Closing Post

In conclusion to this cut back on consumption, I have realized that I really do not spend my money on more material items.  The things I spent the most money on is gasoline and food.  I drove my car maybe twice a week and I have filled up my 12 gallon car twice since this blog was started.  I have not spent money on anything else.  Just yesterday I had to build a lamp shade and instead of going to buy art supplies or using up toxic chemicals I made my lampshade out of yarn and some twigs I found on the ground and it came out pretty well.  I will try and continue this low consumption lifestyle and will be starting off the summer by traveling to Washington state and working on an organic farm for three weeks.  Bye, Lorax

- Leif

Irony

Great news!!! I have been extra green this weekend, with little to no consumption, and only eating one solid meal... The downside is I am sick.  It is funny how feeling soo miserable is helping the world feel a little bit better, usually this is not the case.  GO WORLD!

Chris Jordan- Running the numbers: An American self-portrait

Senior year of high school, our resident artist was a man named Chris Jordan. I really liked Chris' work because it had a message. I think it was impossible to anyone in the audience to ignore the message that he was trying to convey through his photography. The first picture that he showed us was of a bunch of paper bags. Looking at it far away, it kind of looked like tree bark, but if you looked up close, it showed 1.4 million paper grocery bags. The caption read that 1.4 million paper bags are used in the U.S. every hour.

http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/rtn/#paper-bags

To be honest, its really hard to pick a favorite picture because all of the statistics are shocking, and really makes one think about everything that they use or buy.

One that I do think stood out to me though was a huge gray looking picture. The caption says, "Depicts 426,000 cell phones, equal to the number of cell phones retired in the US every day."

http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/rtn/#cell-phones

Heres the link to his website, because the statistics that he points out are hard to ignore:

http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/rtn/#light-bulbs

you can see his other pictures by clicking on the thumbnails on the right hand side

Tuesday - Laura

Since the end of the school year is quickly approaching, I thought it would be a good idea to figure out what to do with my textbooks that I will no longer need. I was searching amazon as well as many other websites to see how much money I could get for each book. Since the majority of my books are not textbooks, many of the websites could not give me any cash back. After talking to a few of my friends about how frustrating it is to have this stack of 12 books taking up space in my room, one of them told me that I should look into a guy here at Elon named Brian Allenby. Brian is a Junior at Elon who works for Better World Books. This a company that takes books and gives you cash for them. One of the cool things about selling your books to Brian, versus another website, is that for every book you give him, his company gives one to a child in Africa.

After looking more into this program, I found out that so far Better World Books had raised over $9 million for literacy and has given over 4 million books to children in Africa and other literacy efforts.

Also, every book that has not been found the proper home is recycled. So far, they have re-used or recycled over 60 million pounds of books, reclaimed more than 720,000 pounds of metal shelving from libraries across the United States, and also prevented 19,000 tons of carbon offset on BetterWorldBooks.com shipping.

This is such an easy way to help the environment as well as help raise the literacy rate in countries that are not as fortunate as us.

Check out the Better World Books website at betterworldbooks.com




If you have books that you want cash for, contact Brian Allenby at ballenby@elon.edu
He will meet you wherever it is convenient, scan your books and immediately give you cash for them. (He also buys them for more than the bookstore!)

American Spending

When I was looking up statistics on American debt, I read that, "Most studies show that the average consumer with credit cards still has more than $7,000 worth of credit card debt." Our country spends more today than we did twenty years ago. On the Forbes website, I came across a paragraph that said, "Americans moved in recent generations from cooking at home to eating out because they think they don't have time to cook." In reality, going out to eat costs about four times more then it would to just stay home and cook (not to mention having to pay for gas prices.) One statistic that I found particularly shocking was that middle income families spend about 1% of their income on education. If so little is being spent on school, then were is all their money going? Apparently an average American family spends about 2.5% of their income on electricity. Why do we spend more on phone and TV bills than on education? As a nation, we have our priories mixed up.

Eggs...

Since the Lorax does not really have any specific thing on anything besides consuming less I am going to steal some of You are What you Eat’s thunder and research an Easter favorite,  The Cadbury Crème Egg.  The Cadbury Crème Egg is my favorite candy of all time.  Let me just give it a rundown.  Based on a 2000 calorie diet the Cadbury Crème Egg has 9% of your recommended fat intake, 1% sodium, 8% carbohydrates, 21 grams of sugar and 1 gram of protein.  All that combined adds up to 150 calories, and by now it does not seem that bad for you, but we’re going to list all the ingredients now. The ingredients are: Milk Chocolate (sugar, milk ingredients, cocoa butter, unsweetened chocolate, soy lecithin, natural and artificial flavours) sugar, glucose, dried egg-white, calcium chloride, artificial flavour, colour.  May contain peanuts, tree nuts.  Now that we look at all the ingredients we see that it might not be too good for us, with all the artificial flavors, and processed soy ingredients.  I especially like the milk ingredients part which I don’t even know what that means, milk ingredients???  I also do not like the glucose and calcium chloride.  I think if they made it all natural and un-processed it might taste even better than it does, which would be awesome.  I am surprised that they have real egg white in them which is good.  As far as where their made they are produced in the UK, and Canada, which is fine by me and I have no problem supporting food produced in the UK and Canada.  I’m not going to give up Cadbury Eggs because their one of my favorite candies and deserts.

My health obsession

Throughout my posts I have related saving money to maintaining good health. On this post I’m not planning on changing my pattern. This summer I plan to never drive my car. This seems like a bold action to take but I realized that everywhere I plan on going this summer is in biking distance. This will be the ultimate saver of money; I drive a BMW 328xi, which takes premium gas so obviously my pockets were getting murdered. I have been long distance cycling all my life so that lifestyle won’t faze me. This summer I have a job at the YMCA which is two minutes from where I live so biking from my house to the center wont be hard. What my biggest challenge will be is biking into the DC which normally is a 10 minute drive for me, so if my calculations are correct, on bike it will take me about 20-30 minutes depending on my energy that day. As the summer goes on I will get more and more fit and the commutes will probably be shorter. I’ve been researching the affects of biking every day and of course it makes you a healthier person but it will also raise your mood and spirit. When you can reach your target heart rate on a daily basis it will relieve you of anxiety and stress (not that summer is stressful). I am committed to achieve this goal and in the process save myself money and also my parents money. Along with the money and health aspect of this challenge I will also be doing a small favor to the environment by limiting the gas that goes into the air from driving. SO I’m killing three birds with one stone by not driving my car. The bike I will be using will be a FELT Z2, this is one of the lightest FELT models you can buy and while you use less of your body while riding it, it is a faster and smoother bike for long distance. The other bike that I was thinking of using would have been a slower bike that would make me exert more body energy and would make me reach my target heart rate faster, this bike is the FELT F95. Seeing as how I am riding on a bike all summer I don’t see the point in using a slower bike especially because I will be making trips that are pretty strenuous.