Friday, June 6, 2008

Day 46 of our Green Year: Bills, Bills, Bills and wasted paper

We all get them, and we all hate them. They are bills and they come into our lives and ruin a perfectly good day. You know what else they ruin? The environment. Every month, millions of bills are mailed out to homes and that constitutes thousands of trees cut down to let us know we are past due on our cable.

To continue with the trend of the past few days, Layla and I are again going to be saving paper and this time we are doing it by getting our bills delivered to us online. Rather than find out from Shaw that we owe so much money through the mail, we will be getting online billing to our e-mail. Not only does this keep us from losing our bills, but it also helps us save trees.

Most companies these days offer billing online, so there really is no reason for you to receive your bills through the post office. I know many of you out there already do this because of the great convienance it provides, but more need to. Think of how many trees would be saved if we simply got our bills through e-mail. Of course, that uses energy on the servers to send e-mail, but many web hosting companies these days are green and actually offset their emissions or power their servers through green methods.

As well, I have to give a big thank you to Ethical Bean Coffee. They are based out of Vancouver and they were nice enough to send Layla and I some wonderful fair trade and organic coffee. We received two blends of coffee and some tea for Layla. The coffee was excellent as most organic coffee is (free of nasty pesticides). Their coffee is also bird-friendly and shade grown (grown without clear-cutting) If you are interested in checking them out, go to www.ethicalbean.com or click the Green Friends link on the side. Thank you Samantha for sending us the samples!