them out on recycling day or carry them to the recycling center if you don't have curbside. There will always be a few things you need to get at the store, but these days you can get just about anything shipped to you online, and why not? When you shop online, you go right for what you need without having to walk through aisles of what you don't need that are set up to make you impulse buy. This kind of impulse buying leads to over shopping, leaving you with items you don't need, won't use and will probably end up being thrown away. Even if you don't impulse buy and the store is easy walking distance, who wants to waste their day off work pushing through crowded aisles just to find the product you came for is sold out and standing in a checkout line? You could be spending time doing whatever leisure activity your family enjoys and relaxing for the upcoming week of work?

I've mentioned Amazon's Subscribe and Save program before in passing, but the overview is you pick what you like, choose when to have it delivered, and pay no shipping plus get 15% off the Amazon price which is almost always lower than the store price to begin with. The program is very flexible, and operates with minimal management. You can send new deliveries whenever you want and cancel deliveries whenever you want. I've gotten everything from household products to over the counter medications to non-perishable grocery products through Subscribe and Save and my total savings over my local grocery store have been more than 50%. For clothing, electronics and larger items you can do a search to find the best deals or use one of the many website comparison search engines. You can review product features from every manufacturer and decide what will work best for you, then find the best price available. Most sellers of clothing or larger, more expensive products have lenient, user-friendly return policies because they understand sometimes when you hold a product or try it on you just don't like it. Shopping green is very easy online as well because you can search out eco-friendly options for just about everything you use including sustainable hemp, organic cotton, wool or bamboo clothing, plant based plastics, energy star appliances, recycled paper and plastic products, natural cleaning products and personal care products and much more.

Product selection is more important than it sounds. Often people are willing to buy a product at the store that does not have the features or ease of use they are looking for because it is "all the have left" or "what's on sale." For example, say I want an inexpensive coffee maker with a timer on it so I can grab my coffee on the way to work rather than stopping at the expensive coffee shop next door to the office. I get to the store, and the only ones they have on the shelves in my price range do not have timers, so I figure I'll live without it and just get up a few minutes earlier because I don't want to drive around and can't afford the very expensive one with the timer. I get home and the first week I hop out of bed 10 minutes earlier to use the coffeemaker, but after the newness of it wears off I start hitting the snooze button. I don't get up earlier and never have the time to brew my coffee, so the coffeemaker sits on the counter unused until one day I decide it's taking up too much space and put it in the basement and now I either keep buying the expensive coffee at the coffee shop or go shopping for a coffeemaker again. Or maybe I do actually get up and use the coffeemaker, but 9 months later it breaks. The store certainly wasn't going to tell me that that model breaks all the time because they want the sale, but other annoyed product owners would have told me online in their negative reviews. Either way, I've wasted my money and wasted the natural resources that went into making, marketing and picking up that product. If I'd shopped online, I would have found a coffeemaker with the features I wanted that I would have used all the time and I would have made sure it had a high rating so I could be relatively certain that it would not break in a short time. Underhanded marketing strategies like creeping featurism and planned obsolescence require customer participation. When people fail to research a product and end up with something poorly manufactured, or settle for something that doesn't really meet their needs and figure they'll upgrade later before the product reaches the end of it's usable life they are making a decision to waste the resources that go into the manufacture and shipping of that product.

Perishable grocery items can be a bit harder to come by online, but not impossible in many areas of the country. While I don't advocate personal shoppers since this just means someone else will be generating pollution and doesn't really help conserve fuel or reduce emissions, services like Giant's Peapod and Safeway's home delivery use delivery trucks that drive a route and bring a large number of groceries at once. There are a number of local services in different areas that do the same, so if they do not operate in your area, check out grocery stores that deliver around you and make sure they are not personal shopper type services where one run per order is done. Unlike other online services this service may cost a bit more and you need to make sure they service accepts coupons if you use them. Often you can save a few dollars and allow the driver to pick the most fuel efficient route by allowing for delivery within a larger block of time, and if you distribute enough of your purchases to discount services on websites like Amazon, though, you should be able to end up with savings overall, not to mention extra time for yourself. You can spend days working on your list and save your staple products on your account, and you can still get the store specials. Since grocery stores are physically laid out to make you walk through all the products you don't need in order to increase impulse buying. It can also be hard to find the natural, organic and eco-friendly products in the store, while it is searchable online and easy to compare the different price, unit price, and manufacturer information online. For example, in the store I was unaware of the Nature's Promise cage, hormone, antibiotic and pesticide cage free eggs from vegetarian fed hens because reading the package of each and every product in the store is time prohibitive. Online I was able to look up natural and organic eggs, then see the clear cage free label, letting me know that for $0.30 more I could purchase a cruelty free product. I also found chicken and milk from the same company (treated the same way) and bison in place of beef (it is illegal to factory farm bison). By shopping online, I improved my health by purchasing food with no added toxins and the quality of life for the animals that produce my food by ensuring every company I purchase from is cruelty free and still was done in less time that going to the store. In addition, making your purchases online will allow you to stick to the list of things you actually need, so in spite of the slightly higher prices, you may even find yourself in the black if you are prone to knocking those extra things you swear you'll use (someday) into the cart.

In every way, shopping online allows you to make a better informed, better thought out decision. There is no more impulse buying, no more getting to the register and realizing you've spent too much but being embarrassed to remove items from your purchase, and plenty of deals you might not otherwise find. Not to mention you will really come to appreciate the convenience and extra time for yourself all while saving energy and reducing emissions.