MAY 2023
Millesimal Magazine
BETTER SHOPPING HABITS WRITTEN BY: LILLIAN & DAVE BRUMMET
Conscious consumerism alone has a major impact on the local economy, your personal health, budget constraints and the environment. It involves looking at the power of each dollar spent and evaluating how it can make a difference while benefiting your family. Sign into your favorite social networking sites and join local buy and sell, advertise, entrepreneur and local event groups. Doing so will expose you to small and home-based entrepreneurs producing wonderful products at great prices. You may find artists who carve beautiful house address signs out of scraps they obtained from a woodwork shop operating just a few blocks from you, who purchased their materials from a local mill. Each of these small businesses hires local people and buys coffee for their staff room and gas from local stations. With this in mind, it is easy to see that buying local is one conscious consumer activity that supports a sustainable community. You may find great prices on items like buckets of honey produced by local beekeepers, and as we all know - bees are vital to food production as well as a healthy environment overall. Local wine producers support local fruit producers. In fact there are small home-brew businesses where you can take in the fruits harvested from your property and have them produce the wine for you at around $6 per bottle. The bottles and buckets (from these examples above) are both reusable and recyclable.