The stories seem unconnected to the chapters that follow them, but should nevertheless inspire a large audience, and are a nice break from reading so many tips. Each tip is presented with an impressive statistic about how if each person of a certain sized group of people conserved only a small amount of a certain resource, that it adds up to saving a massive amount of money, energy, or other resources. Some of the statistics are less good than others, though. And when you combine some of the tips, they sometimes seem to contradict each other.
For example, in the “Travel” section, the third “simple step” is to “Pack lightly. Every additional ten pounds per traveler requires an additional 250 million gallons of jet fuel per year, which is enough to keep a 747 flying continuously for ten years.” This statistic is astounding, and certainly makes me want to try to lighten my travel load by ten pounds every time I fly. But then we are told to “pack your own shampoo, soap, and toothpaste instead of relying on those provided by most hotels” and that “A single three-hundred-room hotel in Las Vegas uses more than 150,000 plastic bottles of shampoo per year.” And toiletries can be heavy, so it seems that packing travel bottles of toiletries which you can keep and refill whenever you travel would be more consistent with minimizing luggage weight. Despite the fact that the statistics get a little old, and that some of the facts could be slightly altered to save even more resources, the United States would consume many fewer resources, and not to mention people could save a lot of money, if each person embraced five new sustainable living habits suggested by The Green Book.
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