More Love, Less Stuff — 3 Cleantech Gift Ideas

We’ve got a cool holiday series running across Important Media this year: “More Love, Less Stuff.” As that article writes, “Instead of focusing on giving gifts for the sake of gifts, we want to talk about ways that we can refocus the holidays this year to make them more about the love and less about the stuff….Of course, that doesn’t have to mean skipping holiday gifts. What it does mean, however, is giving mindfully and minimally.”

At first glance, it seemed like a stretch to fit CleanTechnica in. How are the various cleantech products we push on you unsuspecting good people not stuff?

But, actually, that’s the essence of cleantech. It’s all about doing what we do but using fewer resources and emitting less pollution in the process. Picking out three cleantech solutions, here’s our contribution to the “More Love, Less Stuff” series:

A Fun, Relaxing, Cheap, Efficient Way to Commute

Transit really doesn’t get the love it deserves. The downsides are overhyped and the upsides are often ignored. Riding transit, you don’t have to stress about traffic and your attention is free to go where you want it. You can jump on your tablet or smartphone and get some work done, chat with loved ones, play games, watch something funny, read some CleanTechnica articles, or go shopping (oh, wait, scratch that one).

Gift idea: annual transit pass.

When You Don’t Want to be Tied Down but You Want the Flexibility…

So, say you give up your car (or one of your household’s cars) in order to commute by bike or transit. Great! It’s a genuine improvement to quality of life. I made the move over 10 years and it was one of the best decisions of my life (honestly, no hyperbole there). But sometimes a car really does come in handy….

Luckily, in cities across the world, there are now big carsharing programs in place. When I dropped the car and moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina back in 2004, I was lucky enough to live in a town where a young company called Zipcar was trying to make some progress. It was a great program for me, and makes the switch to a car-free life that much easier. Getting around Chapel Hill and its conjoined sibling Carrboro is quite easy via bike and/or bus (the bus service is even free there), but for the occasional times when you want to pick someone up or drop them off at the airport, or pick up a big item from a shopping center, a car is very useful. I far preferred using Zipcar over getting a taxi or renting a car. It was also nice getting to drive the different vehicles in the fleet there.

Gift idea: carsharing membership

Less Coal = Less Stuff

As the popular Christmas tradition goes, if you’re bad, you get coal in your stocking. Unfortunately, throughout the year many people get coal emissions in their lungs and even die prematurely from the truly dirty energy source. Cutting our use of coal = less stuff in one of the best ways possible. We can reduce our use through energy efficiency measures, and some of us can cut it completely by putting solar panels on our roof. It’s a big gift, certainly one for your immediate family… unless you just have a ton of money floating around. The nice thing about this gift, again, is that it ends up saving your family money, tens of thousands of dollars (in most cases).

Gift idea: solar panels

Image: Transit rider on phone via Shutterstock; Chevy Volt in Chicago Zipcar fleet via PRNewsFoto/Zipcar; Florida solar panels by Cynthia Shahan (CC BY-SA 4.0); Santa solar cartoon via Sustainable Equities Group