Unless you're at an airport or fancy restaurant, a bottle of water typically costs around $1 (give or take). Spending $1 or saving $1 doesn't typically make people think too much about the consequences, but we all love to save $1 when it's easy. That's the whole premise behind why I started this blog, to help people understand that there are easy ways to save $1 (or many iterations of $1) by doing simple things that also happen to help move the cause of sustainability forward.
So my ultimate metric to determine if I make any progress on this idea will be the level of simplicity with which I'm able to explain that concept. Will it make sense to an adult? To a teenage? To my youngest child, in the same way that they understood how to use my iPhone within the first 5 minutes of seeing it?
My good friend Gregg Lewis, award-winning environmental architect, recently sent me this article and hoped it might be help explain to readers why this is such a difficult topic to understand. My response to him was this:
"Interesting article. This is exactly why I tend to believe that the really big thinking should be reserved for the 0.001% of people capable of thinking that big. These would be the people that were able to actually do the math to put a man on the moon in 1969. For the other 99.999% of us, we need a way to be inspired to just do something that we didn't know we could be inspired to do the day before. That's where the simplification of concept comes in.
What you're doing is brilliant, and noteworthy and noble, and I admire the hell out of it. It'll save 100M gallons of water. I've come to the conclusion that my role in this is to figure out a way to inspire someone to save 1 bottle of water, or maybe 1 gallon. I think I might have the capacity to convince a regular person to do that. And if I can figure out a way to get that inspiration to spread just a little, then maybe I've done something worthwhile."
So my goal is to help make this simple, and actually show how ordinary people can save $1 (or many $1's) by doing something that will be good for them and lots of other people.
