How Keeping Your Car Clean is Green
It’s a warm sunny day, the kind where you like to wash and wax the car. So, you go to your local big box store’s auto section and pick out your supplies. As you check out, you get that ever-prevalent question about bagging your purchase; paper or plastic…or a reusable grocery bags for a dollar and ninety-nine cents. You decide to spring for the reusable
bag and load in your purchase. At home as you begin to clean the car you wonder what else you might do with your car to promote green and eco friendly living.
The first thing you think about is what kind of car you are driving. Was its selling feature the mileage or how many horsepower are under the hood? Car technology has spoiled some attempts at green and eco friendly living by letting us have our cake and eat it too. A sixties muscle car with loads of horsepower got twelve to fifteen miles per gallons at best. Some really hot cars were lucky to make ten. Nowadays you can find cars that go zero to sixty in less than seven seconds yet are still very fuel efficient. Of course you have to put that in the context of a sixties economy car got twenty miles per gallon and today forty-five mpg is almost a minimum.
So while things like fuel efficiency and performance have changed, one thing that hasn’t changed is the importance of keeping your car in good condition. If your cars engine is tuned up and has clean filters it will run better, cleaner and be good for the environment. Check the tires, low tire pressure can cut your gas mileage as much as fifteen percent. Simple investments like clean air filters and tire pressure guages can go a long way in keeping your car operating at its ‘greenest’ levels.
If you have to return to the store for those type of things, think about consolidating your trip. Maybe you shouldn’t have made a trip for the detergent and wax after all. Maybe you should have put it on your grocery list. Most big box stores have a section for auto basics that include detergent, wax and even that tire pressure gage. If they don’t have what you need in the big box store, at least stop at the auto parts store in the same trip.
Another aspect of green transportation is ride sharing. Most states sponsor rideshare programs to work, but they are not particularly effective for a multitude of reasons. People have trouble synching their work schedules, and are not particularly comfortable posting their schedules online for strangers to see. But, there are other options – like sharing trips to the store with a neighbor or carpooling groups of kids to soccer practice and school. You know who they are, chances are you meet over backyard barbeques, so why not give it a try? It’s a great way to spend some adult time and live green and eco friendly.
Things like organic cotton totes give us something to think about when we bag our purchases. You can take those same eco-friendly thoughts further to every aspect of your life so don’t just stop being green when you leave the grocery bagging section of the store.
