You recycle, ride a bike to work, and buy organic food. You pay extra for “green” electricity and have an eco-friendly car. So can you rest easy, with a clean conscience that your life is as sustainable as it can reasonably be?

Well … although many of us try our best to minimize environmental impacts, our actions don’t always achieve as much as we believe.

Expensive products that are marketed as eco-friendly may help us to assuage our guilt while drawing our attention away from the more pressing issues.

Meanwhile, other actions and products can be useful, but only when used as part of a wider environmentally aware lifestyle. Most worrying of all, some things marketed as sustainable can have negative side effects for the environment—that’s called greenwashing.

The Green Guide talked to several sustainability experts who highlighted five eco-strategies and products that may not be all they are hyped up to be.

Carbon Offsets

For the busy executive and the hassled family alike, carbon credits seem like a simple way of negating the environmental damage without making significant changes to your lifestyle.

Hop on a flight from the U.S. to Europe and you can pay a carbon offsetting company a fee to mop up your greenhouse gas emissions, for instance by planting some trees or installing solar panels in a developing country.

But can we really continue to take exotic holidays and still have a green conscience? Many sustainability experts think not.

(Related story: “Do Carbon Offsets Do More Damage Than Good?”)

“Carbon offsetting is a con—it encourages businesses and individuals to carry on polluting when we urgently need to reduce our carbon emissions,” said Andy Atkins, executive director of Friends of the Earth U.K.

“It’s not enough to make emissions cuts in developing countries. Rich countries have got to lead on tackling climate change by reducing their own emissions,” Atkins said.

(Get green-travel tips.) Furthermore, it isn’t clear that all carbon credit schemes really do lower greenhouse gas emissions, experts say.

“The science behind some of these schemes is still not clear,” said Wouter Buytaert, an environmental scientist at Imperial College in London, U.K.

For example planting fast growing pine trees on grassland will lock up carbon in the tree—but may also disrupt the soil and release large amounts of carbon stored in the grassland.

That’s why “staycations,” or taking vacations at or near home, are the deep green option, many experts agree. (Read about “extreme staycations” on the Intelligent Travel blog.)

“The greenest thing holidaymakers can do is choose a location that is closer to home, that can be reached by coach or by train,” Friends of the Earth’s Atkins said.

“Governments must ensure rail is a fast, convenient, and affordable alternative to flying,” he said. However, some scientists argue that carbon credits aren’t all bad. “They are a worthwhile option when you have done everything else possible to reduce your emissions,” said Dave Reay, an environmental scientist at Edinburgh University, U.K.

And carbon credits do at least draw attention to the problem.

“The concept isn’t great, but they are a good way to force a transition,” said Andy Kunz, director of the U.S.-based New Urbanism, which works to promote walkable neighborhoods.

Green Cars

Is it time to trade it in the gas-guzzler for a more fuel-efficient model?

When it comes to cars, the fuel efficiency needs to weighed against the “embodied energy,” or the energy used in making the car, experts say.

That means taking into account how much energy was used to refine the iron ore to make the steel, then the fuel used to ship the steel to the car factory, and finally the energy used to assemble the car and transport it to the showroom.

In their book Time to Eat the Dog?: The Real Guide to Sustainable Living, authors Robert and Brenda Vale calculate the embodied energy for four different types of car: the Smart Fortwo, the Volkswagen Golf, the Holden Commodore, and the Toyota Land Cruiser.

energy—the Toyota Landcruiser consumed more than three times as much energy as the Smart Fortwo before either car even hits the road.

The authors also calculated the fuel consumption for each car for an average lifetime of 149,129 miles (240,000 kilometers.) For all four cars, the energy attributed to fuel consumption was around five times the embodied energy by the end of the car’s life.

These calculations reveal that buying a new car might be beneficial for the environment, but that it depends on the fuel consumption of your existing car and what you intend to replace it with.

“If you replace your SUV with a Toyota Prius, it is worth it, but if your old car is a Morris Minor [a small British car popular in the mid-1900s] and you replace it with a Range Rover, it is not worth it,” said Robert Vale, an architect at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.

