I don’t know who first said, “when the going gets tough, the tough go shopping.” In my memory, it was Dolly Parton in the legendary film 9 to 5, but Google disagrees and attributes it to a book-slash-card-game that came around about 30 years later. Who knows. Let’s all re-watch and report back. We’re doin’ the work, y’all!
Regardless of where the witticism came from (also not Joseph Kennedy or Billy Ocean), it’s particularly relevant to the climate emergency because hooo boy do we love to try to buy our way through this thing. In fact, when one5c was just Corinne and me, we often talked about how the shortest path to profitability would be to post roundups of sustainable products and cash in on the referral bonuses that companies like Amazon pay to publishers who send them customers. For the record, we don’t do this.
You’ve probably noticed that we publish product reviews now (commission-free). Our reason: You’re gonna buy stuff anyway, so we might as well perform the testing to help you avoid purchasing landfill-bound crap and do the research to ensure that companies you give money to don’t use it to torch the planet. I feel pretty good about this.
So good, in fact, that, when the news has me feeling glum (🫠2025!) I find my mouse hovering over the “add to cart” button for pretty much anything we recommend. Gimme that retail dopamine! Do I need a countertop composter when my heap is so far away that not even my chickens can smell it? No. Do I want one? Yes. Is my perfectly good water bottle in danger of being usurped by another that’s been in my online cart for the past month? 😬 Do I need new reusable storage bags? Well, actually…
I class the retail stuff as mostly harmless, but this eagerness we all have for credit-card activism is ripe for exploitation. Carbon credits are a common offender. When I buy an airline ticket, I’m often offered the option to offset that flight’s emissions by putting a few bucks towards planting trees or maintaining grasslands or hiring mermen to tend kelp forests. Yes, we should absolutely maintain as many natural carbon sinks as possible. Also: there’s an ocean’s worth of evidence that offsetting your travel just doesn’t work.
There are similar might-be-traps everywhere.
There will be legitimate innovation, and there will be heaping portions of greenwash. You will fall for it, and I will too. All we can do is keep trying.
Terracycle, for example, is one of the few widely accessible programs claiming to handle tough-to-recycle plastics like ABS and polyethylene. There’s a dropoff location near me—and I live in the middle of nowhere. Their website touts a recycling guarantee and offers in-depth explanations about how their program works. It looks really impressive, even to my climate-curmudgeonly eyes. Yet investigations have shown that the company has some skeletons in its closet. Do I use it anyway? No comment.
Many of you have written in to ask about Ridwell and Hefty’s ReNew orange bag program, both of which make similar promises to Terracycle—though usually on a smaller scale. Do these programs do what they claim to do? Maybe! (Though Hefty does burn a certain portion of the plastic it collects to power cement kilns… not great.) Are they perfect solutions? Probably not! Will they be the last companies who try to get you to pay a little money to green up your life? Nope.
There will be legitimate innovation, and there will be heaping portions of greenwash. You will fall for it, and I will too. All we can do is keep trying.
One good option, and one that’s available to all of us at some level, is to train ourselves to consume less stuff. Many of us are legitimately addicted to online shopping, and everyone could probably stand to step away from the screen every time some inconvenience sparks the thought “this would be so much easier/faster/more sustainable if I had a _____.” I include myself in this prescription. But that’s the small stuff—mostly harmless.
The crappiest part of this mess is that you actually can buy your way out of a good chunk of your personal emissions—or, at least, some of us can. The fortunate among us can buy solar panels; yes, it takes resources and energy to manufacture them, but they can offset themselves in less than four years. Those who need and can afford a new car can opt for EVs, which, like solar panels, get cleaner than gas cars within a couple years. Some of us can trade our ACs for heat pumps, move to cities, eat fake meat instead of beef, and so on.
This stuff is expensive, which sucks. But it does take a real bite out of the problem—especially if millions of us do it. So how do we give millions of people who maybe can’t afford it a cleaner, greener way of living? I don’t know. But maybe it starts by helping each other resist the urge to buy new water bottles and carbon offsets, and save that cash for the stuff that matters.
If I had an easy answer, you wouldn’t be getting this email on a Wednesday.
OK, I’m gonna go see if I can convince my daughter to surrender her silicone candy bag and keep me from having to buy another one. It’s hot, so maybe I can bribe her with ice cream. (Yeah, I know, dairy…)
