Frugality vs. Environmental Responsibility

This article appears in the 145th Festival of Frugality at Value For Your Life.

I wrote a post awhile back on Frugality vs. Charity. What about being frugal while also trying to be environmentally responsible? In a lot of ways frugality and environmental responsibility go hand in hand. When you choose to turn down your thermostat or turn off your lights to save on the cost of electricity, you have also made an environmentally responsible choice. When you choose to reuse something to save the cost of buying new or to hang on to your old car a little longer you are making a choice that is not only frugal but also good for the environment. Walking or biking instead of driving is also a win-win situation for the bank balance and the earth. So far so good.

What about when you are trying to be frugal in the grocery store? If the Seventh Generation, chlorine free baby wipes cost $6.89 for a package of 80 wipes and the store brand costs $1.09, which do you choose? If you are living within a tight grocery budget you are probably going to choose the chlorine bleached $1.09 store brand baby wipes. What else can you do? What about those cage-free chicken eggs, packaged in a recycled cardboard container that are $3.09 a dozen? Right next to them on the shelf is a dozen eggs in a Styrofoam container from unspecified chickens that cost $1.89. No offense chickens, but that’s a tough choice when you are counting pennies. What about all those “organic” choices? They are almost always much more expensive than their non-organic counterparts.

You do the best you can with the choices you have. You may not be able to purchase something marked “organic” in the grocery store but maybe the offerings at the local farmer’s market will present a reasonable alternative. Coupons are always a good choice for bringing down the cost of some of the higher priced, more environmentally friendly items. If you are not seeing coupons for the products you wish you could afford to buy, consider sending an e-mail to the company and explaining your dilemma. Tell them you want to buy their product but really can’t afford it in the face of their cheaper competition. Frequently they will pony up some good coupons. Try Amazon’s grocery section. Their prices on some items are lower and if you use their automatic reorder system, you can frequently save an additional 15% off, which may bring the price down into your comfort zone.

Finally, perhaps you can assuage your guilt the way corporations do. Figure all that recycling, walking and electricity saving may be buying you enough carbon offsets to balance out the baby wipes. Do the best you can, where you can, and know that, as your fortunes increase, you will do better!

How do you juggle environmental responsibility and frugality?

Here are some posts I really enjoyed this past week –

Over at Wise Bread – Are you and your spouse planning the same retirement? Better start talking!

Funny About Money wonders why we are paying for all the people who refuse to evacuate in the face of a natural disaster. I wonder about that myself.

The Wisdom Journal has a great list of 50 frugal things you aren’t doing. Okay, you may already be doing some of them but out of a list of 50, I bet you’ll find some new ways to trim your expenses.

Five Minutes for Going Green has a great post about those completely ridiculous commercials touting the benefits of high fructose corn syrup. I was going to write about that myself but they did such a good job, I thought I’d just save myself the time and have you go read their post.

Finally, another good Funny About Money post, which makes us consider the ancillary expenses that often accompany shopping at a bigger, cheaper store. She has a great example of not shopping at Ace Hardware, which is more expensive, and going instead to Home Depot, where she finds more things and ends up spending more money than if she’d gone ahead to Ace. Check it out.