And Jack the Sailor has hit on a key point.

The city I live in has an excellent recycling system, with waste pre-sorted by people themselves. Cans go in this container, bottles in this, paper products here, matter that can be used for mulch goes here, etc. How does the sanitation department encourage this? If it isn't properly sorted, they won't pick it up! You have to haul it to the dump yourself. Only most dumps are turning into recycling plants where, if it isn't sorted, they won't take it.

The building I live in is a coop apartment. A couple of decades ago, we took out a big mortgage and had this 100 year old building weatherized, complete with thermal windows, got rid of the coal-fed boiler that inefficiently fed an antiquated radiator system and installed electrical baseboard heat (Seattle City Light is all hydropower, no coal-fired plants), and got a tax break and historical status as a result.

Several of the people who live in this building work for Microsoft. They don't hop in their cars and drive across the Evergreen Point bridge to get to work, they telecommute. My wife works at the Seattle Public Library and she takes public transportation to work (our car, a 1999 Toyota Corolla spends most of its time in the garage; ten years old and about 25,000 miles on the clock).

Energy Star compliant electrical appliances (including my computer). Energy efficient light bulbs everywhere!

Saturday is "Farmers' Market" day in Seattle. In addition to the famous Pike Place Market, almost every district has a location where local farmers bring their produce, so it's not too difficult to get fresh, locally grown food, trucked in from various areas such as the Kent Valley south of Seattle, not trucked halfway across the continent. It's generally less expensive than what you can get in the supermarkets and it doesn't have all the nutrition processed out of it.

I see a lot of Priuses and "Smart Cars" around.

Don Firth