Make Your Lifestyle More Sustainable

Many individual lifestyle changes we make can improve the resilience of our lives. Click the subjects below for ideas in any of the categories listed. You can also calculate your overall personal “carbon footprint” at either of these sites:

Green basics footprint calculator
How to reduce your carbon footprint

Energy & Water

Make your existing home energy efficient. Obtain as much energy as possible from renewables, biofuel, passive solar, efficiency. Buy energy-efficient cars, appliances, HVAC. Save water. Here are some resources to help you do this.

The Energy Efficiency Pyramid being developed by our Energy Action Group shows you improvements to make on any budget.

You can get ideas on water conservation from the website of the Orange Water & Sewer Authority (OWASA).

The Carbon Free Home is a book on remodeling projects to reduce energy usage to a bare minimum.

Tips on making our homes more energy efficient.

An outline of green building materials.

N.C. Powerdown Triangle Peak Oil Group, a local group working to reduce our energy usage.

N.C. Green Power—Subsidize renewables by paying a little extra for power from your current power company.

Energy Star—Find the most efficient appliance before you buy.

Some local businesses and institutions that can help you install alternative energy systems at your home or business:

Food

Eat locally grown food and shop from locally-owned food stores and restaurants. Grow even a little bit of your own food. Join a community garden. Plant edible landscaping.

Carrboro Community Garden Coalition

If you use some of your lawn to grow food plants (veggies, nut and fruit trees), you’ll have less grass to mow, argue the folks at Food Not Lawns.

If that sounds good, here’s a planting guide for vegetables in our region (PDF) from Chatham County Extension’s Growing Small Farms program.

Here are some sources of trees, seeds, and other food plants:

  • Southern Exposure sells organic, mostly open-pollinated seeds, adapted to our part of the world.
  • Niche Gardens has local native plants and offers consultations.
  • Southern States has trees, seeds, and gardening supplies.
  • Useful Plants Nursery offers fruit trees, shrubs, and berries. They have a permaculture orientation. They are in Black Mountain, but deliver to Durham every month or so.

Carrboro offers free leaf mulch to Carrboro residents at the Public Works facility just south of 54 on Smith Level Road.

The Independent offers old newspapers free to gardeners.

And if you’re not a do-it-yourselfer, Bountiful Backyards will install an edible landscape in your yard.

Buy as much of your food as you can from Triangle area farmer’s markets or from pick-your-own farms.

We have a locally-owned grocery store, too—maybe even owned by you! Anyone is welcome to shop at Weaver Street Market, a co-op grocery. If you wish, you can also buy an ownership share for a one-time refundable fee. Owners receive a dividend in years that the co-op earns a profit, as well as discounts on selected items each week.

Join a CSA and develop a relationship with the farmer who grows your food. (Community-Supported Agriculture or CSA is an arrangement in which you pay up front for a season’s worth of yummy produce from a specific farm, helping that farmer get the capital he or she needs to plant the crops.)

Maybe you want to be a farmer yourself. Check out Central Carolina Community College’s Sustainable Agriculture Program.

Patronize restaurants that buy local produce.

Transportation

Take public transportation, use a bike for errands and commuting, walk and carpool, drive less, buy fuel-efficient vehicles, and stop flying.

Where do you want to go? It’s more possible than you might think to get around the Triangle on public transit. Go Triangle will help you find a way—just input your starting point and destination, and the website will suggest routes and schedules for you. More information is available on the websites of Chapel Hill Transit and the Triangle Transit Authority (TTA).

Going farther afield? Try Amtrak or Greyhound. Try to avoid flying. Here are some data on carbon emissions from air travel.

If you’re buying a new car, make MPG one of your top criteria. Consider a hybrid. Or buy a diesel car and run it in whole or in part on biodiesel from Piedmont Biofuels.
Look for the Chevy Volt (electric car with gas-powered generator that can recharge the battery while you are driving) and Nissan Leaf (100% all-electric plug-in vehicle), both due out this fall.

Check out the Triangle Electric Auto Association and Triangle Segway.

Zipcar—share a car instead of owning one!

Ready to kick the 4-wheel habit? Cycle 9 on Main Street sells cargo bikes, electric-assist systems for your bike, commuter bike gear, and racks and bags of all types.

Get tips on safe bicycle commuting from the League of American Bicyclists.

At The Recyclery, you can recycle your bike and bike parts, and learn to repair your bike.

