So I guess my advice would be to get to know some folks in co-ops, because those people will likely share most of your values and a lot (though not all) of your desires. And you may find opportunity opening up to become a part of a co-op without actually living with a bunch of other people.

As for dinner parties, we live in a small apartment where there isn’t room to have even a little table set up on the regular. For big dinner parties we use a large fold-up table that can be stored in a closet. We just set it up right in the middle of the living area and use a table cloth. No one seems to mind.

Finally, I’ll second the suggestion to look for an apartment with a small balcony or patio. I took my first crack at container gardening this year, and actually grew tomatoes (I normally can’t keep a house plant alive)! The gardeners amongst us know this already, but it was really magical to watch the little 2-inch seedlings I started with grown into full blown producing plants. Even just the small amount we were able to grow ourselves helped us feel more connected to the productive cycle.

Similarly, although a lot of new buildings are being greenwashed, some building practices (eg passivhaus) certainly merit the new materials cost. And this is even more true considering that a lot of the Boston area uses oil heat, which is basically the least efficient way to heat a dwelling with fossil fuels.

I don’t know how much these things apply to anna’s situation, but I wanted to point out that when it comes to something like an LCA or carbon balance, a lot of the time it’s difficult to make a determination based on guidelines like “used is always greener” when the types of impact vary widely and a lot of it is extremely situation specific.

I am really grateful for urban living because it makes environmentally conscious living much easier—no need for a car, smaller spaces to heat and cool, no yards to be watered. But I hear ya on the compost issue. I now freeze all my fruit’n'veg scraps and then drop them off at a composting point every couple weeks. It requires a trip into Manhattan because there’s not a place near me in Brooklyn. Total pain in the ass., but there it is. Anna, I forget where exactly you live but I know there’s a composting drop-off or two in Cambridge. Not sure how inconvenient that is for you, though.

I have friends in my building who have done the indoor worm box composting and didn’t find it as easy as they’d expected. It requires careful attention to how moist/dry/acidic the environment is within the box, and yes, the box takes up some space. When I looked into it, I was told that if you have the standard apt-sized box, the worms can consume about a handful of scraps a day. Which, for me, is not really enough composting capacity, because I eat at home a lot and make my own juice nearly every day, so I generate a LOT of food waste. It just didn’t seem like an easy option to me, which is why I wind up toting the stuff to the drop-off point.

Stupid mousepad on this laptap randomly unlocks itself and sends words into the middle of sentences where I don’t want them.

Everyone says to me: why don’t you get a Prius? I’m all because my 11 yr old car is *almost* as efficient, and I don’t want to take up all the resources that go into a new car until this one is falling apart (or I can see my feet go through the bottom like Cimorene said).

I agree that a lot of the new “green” housing is bullshit. It is much greener to buy an existing home, which the resources have already been used for, and make it more energy efficient, than to contribute to stripping resources for the “green” housing.

Don’t consume new resources in the first place, and reuse things that are already out there. That’s the greenest way to go.

If you buy something new, get a good quality item that will last longer, much better than getting rid of creating demand for more resource usage every few years. The husband and I bought a solid oak bedroom set. It’s 17 yrs old and still looks brand new. We bought it planning to use it until we move into a nursing home, then our kids can have it.

Which leads to my next point… it might be worth collecting a bunch of friends and buying a house with garden, then converting it into suitable apartments. You’d probably want to start by seducing an architect into your group. That’s what I did They know phenomenal amounts of useful stuff about what you can do, should do, and will be allowed to do.

I think we’re still in the sort of meta planning stages of thinking about not just how to live more consciously in the space we have, but also what kind of space we want and how to do that in a conscientious manner. How to, for example, balance the desire for a private home with the desire for the efficiency that multi-family units provide. Hence the interest in co-housing options.

In terms of apartments, also remember that multiple-person apartments are more efficient than single-person apartments, and living in a city is actually more energy efficient altogether than most suburban, rural, or semi-rural living situations. It may not feel like it, because you’re in something of a concrete jungle and have no garden and so on, but on a macro scale things like yards are incredibly wasteful, and composting may not make up for the toll that, for example, an even slightly longer commute may have. Also, small apartments with two people are much more energy efficient than houses with two people, or apartments with one person, and so on.

