Design your life to include more money, health and happiness with less stuff, space and energy.

Design your life to include more money, health and happiness with less stuff, space and energy.

Your Guide to Doing More with Less in the Big Apple

A new project called the “Less = More NYC” Green Map is a great guide for finding your way around America’s largest city using minimal resources. The map, available in print or online, shows a variety of locations–ranging from tool-shares to composting drop-off sites to fixer collectives–that help you reuse, share and upcycle your way around town. The map also has many other searchable sites such as cultural centers, nature sites and even toxic areas (the latter presumably to avoid).

According to a press release for the map, NYC spends $300M carting 600M tons of trash, often to places as far away as Virginia and Ohio. The sites on the map were selected as spots to help reduce both the expenditure of money and resources. “Beyond just shopping at thrift stores and recycling your discards, we New Yorkers have great opportunities to reduce our impact on the earth by taking what would otherwise be going to a landfill and finding a way to give it new life and a new worth,” said Aaron Reiss, the map’s designer.

The map is great because it illuminates the resources that are all around us that might help us live simpler, lower impact lives, but might otherwise go unnoticed.

For non-New Yorkers, the Open Green Map has almost 31K green sites around the world and is available online or as an iPhone app. Both the Less = More NYC map specifically and the Green Map in general demonstrate the power to technology to help save resources.

One question we have is why the “Less = More” Map is available as a print copy at all? The paper version has a mere 13 sites versus the online version’s 150 and counting. Considering the ubiquity of smartphones, one of the first ways of cutting waste might have been to not make a paper map (it is made of 100% recycled paper). Big, foldout maps seem to be going the way of the phonebook…but we digress.

Find pick up locations for the print version at www.facebook.com/Less.is.More.NYC. Or send a SASE to Less = More Green Map, 220A East 4th St., NYC 10009 for a print version.