Going Green Isn’t Always Kind To The Environment

If you’ve resolved to reduce your carbon footprint, there are a few things you should know about your “eco-friendly” actions before you take a hardcore pledge to go green. Environmentalism comes with a cost to… the environment. Being kind to Mother Nature in one way may cause problems somewhere else, so choose your green activities carefully.

Biofuels Don’t Always Help

You want to reduce your dependence on gasoline and help the environment at the same time. What could be better than moving toward the use of biofuels? Well… biofuels create their own environmental concerns, not the least of which is that they put food producers in competition with energy producers. Current legislation in the US requires a certain portion of the corn crop to be used for biofuels.

Unfortunately, the corn crop happens to be a huge source of food for everything from humans to animals. Unless the amount of land devoted to the production of corn increases significantly, the logical outcome of competition is an increase in the cost of corn used for food… and fuel. As a result of feed shortages, fewer farmers are producing pork, chicken, beef and other corn-fed animals, which pushes the price of food in the supermarket ever higher.

If the amount of land devoted to corn production increases, expect to see biomass fuels creating a larger carbon footprint than fossil fuels do. How’s that? Farmers need to clear more land and devote less desirable land to corn production. This will require clearing and an increased use of farm equipment that uses… fossil fuels. In addition, the waterways will likely receive a much larger dose of farm fertilizer run-off, which will create algae blooms and subsequent fish kills within the system of freshwater lakes and rivers.

Recycling Is More Wasteful Than You Might Think

It sounds good. Reduce, reuse, recycle, right? The truth of the matter is that only a small fraction of the consumer waste stream is (or can be) recycled. Newspapers come to mind immediately as a recyclable product. While it’s true that paper is one of the most recyclable products around, legislation introduced in the US often requires newspaper producers to use recycled paper. Recycled paper is actually more expensive than new paper, and puts newspapers at a competitive disadvantage. Ultimately raises the price of the newspaper and reduces sales.

Mandatory recycling goals haven’t worked out so well, either. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had established a recycling goal of 25% of all trash. Many states went much farther and set goals that fell between 40% and a whopping 70%. This led to the construction boom for incinerators. Aside from their phenomenal costs, the incinerators haven’t been kind to the environment to say the least. Further, municipal recycling plans – the weekly curbside pickups- have produced millions of tons of nominally recyclable garbage across the nation for which there is no market and there are few productive applications.
The same legislation that requires newspapers to purchase and use recycled newsprint also requires green purchasing programs in the public sector that use recycled materials. In other words, the government has legislated a market for materials that consumers don’t want, in part because they’re more expensive and less reliable than new materials.

Environmental Protection Policies Sometimes Exacerbate Damage

Not all environmental protection policies turn out to be helpful. In fact, the rise in the size and severity of some wildfires has been directly attributed to the land management policies designed to protect the environments of certain threatened species. One of the key ingredients to a wildfire is fuel. The inability to clear brush due to environmental concerns has created a significant amount of ready-to-burn fuel in certain areas of the country. In some cases, land designated for conservation is at a much higher risk for fire damage than land designated for development.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to protect the earth and limit your impact on your environment. Reducing gasoline consumption and dependence may make a lot of sense. In some circumstances, recycling is the best, most viable option. If you decide that green is the way to go, just make sure you’re really reducing your impact on the environment, and not just shifting it somewhere out of your line of sight.

Mark Lowell is a huge green activist, even though he did graduate from one of those big beauty schools in New York. He’s being living green for over 10 years and has found some bad things about living green that he wants to make everyone aware of. 

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