Archive for Green Living
Go Green: Go Local
Posted by: | CommentsGo green, go local. When you buy anything made within a 100 mile radius of your community you’re casting a wide net of green mindedness. Whether you’re buying from a farmer, carpenter, winery or a coffee shack, using local resources builds the entire community up. The money you spend stays circulating within your area, keeps small businesses thriving, cuts down on transportation costs to and from the source and pride in the product will show. Local merchants have a positive reputation to nurture if they want to survive so customer care is generally quite a bit better.
Go green, go local and stay happy with the quality of products you get. A local farmers’ market is a treasure trove of unique, personal resources. Hand-crafted edible and non-food items made by your neighbors are one-of-a-kind gems and they’re easier to get information about. You can ask the designer or the grower when, where and how it was made. If you see a craft or skill you share with a vendor, you can ask where they get their supplies and why they chose that place. You can visit many of the farms and studios your favorite items come from to get an even better idea of the growing or making process.
Go green when you get local products by reducing packaging waste and costs. Bring your own mug for that morning espresso and grab a bag of fresh-roasted beans or a muffin that was made 2 hours ago by the baker. You kept a paper cup and box out of the landfill and didn’t contribute to the use of extra fuel for shipping the beans or muffin across state. How easy was THAT? With all the fresh produce available during the warmer months, why not grab an iced tea, some totes and visit the small farms near you? More and more of these little farms are letting you go pick your own produce if you want. No trucking fees, plenty of foods and flowers to pick from and the only packaging used is newspaper to wrap delicate things in your totes.
Go green, get to know your area, crafts people and resources better. There are still many local businesses that, once you have a good relationship with them, will even barter some their wares for yours. The more you support your local merchants the more you’ll see come back to your community.
Go Green Easily: City Slicker Composting
Posted by: | CommentsGo green easily. be a City Slicker composter. Sound unbelievable? It’s not. The old stigmas no longer apply. Composting won’t smell to the high heavens if it’s done right. You don’t have to fork over hundreds of dollars, either, for a fancy contraption. A little imagination and elbow grease will get you a composter for almost free or with a little extra browsing on the internet you can get one for a serious discount, your choice. There are all shapes, sizes, capacities and material constructions available now. Yes, there are a lot of them out there and with the increasing demand in gardening equipment for the home grower, you should do some homework to get the biggest bang for your buck. You can use all the finished product yourself, share with neighbors or even pitch in and buy 2 tumblers to rotate fresh batches with “cooked” ones for your group of fellow gardeners.
Going green by composting is beneficial in so many ways and where you live makes no difference. The usual thought is that composting is for those folks with a nice chunk of land for the gardens of their choice. It’s true that the more ambitious your garden the larger tumbler or more of them you’ll need but more and more apartment dwellers are getting on the composting band wagon. Houseplants and potted potatoes alike need the nutrients found in household compost. It enriches the soil, feeds the plant the building blocks it’s made of and reduces the amount of trash put into your garbage can.
Go green easily by composting because they can be made from just about anything and they fit just about anywhere. From garbage cans, PVC panels that spin with handles to wood-and-wire crates that you stir up with a pitch fork, your gizmo can be filled with all the plant matter that comes from your kitchen plus eggshells. The only things that don’t belong in compost are any toxic products, animal parts or products and seeds you don’t want to grow up. Ground eggshells are the only recommended animal products because they don’t attract vermin while adding calcium to your finished “gold”. Composting is common sensical. If you don’t want something in your body, don’t put it in the compost. If something goes into the soil your food is grown in, it goes into you.
Whether you have an acre, a balcony or a pot in the window, go a little greener and compost. A coffee can, a do-it-yourself web find or a prebuilt tumbler will keep your plants happy, your garbage can less full and you’ll be participating in your own little circle of life. Composting is the original and best step in recycling.
