How wasteful are we, really?
Is Baltimore a throwaway community? There's a ranking out of the least wasteful cities in the US of A, and good ol' Baltimore comes in 16th. We're behind the usually crunchy places like San Francisco, Seattle and Portland, but also trailing New York and Pittsburgh, even Dallas and Orlando.
The ranking - which I saw on Mother Nature Network - is the second done by Nalgene, the reusable drink bottle maker, and Baltimore actually dropped four places since 2009, when we were judged 12th least wasteful. Guess we're getting worse.
Or rather, should I say, when we judged ourselves - because the rankings are based on a survey in which about 150 residents from each of the 25 cities rated were asked to score themselves on 23 different behaviors and practices that are either wasteful or frugal.
Here's some of the things our city's participants in the survey say we don't do:
- hanging clothes out to dry when possible
- limiting showers to five minutes
- composting fruit and veggie scraps
- turning off the water when brushing teeth.
Of course, some of the top cities have a head start on establishing social norms around some of these behaviors. San Francisco, for instance, has the nation's strictest recycling law, it seems, which has sparked a big jump in residents composting their food scraps.
