I just received my new laptop today. Once I arrived home from work I started to play. Its a lot faster, of course, than my five year old custom built desktop. The new toy is commercially known as a Lenovo Ideapad Y530. I’m still working on a more personal name. I still have issues with the way that laptops mess with my posture. I seem to slowly sink into it, til I find myself about six inches from the screen wondering why my neck is killing me. Also, for now, there seems to be a disturbing smell coming from my Chinese-made computer. While my headache might be from a simple lack of water, I am not convinced that the off-gases are harmless.

I guess that my expectations of Vista have been considerably suppressed over the last year and a half since its release. Now, I am pleased to see that it works without any major meltdowns.

Yes, it is heavier than I would like and although I think that I won’t travel with it much, I am returning to university, where laptops are more common than pencils.

Does anyone have any suggestions on what I should name the little guy?

This morning I hopped in the shower, washed my hair using a bar shampoo that was packaged in only a small amount of paper (not a giant plastic bottle) and used a paraben-free body wash with natural oils & extracts. But I might as well have been slathering myself with green paint. After all, I am greenwashing every day. Despite using these eco-friendly personal care products, I turned the water up extra hot and just stood there for awhile to help relax the kink in my neck that I seemed to develop overnight.

The greenwashing in my life doesn’t stop there. I’m in the midst of remodeling our home office into a nursery as we anxiously await our first born. I’m proud to admit that I used a low-VOC finish on the hardwood floor and no-VOC paint on the walls. We are searching Craigslist and used furniture stores for a crib and other furniture to give new life to someone else’s discards. We are registering for BPA-free bottles, organic onesies and the safest baby shampoo we can find.

Meanwhile, our lives will soon be full of new plastic toys, disposable diapers, and all the other short-lived items and environmental impacts that come with having a baby. In moving our office to the room next door, we replaced our massive old reclaimed desk with a sleek new mass-produced particle board desk that came packed in a 40-gallon trash can’s worth of Styrofoam. And from the smell of things, that desk is probably off-gassing enough VOCs to make up for all the toxic fumes I carefully avoided in the nursery. These are the things I try to keep quiet as I greenwash about our future eco-baby.

To me, thats what greenwashing is about: all of the stories that aren’t being told. To a degree, I’m doing the same thing corporations accused of greenwashing are doing. I brag about my environmental victories but keep quiet about the things that aren’t so green. No one is attacking me for my lifestyle, so why do we have a different standard for businesses made up of individuals just like me?

Perhaps we need to measure the “greenness” of a corporation or business by how much progress it is making and not just by a snapshot of on any given day. That snapshot may show that the company is doing more harm than good, even if the good portion has been increasing over time. There is a big difference between a company that simply absolves itself of environmental sins with offsets alone and one that has made incremental improvements – no matter how small – to reduce emissions in the first place.

I feel I’m making progress in greening my life, and I think the business community is doing the same, even if it isn’t changing as quickly as we would like. True there are companies who are just coating themselves with a thin green wash. But before we accuse a company of such a crime, we need to take a look at their track record, then give them time to prove themselves with continued improvement.

- Jeff Severin

The packing insanity, as you can see from the above photo of my so-called living room, has officially begun. In my quest to make this move as green as possible, I’ve been buying all my furniture used or antique. But recently, I decided to take another leap in this direction:

As I plan on renting out the basement of this house furnished, I need another mattress. Although most people balk at the thought of a used one, a looksee on Craigslist turned up lots of mattresses that had only been used a few times for guests and were purchased as recently as a month ago. Plus, while sleeping on something previously slept on may sound creepy, what’s also creepy is the off-gas that usually accompanies a new mattress. Yes, there are eco-friendly options, but I happen to be broke.

Anyway, I found something I liked on Craiglist and after a few phone calls had agreed to buy a mattress, boxspring and frame for $400. It couldn’t be delivered, so it wasn’t long before I found myself at a U-Haul office in the west end, booking a cargo van with a man named Fred. Making conversation, he asked what I needed the truck for, so I explained the situation and grumbled about having to go all the way to Richmond Hill.

Then he said, “You know, I actually have a queen-sized mattress and boxspring out back that I’m trying to sell — did you want to look at it?” Next thing I know, I’m lying on this mattress in a dark storage room with Fred, thinking it was not the most comfortable thing in the world but would save me having to U-Haul my ass out to the ‘burbs. Then I see he’s got this wicked 50s-era love seat (that’s it, in the pic above), so I ask him if that’s also for sale. He then tells me he’ll give me the mattress, boxspring, frame, love seat AND the whole truck rental for $120.

Best deal ever! Unless of course it has bed bugs or something, but I did as careful an inspection as I could and will be airing it out as much as possible.