Housing

Live in cohousing, an intentional community, or an environmentally planned development. Downsize your home or share it with other people.

Cohousing is a type of collaborative housing in which residents are consciously committed to living as a community. Some cohousing communities in this area are:

  • Arcadia, in north Carrboro
  • Eldergreen, a single-building cohousing community soon to be formed for “elders in the second half of life”
  • Pacifica, in Carrboro

Walk Softly on the Earth is a permaculture-based housing development organization created by Harvey Harman.

Find intentional communities in North Carolina.

Triangle Intentional Communities Meetup Group

EmPOWERment, Inc. in Chapel Hill works to make more affordable housing options available in the community.

If you’re building, build green, with help from:

If you’re buying or selling, Arbor Realty is local nonprofit real estate agency that donates all its corporate profits to land trusts.

Shopping

Reduce consumption. Especially reduce consumption of things made of plastic or other petroleum products, and things that cannot be recycled in any way. When you must buy, buy local whenever possible. A dollar spent at a locally-owned business is much more likely to stay in the community and continue circulating here than a dollar spent at a chain store.

Local businesses and individuals make pottery, rugs, jams, pickles, blown glass, soap, baked goods, jewelry, furniture, and more. It’s fun to find and meet these local artisans. One way is to go on the free annual Orange County Artists Guild’s Open Studio Tour, held in November every year.

Repair rather than replace. Learn how to fix your clothes, cook, and maybe even grow your own food and medicinal plants, do first aid and simple health care, maintain and repair your car, bicycle and appliances, sharpen your tools, build simple things (a brick oven, a set of shelves, a compost bin). Watch this website for announcements of “Reskillings” where community members will teach each other how to do these things.

Buy used rather than new. Look for clothes at Refinements in Chapel Hill and the Club Nova and PTA Thriftshops in Carrboro. Used books? Try Nice Price Books in Carrboro, The Bookshop on Franklin, or Flyleaf Books on MLK Blvd. For furniture and construction materials, check Habitat for Humanity REStore.

Try a clothing swap, or share a lawnmower with another family.

Visit Carrboro’s Really, Really Free Market the first Saturday of every month from 2 to 5 p.m. at Carrboro Town Commons (next to Town Hall). You can donate used items for others to take, and you can take whatever you find there. Everything, sometimes even food and haircuts, is absolutely free.

Trash

Try to put as little as possible into the trash can.

Orange County is blessed with some of the best recycling opportunities around. Not sure where or how to recycle? Here’s the county’s recycling guide. You know about the paper, plastic, metal, and glass. But the County guide also tells you how to dispose responsibly of batteries, electronics, paint, hazardous waste, construction waste, and more.

At Weaver Street Market, you can recycle:

  • batteries
  • clean paper and plastic bags
  • compostable takeout containers and cold-drink cups (look for “PLA” or “Nature’s Plastic” on the bottom)

Food waste can be composted. Orange County to the rescue again! Here’s their page chock full of composting information, including vermicomposting (using worms to get quick, extra-rich compost).

Here’s another great resource on vermicomposting from N.C. State University.

And the South Estes Farmer’s Market has a vendor (Twin Spruce Farm) who will sell you worms, worm castings, and anything you may need for vermicomposting. And answer your questions for free.

Got clean, interesting-looking trash items? Turn them into raw materials for art by donating them to The Scrap Exchange in Durham.

The Habitat for Humanity REStore across 15-501 from New Hope Commons accepts donations of furniture, construction materials, and other items. Proceeds fund the building of houses for low-income families.

Tired of getting all those yellow pages you don't want? At this website you can opt out of any or all of them: www.yellowpagesoptout.com

Money

Invest locally, invest green.

Local banks are safer and invest more of their money locally. Credit unions are co-ops, not traditional for-profit banks. Local banks and credit unions were less affected by the recent economic disturbances. Here are some to check out:

Want to invest in green business? Here are two sites that can help you decide how to make your money work for good:

  • Green Progress (list of green stocks)
  • Green America (formerly Coop America) has a wealth of information on socially responsible investing

Want to start your own business? The Midway Business Center— a small business incubator located in Midway, a historically Black business district connecting Chapel Hill and Carrboro—is the economic development arm of EmPOWERment, Inc. It has 6,000 square feet of affordable office and retail space and access to shared business equipment. The Center targets low- to moderate-income women- and minority-owned businesses and other new start-up companies with growth potential.