All these years, you've been doing it wrong

I'm sure most of you are familiar with TED talks.  For those who aren't, TED is an acronym for "Technology, Entertainment, Design" and is a conference that gets a very diverse set of people together who give talks on pretty much whatever they want.  It's been around for 30 years, but now that we have this internet thing, a lot more people can see it.  There are good TED talks, and boring TED talks, and sometimes they stray a little too far into entertainment, with the presenter trying to convince me that their study of whatever is somehow the most important insight into the world that has ever been.  But, there is one talk that did change the way I go about life.  I think about it most days, and now I'm sharing it with you.

It's not about education, body language or leadership skills (3 most popular talks with over 15 million views each).  Nope, it's a far more important topic: How to Use a Paper Towel.

It's only four and a half minutes long, so you should go watch it, but it comes down to this: Americans use 13,000,000,000 pounds of paper towels each year.  If you didn't want to count those zeros, that's 13 billion pounds.  (About 40 pounds per person.)  Reducing paper towel usage by 1 towel per person per day would save 571,230,000 pounds of paper each year.  So, what's the trick?  It's a very complicated process that involves two steps: 'shake' and 'fold'.  (Don't worry, he demonstrates each step.)  I've used it, and it works.  For those of us that use public bathrooms regularly (work, church, etc.) it's easy to do.

This is an example of my favorite kind of environmentalism: the obvious kind.  There is literally no reason not to use fewer paper towels.  Well, maybe those 3 seconds extra it takes are that important to you, but I doubt it.  It works just as well, and saves money that can be used for things that I think are more important, like my paycheck.  (Yes, it's a small thing, but there's probably a good quote about "small things making great things come to pass", or "an error of only a few degrees" makes all the difference, or long journeys begin with a single step, or something like that. If I can think up a good quote, maybe I'll post it later.)

The US burns about 365 million gallons of gasoline each day, roughly 1 gallon per person.  Aggressive driving reduces fuel efficiency and does very, very little for you.  We aren't all aggressive drivers, but if 10% of the population could save 10% of their fuel by not riding my bumper and cutting people off wherever possible, that could save 3 million gallons of fuel ($10,000,000 worth) each day.  Whether you think global warming is an issue or not, there's not much use to burning ten million bucks worth of gas if you don't have to.  Examples abound, feel free to share your favorite one, but it's amazing how often we can all be wasteful, and half the time what we're wasting most of all is our own money.  So go save the world, one paper towel at a time.