A few years ago, when I started paying attention to my diet, I found that drinking at least a liter of water a day kept my brain functioning better, and in the case of two liters a day, kept me from gaining weight. Where I was living, the tap water was unpalatable, so I made a habit of stopping at the Kwik-E-Mart and buying some bottled water for the road trip and the rest of my morning.

I’ve been a fan of recycling since I was a child, so none of my bottles ever got thrown away, but they hardly ever saw a second use. What I didn’t realize (and please forgive my lateness in arriving to this party) was how many of the Earth’s natural resources went into making, filling and then shipping each bottle so that I can buy it in the morning. Let me sum up: a lot.

Some alarming statistics from Wikipedia:

• The Pacific Institute estimates that producing the bottles for American consumption in 2006 required the equivalent of more than 17 million barrels of oil.
• Once the bottle is created and filled with water, large amounts of fossil fuel are expended delivering the water from its source to end user by means of ground transportation.
• If a container holds 1 litre it requires 3 to 5 litres of water in its manufacturing process

When people hear “petroleum,” we think “I use gas in my car”, but food costs and petroleum prices are so tightly knit. I am embarrassed that I never realized that before. If only to help reduce our dependency on oil (foreign or otherwise), I have stopped drinking bottled water.

My wife and I finally hooked up the water line to our refrigerator, which has a filter and a water dispenser (it was not an expensive refrigerator), and I started looking for a resuable mug for my water. I wanted something that could fit a liter, but I settled for the 32 oz. Eddie Bauer model in the picture over on the side. I found it at Target on one of our increasingly-consolidated shopping trips.

The mug cost about $16. The water line was at Lowe’s for $7. I imagine our water utility bill will be higher than it was, but annually, I bet I’ll still be saving money over $1.09 / day. More importantly, I’m helping reduce our need for oil. Please consider joining me in this effort.

I recently sold a number of possessions in my year-long quest to vanquish my credit card debt as quickly as possible. Before this, I had very limited experience using online selling tools, and generally thought of them all as a hassle, so I thought I would try more than one and see how they stacked up. Your experiences may differ, along with your selling requirements, but here’s what I found:

Craigslist

I’m fortunate enough to live in a city with a Craigslist presence (check to see if your hometown is on the list), and I had something that I really didn’t want to bother trying to ship: Guitar Hero III for the Nintento Wii. Craigslist, if you haven’t heard of it, is sort of like a city-wide distributed garage sale. You describe what you have using a free-form text entry field, pictures optional, prices optional, limited only by your imagination.

I said that I had Guitar Hero III for sale, found some Creative Commons photos on Flickr, asked for $50, and that was all there was to it. Within a couple of hours I had two offers. The first person haggled with me and asked if $40 would be okay. So I found a Starbucks that was easy for both of us to get to and met her that evening. If I’d waited a little longer, I could have gotten $50 for it from the second person. Lesson learned.

eBay

I had a number of DVD box sets of a favorite TV show that I wanted to unload (while keeping a soft copy of the better episodes on an external hard drive at home). It was easy enough to copy the details of each episode from a wiki to the “Sell item” page on eBay, and after a few repetitions I found it was even possible to find the vital stats with a database that eBay provided.

There are, not to put too fine a point on it, a lot of options for how to sell an item on eBay. I sort of wish there was an “eBay lite” option, or better wizard that stepped me through the process. Also, it tended to break when I used the Safari browser at home. I had to remember to use Firefox.

But my biggest problem with eBay was not really eBay’s fault: they wanted me to estimate shipping costs. The thing is, I don’t own a scale, and I can’t hold something in my hand and say, “yep, that’s about six pounds.”

In general, it seemed to me that eBay is geared toward professional sellers.

Amazon Seller Account

One-click patent silliness notwithstanding, I like Amazon because it is easy. Even without 1-Click, it’s easy. And that ease of use has expanded to their options for selling things online, in my case it was a used video camera.

All I did was find the right model camera by acting as if I was looking to buy one and click a button labeled “Sell yours here”. Specify the condition (new, used, etc.), add comments, pick a price and that’s about it. You get to benefit automatically from any pictures, customer reviews, or any other information that Amazon is already storing about that product.

Amazon also did a good job of estimating the shipping cost for me. The drawback I experienced using Amazon was that I had to wait. This will vary from product to product, of course.

Conclusion

With both Amazon and eBay, there’s something of a process to setting up an account and getting paid. Craiglist is a lot more free-form in that respect. If I was in a real rush, I’d probably use Craigslist again, but for the most part, I prefer Amazon’s way of selling things. I hardly had to lift a finger.