Changing your driving habits can really help to save fuel. “Driving smoothly, getting rid of unnecessary weight, and keeping tires inflated can cut emissions by up to 30 percent,” said Friends of the Earth’s Atkins.

“But the best way to cut emissions from cars is to use them less.”

The supermarket dilemma: organic green beans from Kenya, or ordinary green beans grown just down the road?

From an environmental perspective, organic farming is usually considered the better option, experts say. It’s less intensive and relies on ecological processes rather than synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.

But some experts argue that those benefits can be outweighed by the energy used to fly food to the supermarket.

“I feel really conflicted on this issue every time I shop,” said New Urbanism’s Kunz. “I want to do the best thing for the planet and buy local, but I also want to do the best thing for my body and buy organic.”

Alex Randall is a a sustainability expert from the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales, U.K. “We need to look at everything we eat and try to replace high environmental-impact foods with lower ones,” Randall said.

“So avoiding foods that have travelled a long way, or are out of season, is a good place to start,” Randall said.

But this doesn’t mean you have to avoid all foods from afar.

Foods that have a longer shelf life, such as cereals and wine, can be transported by ship rather than air. “Shipping is better for the environment than air-freighting, but if you can local products are the best of all,” said Randall.

(Learn how to spot misleading labels at the store.)

“For the greenest meal, shoppers should look for local organic produce direct from farmers and [neighborhood] markets,” said Friends of the Earth’s Atkins.

“Avoiding supermarkets cuts out the middleman and helps to ensure farmers get a fair price for the produce they sell.”

Reusable Bags

For a while, reusable bags were the must-have accessory: In 2007 many shoppers sported their Anya Hindmarch-designed “I’m Not A Plastic Bag” carrier. But does spurning plastic bags really make that much difference?

For one, plastics as a whole are an increasingly common type of waste: In 2007 in the U.S., about 31 million tons, or 12.1 percent of total municipal waste, was plastic. Much of that waste makes it into the world’s oceans, where it can harm wildlife.

(Related story in National Geographic News: “PHOTOS: Giant Ocean-Trash Vortex Documented–A First.”)

Many cities, and even some countries, are phasing out or taxing plastic bags. Ireland introduced its plastic bag tax in 2002, charging 15 Euro cents (22 U.S. cents) on each bag.

In 2007 San Francisco became the first U.S. city to introduce a plastic-bag ban, and now Seattle is considering following suit. (Take a plastics quiz.)

But there are downsides to getting rid of plastic bags. Plastic-bag manufacturers claim that there has been a huge spike in sales of bin liners and garbage bags, since people no longer have the free ones from the grocery stores.

Paper bags are also increasing in popularity. Some studies suggest that paper bags require more energy to manufacture and release more greenhouse gases when degrading than plastic bags. Friends of the Earth’s Atkins suggests that we should concentrate more on what goes into the bag than what the bag is made of.

“Plastic bags are only a tiny part of the problem. To avoid sending materials to landfill or to be incinerated—which is a polluting and expensive process—we should avoid producing waste in the first place by buying only what is necessary, and reusing and mending our possessions.”

Green-Energy Tariffs

Pay a small “green” supplement to your electricity provider, and in return they will provide you with “zero emissions” electricity from renewable sources such as solar and wind—or so it seems. Can you leave the air-conditioning on and watch your plasma screen TV, assured that your electricity is all squeaky clean? (How green is your flat-screen?)

Victoria University’s Vale said people have to change their energy consumption habits, too. “The only answer is to start by using less power,” he said.

“Only when you have really reduced demand can you then do good by using green power. Otherwise you are just expanding the total electricity generating capacity. Less really is more.”

And not all green-energy tariffs are created equal. Some companies promise to install as much renewable energy capacity as their green tariff customers use, while others buy offsets to compensate for polluting sources of electricity.

“In general, buying your electricity from the companies that produce their own renewable energy will have a greater impact,” said the Centre for Alternative Technology’s Randall.

As well as increasing demand for renewable energy, green-energy tariffs can make a statement to society, Randall said.

“If lots of people opt for green-energy tariffs, it sends a powerful signal to government and industry.”

By: Kate Ravilious
Source: The Green Guide