I consider myself to be a fairly environmentally conscious person. I live in New York and don’t have a car, so that’s a common vice that’s easy for me to do without. I’m the guy the girl in the deli recognizes as “no bag” for my morning bagel. I routinely transport groceries home in a bag I brought with me. Admittedly, it’s my wife who schlepps the empty cans back to the supermarket, but if she forgets to do so then I can rest assured that the can-collector will come around with his shopping cart and pull them out of the bin. In New York there are microeconomies subsisting on deposit currency, so I know those cans and bottles are not going into the waste stream.

However, there are a lot of small decisions to make throughout the day of which I’m unsure which one is truly more sustainable. Can or bottle, paper or plastic? Instinctively I balk at plastic bags and prefer paper. A petroleum based product must be worse than one that can be produced from recycled material or a replenishable resource. Trees grow back after all, don’t they?

It makes me squeamish when I have to eat in a corporate cafeteria and the food is served on styrofoam cups and plates. The cafeteria at my university in Germany used plastic plates but those were collected and washed to be reused hundreds if not thousands of times. That’s greener. Am I right?

What I don’t know is whether any of my gut instincts about these things are correct. I’ve read the New Yorker article that pointed out that as long as you live east of Ohio, Vouvray shipped in from France uses less energy than Chardonnay trucked in from Napa. Or was it produces less carbon? I’d really like to know the answers to my hunches, so consider this the first post of many on my journey to get smart about green. I plan to scour the internet, read the classics, interview experts and poll my peers to find out.

- Sidney Blank is a partner at MBLM writing on all things digital and whatever else strikes his fancy. This week he grappled with his inner green giant.