Welcome to Day 59 of Our Green Year, only one day away from two months!! So, for this day, we are going to be going green with our shopping. Already we have gone green by only buying local food and making sure it is organic, but there are other ways that we can go green with our shopping.
I would like to thank Mother's Going Green (http://www.mothersgoinggreen.blogspot.com/), who offered several awesome tips on how to go green with your shopping. So, Layla and I are taking the steps ensure our shopping is green, and that goes well beyond bringing cloth bags to the store.
First, we are going to shop less like our friend at Mother's Going Green. We will only be shopping for things when we need to, and when we do it will only be a local store. This means that unless we can't avoid it, no more Wal-Mart for us.
The other way we are going green with our shopping, and this is the most important one, is we will only buy items with minimal packaging. This goes from the food we buy, all the way to anything else.
Excess packaging is everywhere in our lives. When we buy food like Pizza Pops, they are put in a box, and then in individual plastic wrap. Is this necessary? What about Swiffer Sweeper? This product is built on not having a reusable mop that you can use for five years. Instead, you have to keep buying packages of individually-wrapped sweeper pads.
According to some estimates, while we are urged to increase how much we recycle, the amount companies waste in excess packaging has increased by 12 percent since 1999! We are talking about items like plastic that can take 1,000 years to break down, and once we rip the packaging to get our product we forget about it in the garbage.
Think about this. A total of 35 percent of all the waste in landfills is from packaging! That is a lot of waste that does not need to be there.
Therefore, from now on Layla and I will only buy products that are in cardboard boxes that we can reuse. We will only buy other products in jars that we can also reuse. If we have to buy something that uses plastic, we will either recycle it or turn it into something we can use. If you wonder what you can use the CD plastic wrap for, well if you take it off carefully, attach it to the to of a bucket and poke a hole in the middle (make sure it slopes down to the hole), then you can collect dew in the morning to use on your plants.
Thank you to Mountain FM who did an interview with us today about Our Green Year, as well as Shaw TV, who are planning on speaking with us next month!
The message of Our Green Year is spreading. Thank you to everyone who comes to our site each day and I hope we are helping to make a difference.