Also, those “eco-friendly” or “green” condos that they’re building now–I just find that most of that is total bullshit. Building new buildings is incredibly hard on the environment because of the resources it takes to put together a building, shipping costs, and so on. Making a building slightly more eco-friendly is often not worth the dramatic cost of building those eco-friendly buildings, and more good can be done by remembering to turn off your lightbulbs, taking a bike instead of a car, or any number of lifestyle changes (which are much more difficult), as opposed to “Lifestyle!” changes, which are often more cosmetic than anything else.

But knowing the facts of your environmental kindliness seems to be only part of your concern, which is also on lifestyle. A couple things I’d recommend doing: look into green cleaning. Namely, vinegar. Vinegar, baking soda, salt, lemons, mineral or some other kind of oil (for wood)–those things are far kinder to the environment than most cleaning products you can buy. I belong to BJs and I get a couple 3-gallon things of vinegar every few months, and use it to clean everything. It’s amazing. I do still use bleach in the toilet and every now and then in the tub, but I use only the basic liquid bleach (which, from what I understand, breaks down into fairly innocuous elements eventually, so isn’t quite as violent as some of the other crazy chemical stuff).

I second the suggestion of things like sealing windows, which is an amazing way to save money AND energy.

Also, look into worm composting, which can usually be done in your kitchen without smelliness. I’ve been meaning to do this for some time but I am a terrible procrastinator. There are people in RI who sell worms (The Worm Ladies) and they’ll ship you a pound of worms, and you can build your own composter, and then you’ll have worm castings and worm juice, which is totally good for your waste-impact and garden/houseplants. (Also, if you have a sunny kitchen, you can grow herbs inside! I have thyme and rosemary and it’s great). Also if you move somewhere with a deck, you can get a container garden!

Ok as for gardening: check with your university to see if there’s a community garden associated with the school. A friend of mine goes to Yale, and they have a graduate school community garden that students can sign up for, and everybody helps take care of it and they get produce and such, and it’s awesome. Also non-university associated community gardens are probably all over Boston.

Warning though: be careful about urban gardening. A professor of mine from college (environmental science) did work on urban gardening, and he found that lots of Bostonian urban gardeners were unknowingly ingesting wayyy too much lead. Apparently Boston–the more urban, the worse it is–is full of lead because of leaded gasoline, which leached into the soil for years and was never remediated. Also Boston has a breathtaking number of lead pipes–like, miles and miles–so your water might already have high amounts of lead, and you don’t want to compound that by eating lead-filled veggies from your garden. You can send soil sampled to UMass Amherst and for $10 they’ll test your soil for heavy metals and other possible contaminants. I had a chance to have a plot on campus this year, and the space (which was supposed to have been tested already) ended up being a HAZARDOUS WASTE SITE, like as in the recommendation was like, “Call the EPA because this shit needs to be fixed ASAP.” I ended up filling two kiddie pools with soil and having a container garden, and it’s been delightful.

If you end up moving into a more grown-up-like place, don’t buy new furniture at Ikea. Well, don’t buy non-upholstered furniture at Ikea or wherever. You can usually get nice wooden tables and stuff at garage sales or thrift stores–all the furniture at my house was free or purchased on the Super Cheap at yard sales or Goodwill, and my apartment looks much nicer than most of my cohort’s places, which are frequently filled with cheapy-looking and shoddily-made Ikea furniture (which was also wayyy more expensive than what I paid). Having beautiful wooden furniture that’s old and carved all pretty-like is–for someone like me at least–a total mood-booster and helps me think of myself as a grown up. Plus I feel good knowing that I kept something out of the landfill and didn’t get something that required trees to be cut down, screws to be mined/made, and parts shipped all over to get it. If your university has a grad student listserv or forum or something, people tend to post for sale stuff all the time. Also troll craigslist for furniture that’s for sale and for announcements about yard/garage sales, which will probably still be going on for a week or two.

Finally, learn how to fix stuff. Fixing stuff instead of buying new stuff is not only psychologically satisfying, it’s also cheaper and more environmentally-friendly than buying.