Often lately I’ve found myself encountering the idea of sustainability. It seems like everywhere I turn, people are promoting a so-called “green” lifestyle. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for caring for the environment. After all, this is the only planet we’ve got, and we’re already running out of chocolate. Here’s what I don’t get. What do you mean by sustainable?

Let me back up for a second. The story of how Miller and I ended up adopting a guinea pig is a story for another day; suffice it to say for now that we did. (His name is Nibbler.) Now neither of us is exactly Bill Gates, so we’ve been trying to save money as much as possible in all aspects of our lives. Recently we learned that the cage we’d originally bought for Nibbler was too small, so we decided to build our own. That meant finding an alternative bedding solution, and preferably one that wouldn’t cost us quite as much as the paper bedding we were using. Our research led us to reusable fleece cage pads, which I sewed by hand. I’m crafty that way.

Speaking of crafty, I’ve been a die-hard knitter/crocheter for several years. In my recent increase in creative drive, I started browsing Ravelry for ideas and discovered a number of knitable household knickknacks. Everyone has a crocheted potholder, but what about loofas? Cotton rounds? Swiffer pads? I got to work right away. Reusable means we don’t have to spend money on disposable ones. It’s not like I don’t have tons of yarn already lying around. I was also snowed in for a few days thanks to a blizzard, so it could be argued that I had nothing else to do…

Anyway, so now I have reusable everything. Throw it in the wash and we’re in business again. It’s a little more expensive starting out, plus there’s all the time I have to spend making whatever it is to begin with. But now I’m not spending $X0 every few weeks on that paper bedding.

The thing is, every pattern and tutorial I found proclaimed “sustainability” and “green”-ness. But that got me thinking. Is it really greener to reuse?

Let’s use Nibbler’s bedding as an example. In his old cage, we would lay down a lining of old newspaper – since we had tons of it laying around anyway – underneath a layer of paper bedding. Everything we threw out when we cleaned his cage every week was biodegradable. Eliminating supply and demand on the bedding for the sake of arguments, we were only recycling existing paper.

The reusable bedding, on the other hand, is two layers of fleece with a layer of absorbent material in between. We used genuine woolen fleece (as opposed to synthetic polar fleece), so theoretically it’s also biodegradable. But I have no idea what’s in that absorbent fabric. Not to mention the water and soap spent to wash it once a week. That might well be the most important factor: the water. Which is more harmful to the environment, using water or throwing away paper? (On the money front, which is how I started thinking about the subject, it works the same way. Rather than “which is more harmful,” the question is “which costs more money, the disposable products or the soap and the water bill?”)

My personal conclusion on the subject is that it depends. You can’t just follow one formula to “save the environment.” If you’re in California in the middle of a drought, it’s probably better to go on buying those Swiffer pads from Target and throwing them away when you’re done. If you’re in Peru, where paper is a slightly rarer commodity, it probably makes more sense to take the time to craft those reusable cotton rounds. As for me, the so-called sustainable thing suit me fine. I already like crafting, and I have a fair amount of free time to do so. #makersgonnamake