Go Green Easier: Plan Out Your Shopping
Posted by: | CommentsGo green easier by planning out your shopping and making some very simple changes to your habits. Simple steps will make a huge impact, it just takes a little patient rethinking. From reusable grocery bags to buying and selling at consignment stores, a little preplanning will stretch your money and your planet’s resources a long way. Take plastic bags. Do you have a pet to pick poop up after? Unless you’re in an area that recently banned plastic grocery bags, why pay extra for tossing out critter waste? These are great for the cat box clean ups or for poop scooping after the dog. Unless you go through a lot of bags every week, opt for using totes instead of the plastic or paper bags. Some stores use mostly-to-fully post consumer recycled materials in their bags, so ask. If the paper bags aren’t using post consumer materials, don’t use them. Trees still have to be cut down and milled to make those bags. Totes rinse out, tear less, fold up easily and a stack of them isn’t unsightly on the backseat of anyone’s car.
Go green easily by planning your shopping trips and you keep fuel costs down. By making a list of what you have to do and where you want to go prevents back tracking. If you live with others, see if you can’t run errands together or even divide and conquer your lists. One trip to the consignment shop can get your items up for sale, some new clothes in your roommate’s or partner’s closet and a new bedside novel before grabbing some zinnias for the patio. A phone call before leaving work puts a new batch of salad on the dinner table, replacing what got eaten as someone else’s snack; one trip, no unhappy surprises and fuel saved. Just grab a tote from the car and grab those goodies on the way home.
Going green is easier than most people think and you don’t have to change your political party, your zip code or even your dress code. All it takes to keep a greener planet and wallet is a little “Stop before you shop” thinking. Need poop bags, get plastic today. Start paying bills on line; electricity for the computer is cheaper than gasoline and uses no trees; there’s no paper check. Bulk shop with friends to save fuel and food costs. Get as many errands run in one area of town as you can. There are internet sites, magazines and local groups devoted to helping everyday people, just like you, get a little greener, a little easier.
Go Green Easily: Reuse Glass Jars
Posted by: | CommentsGo green easily by reusing glass jars from sauces, olives, jams and even spices. Instead washing jars out and throwing them in the recycling or, say it isn’t so, the garbage, use them again and again. It’s so easy to soak the label off, grab masking tape (it peels off easily) and relabel them for left-over soup or anything you can think of, really. You go to a warehouse grocery store and see a gallon of artichoke hearts but what to do with that large jar after the goodies are gone stumps you. Put your flour in it to keep bugs out or use it for the jumbo bag of coffee beans you’ve been wanting to put in the freezer. Glass freezes well as long as you don’t subject it to extreme temperature changes and leave room for the food to expand while it’s freezing. When freezing liquids always leave 1/2 to 1 inch of room from the top of the jar and keep the lid loose until your food is frozen so the jar won’t break.
Go green easily using glass jars and utilize the bulk foods. Most stores have bulk cereals, pastas, snack foods and other staples that can be bagged there and put in jars at home. They also have spices, honey, nut butters and syrups so why not reuse the same type jars for that? You’re saving resources, counter clutter and you don’t have to guess what’s in the jar; if you use masking tape labels even spices aren’t a mystery. When the item inside the jar changes, peel off the old tape, put on a new piece and voila, a used glass jar gets a new life, again.
Go green easily with reused jars and be healthier. There is a lot of controversy about storing and microwaving food in plastic storage containers. Too many types of plastic leach unhealthy chemicals and vapors into the hot food when it’s cooking and also as it cools in the container. Glass doesn’t leach, leak or warp when heated so it has a built-in safety feature. Using 8-12 ounce jam jars to store left-over soup will give everyone their own cups of soup to heat and serve, so clean up is a breeze.
Going green is easier than you may have thought and you have the start of a new storage container collection already in your cupboard. Soak off the labels, use tape for new labels, fill them up and reuse them when they empty. What could be easier? Money, resources and your healthiness are saved in larger doses for the future.