Environmental Responsibility

So this year I decided to try to be a lot more environmentally responsible. Here is an update on what we did and how it worked out.

Living

Coming to Japan we chose countryside living over city living. (thats probably not better!) We live in a small house. Importantly, its a very short drive to work and we can walk to shops and restaurants. Its a longish walk to the station.

Car

We bought a nice small car. Its a Nissan Tiida (Versa in USA). We got the smallest engine. I have not fixed my bicycle. This is one of my big failings on the environmental plan.

Travel

We decided against a trip to Australia for New Year instead choosing Taiwan. And we haven't done any international recreational travel since.

Work

I have tried hard to reduce business travel too. This is tricky because I don't want to be ineffective at work. If I am then our competitor who does continue to travel will just take our business and the travel will be done by somebody else. I want to start to leverage remote meeting technology and video conferences more and early in projects. I used my FTP server to distribute test software so I didn't have to ship it.

Consumption

We eat locally. Tochigi has great local fruits and vegetables especially. And we eat it a lot. Our weakness here is wine. We drink a lot of imported wine!

Overall, I feel pretty good about our efforts. The one area I really need to improve is business travel. But as I said, I don't want to be inefficient in this because I run the risk of just transferring the travel to somebody else.