Originally Posted by
Platy
Buy more things at garage sales? That keeps stuff out of the landfill and puts a few extra bucks into the local economy. It's also a great excuse to get out on a bike on Saturdays.
+1
Unfortunately, garage sales tend to be rather seasonal. However, there are things like craiglist (sp?) and kijiji (or newspaper classifieds) where stuff can be found on the cheap/semi-cheap. Or thrift stores (Salvation Army, MCC, and Value Village depending where you live).
For fair trade stuff (particularly trinkets, etc) you can see if you have a "Ten Thousand Villages" near you (I live in Saskatoon and we have a couple here. I believe it is a Mennonite run operation, although I could be badly mistaken).
Originally Posted by Llamero
As long as you have a roof over your head and food in your mouth, everything else is just details.
How true this is (and how difficult it can be to learn). I am gradually starting to realize (again... I've realized and then sort of forgotten/neglected this) the need to live simply, and to be mostly content with what I already have.
@PotatoSlayer: As far as going green and eliminating corporate crap from your life, one potential step is to ditch the TV. While my room-mate and I still have a TV (which I bought at a Garage Sale), we have gone on a TV-fast for nearly a month now. Most of the "TV" we have watched since beginning the fast have been a few shows on the weekends streamed to us via the Internet (We had been watching Defying Gravity on spacecast.com, and I have been watching StarGate Universe via spacecast.com). We had several reasons for fasting from TV. For one, a lot of the shows we were watching were garbage and unwholesome. Another (and this is the one that could actually pertain to you) was to reduce the amount of advertising we subject ourselves to (lets face it, TV is rife with advertising. In one hour you can watch nearly 20 minutes of advertising, which encourages you to be dissatisfied with what you already own, and so on). So, if you want to eliminate the corporate crap, I would say that eliminating TV is a good first step. It is made even easier by the availability of many TV shows on the internet or DVD (and something you can do with DVD's is bring them to a pawnshop and trade in ones you don't like or don't plan on watching again). At the same time, cutting the TV out also allows you to be a bit more environmentally friendly (lets electricity consumed, especially for the old CRT televisions or Plasma TV's). And if you decide to literally ditch the old TV, I'm pretty sure there are electronics recycling places you can bring your TV to for further environmentally friendliness (in Saskatchewan, I believe you can bring such old electronics to Sarcan).
Anyway, thats my 10 cents (CDN).