green living Archives • Bitches Get Riches

I’m always looking for great sustainable swaps, because I love finding ways to reduce my footprint. (In an ecological sense only—been holding steady at size 7.5 for years.) I try to recycle, compost, buy less, shop local, and choose more sustainable options. But I’m just one woman! I can’t test out everything. So I asked our endlessly wise Patreon community. And boy did Bitch Nation deliver!

My only caveat was that these sustainable swaps can’t suck.

Paper straws that disintegrate into wet clumps in your mouth? Absolutely not!
Coffee pods sold to us as green because you’ll “waste less water”? Lies and pictures of also-lies!
Cloth napkins that cost—I’m sorry—$92 for a set of four?! WHAT! I’m not linking to the site because they claim to be handmade by artisans, and I’m sure those artisans are very nice people. BUT STILL!

Out of this list, ye devils! These sustainable swaps need to be as good—or gooder!—than the products they’re designed to replace. Nothing prohibitively expensive or complicated.

And definitely not shitty.

“I would rather bathe in 10,000 scorpions while singing the entire libretto of Rent than live in a tiny house.”
-Piggy

For a while there, I was ready to breathe easy, thinking the tiny home craze had finally passed. I saw fewer think pieces, pins, aspirational hashtags. The advent of television shows describing the movement seemed to announce its loss of counter-culture status, a sure sign of the end.

… Then I started a financial blog.

Like a recalcitrant UTI patient, I’d stopped taking antibiotics when my symptoms left. My reward was the metaphorical equivalent of pissing broken glass and lava: boundless renewed fascination with tiny houses.

I understand! Tiny homes are appealing to frugal people. On paper, they’re everything a traditional home is, but optimized: cheaper, greener, less constricting. But the proliferation reveals a less rosy truth.

I think the tiny house movement is already being lowered into its coffin, but allow me to secure the lid. The following list comes from Tiny House Blog’s Top 10 Reasons to Join the Tiny House Movement. (I selected this list because it popped up first when I googled “reasons to get a tiny house.” Interestingly, the second is 5 Reasons Buying a Tiny House is a Mistake.)

I’m going to dismantle each one because I’m a neoliberal killjoy and secret corporate shill for Big Housing.