Lazy Man and Money

Four Lazy Ways to Save the Environment

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It’s Earth Day and I’d be remiss if I didn’t take a minute to recognize that. While I typically focus on financial topics here, there are other important issues I care about. The environment is one such issue. All the money in the world is worthless if there’s no world left. I know that’s a bit of an extremist view. I honestly don’t know the state of the environment throughout the world, but my common sense says that we need to start acting now. With that in mind, here are some tips that will help the environment… be careful a couple of them might even save you money.

  • Re-Use – Re-usable cups for your morning coffee reduces trash. Substituting bottled water for water from a Brita in a re-usable bottle saves the environment and money. I like Thinksport Sports Bottles for both hot and cold beverages. Bringing re-usable shopping bags is another great way to re-use. I’m only touching the tip of the iceberg of ways to re-use – I got more ideas from watching Enviromom on Nightline and following up on the Enviromom website.
  • Corkscrew Bulbs – Those wacky looking bulbs, known CFLs (Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs) are great ways to save energy (and money). There are similar products that can also do this, like photoluminescent exit signs ““ perfect for making sure your office obeys building regulations and helps the environment.
  • Eat a Low Carbon Diet – No, not low carb, but low carbon. The idea is to eat locally, grown foods. If you logically think about it, importing food requires some kind of fuel. The further you import the food, the more fuel you’ll need. See Eat Low Carbon for more ideas.
  • Recycle – As Lazy as I am, I can usually sort our where I put my garbage with little effort. I realize that for some people, recycling is more difficult, but for others it’s easy.

This is space where I annually pitch The Good Human. David is a great writer who not only writes about sustainable living… he lives it everyday.

Capital One Hates the Environment

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capital-one-environment.JPG
It’s true… I have proof. Look at the picture above. The most obvious thing is that I’m horrible at taking pictures. (Unfortunately, my camera skills are not good and I recycled the evidence before I noticed how bad the picture was. Let’s pretend I was trying to create blur effect to keep my name a secret.) However, if you look more carefully, you’ll see why Capital One hates the environment.

In the top right, you’ll see a square of bubble wrap. It’s sized the same as the yellow-orange envelope. That’s because it came in the envelope. What was the bubble wrap protecting, their letter? No, it was simply set up to look and feel like package so that it would be opened. It also serves the purpose that you can’t rip the envelope in half without opening it up and separating the bubble wrap. If you can think of another reason for bubble wrap in a letter, I’d love to hear it.

This is the third such letter I’ve gotten from Capital one. I gave them a pass on the first two for two reasons… 1) I’m Lazy and didn’t get around to it 2) I assumed there would be enough customer backlash to make them stop. Apparently it hasn’t happened because they are still continuing with the practice.

It’s bad enough to get all the junk mail that I get (I try to get on all the necessary lists), but I would hope that it would at least have the potential of serving the consumer… other than trying to trick them.