Chinese people are thrifty: it’s common for them to go the extra mile just to save an extra Yuan. They wear long johns, ride the bus and buy tofu instead of meat. If you asked them why they did these things, they would probably tell you it’s because they are trying to save money. But what they may not realize is that while they are trying to save money, they are also saving the earth. Yes, it’s true that China as a whole is one of the biggest polluters in the world, sending enormous amounts of pollution into the air, and dumping who knows what into their rivers. But these are examples of pollution on a grand scale caused by corruption and policy failures; per capita pollution in China, particularly in areas like carbon dioxide emissions, is still a fraction of that in most developed countries.

Photo: Boondockdurden

When the Chinese way of life is examined, the way the average person lives on a small scale, you actually see that they have been preserving a culture of natural, impact free living for centuries. This can be seen in everything they do, from the way they hold on to every plastic bag to reuse later or how they use solar water heaters.

Take for example, how the Chinese choose to cook their food. Urban dwellers typically walk to a local market and buy fresh vegetables that were grown nearby. They buy their veggies with cash, or small change and put them in small plastic bags. They might also buy a small piece of meat or tofu to cook with their vegetables, also to be wrapped in a small thin plastic bag. Then they go home and cook over (usually) a natural gas range.

The Chinese dinner produces very little consumer waste, requires only a little energy to cook, and probably traveled no more than 50 or 60 km from the farm to the dinner table. It’s also very cheap.
This way of cooking is so different from standard Western habits where we open our vegetables from a bag or a can, bake for hours with other condiments from other bags and other cans, and serve it all with a large hunk of meat that was imported from one of California’s gigantic methane polluting meat plants. (You know, the ones that release more global warming gases than a small city.)

Another thing that Chinese people do to save money but ends up helping the environment is wear long underwear. And unfortunately for us foreigners, they usually wear long underwear so they never have to turn on the heater. At work, I often wish that Chinese people would just develop and use electricity like everybody else, but in reality, the world would be in a scary state if everyone in China chose to heat their homes with electricity or gas. That would result in a carbon footprint the size of 700,000,000 people, which is about the same size as Europe and the United States combined. Really, we should be grateful that China’s hundreds of millions of people are too cheap to run their heaters or air conditioners.

Another decision that Chinese parents make that benefits the environment is the choice to go diaper free for their children. Although this tends to be something that makes foreigners a little uncomfortable, it has prevented hectares of wilderness from being smothered under a putrid heap of non-biodegradable diapers. In fact, the average child who uses diapers will create well over 1 ton of waste by the time they’re potty trained. In the US, over 20 billion disposable diapers end up in landfills each year. According to one source, if stacked on an American football field (5,350 square meters) these diapers would make a pile three miles (4,828 meters) high! Can you imagine if a country the size of China decided to use diapers?

Westerners may insist that diapers are essential, because we think it’s a public health issue just to allow babies do their business anywhere. But that is not entirely true. Urine from a healthy individual is sterile. And poop, although revolting, is biodegradable.

Something else that Chinese people do to save money (or earn money) is to recycle. While Americans at first were reluctant to begin recycling because there was no financial incentive, many poor Chinese actually depend on income from salvaging recyclable materials, whether that be cardboard, plastic bottles or Styrofoam.

For me it’s actually nice. I just put my recyclable materials outside my door, and someone always comes along and claims it. I don’t even have to sort through it, and I don’t have an annoying waste management bill. It’s really pretty neat to live in an economy that rewards recycling. It’s just too bad that to be that way, there has to be poverty.

Another sad thing about this Chinese way of life is that it is slowly changing. As incomes grow and the middle class swells, the small decisions that were made to save money are now made to save time or satisfy an appetite. Let’s hope that as China continues to develop, that the Chinese will keep those simple habits that have kept this country sustainable for so long. Let’s hope they will still take the bus to work, sport their long johns and eat tofu.

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