April 28, 2010

Get Less Wasteful and Improve Your Love Life

Want to see how green you are compared to fellow FilterForGoodians? Take Nalgene’s Least Wasteful Cities Challenge Quiz to find out how your eco-creds stack up to other green-curious people taking the test. I’m proud to say that I scored greener than the national average — and even prouder that I beat my regional average too!

The quiz asks about simple lifestyle habits — like turning off the faucet when you brush your teeth or turning out the light when leaving the room — and as you may have expected, filling up reusable water bottles instead of buying disposable bottled water. The idea’s to show how collectively, these small individual choices can add up to save a lot of water, energy, carbon emissions — and often, your money.

Of course, I’ve got a few little quibbles with this survey. One question simply asked how often I take public transportation. I put about half the time — but if the question had asked how often I take public transportation, bike, or walk instead of driving, I would have put down about 90 percent of the time! Plus, as an apartment dweller, I’m not able to get a rain barrel — so I didn’t get points for that either.

Still, I’m glad those two issues didn’t hurt my score too badly. Los Angeles, where I live, actually ranked the 8th least wasteful city according to the study. Which city topped the list? Perhaps expectedly, it was my greener northern neighbor, San Francisco.
Find out if your city made the top 25 list — and take the test to see how your own habits score next to your neighbors.