Green Tip: Bring Your Own Bags To Shop!

Many years ago when I started trying to be more environmentally friendly, I was tired of having piles upon piles of plastic bags around the house. I couldn't stand to just toss them out, and recycling them wasn't always an option, so we used some for waste liners, and some to carry stuff around, but we still just had a TON hanging around, so I came across this website http://clothbag.com/ We LOVE these bags, and get compliments on them all the time. They can hold up to 40 lbs! Where most of our grocery outings we'd come home with at least 10 plastic bags, we could fit the same in 3-4 of these bags. Some grocery stores even offer $ back when you use your own bags.

Recently Wal-Mart introduced their own reusable bag which is made out of plastic bottles. I know Wal-Mart gets a lot of flack about their business practices, but I do have to give them credit in trying to be more environmentally friendly.



Cool things about this bag:

*Only $1

*Estimates show that each reusable bag will eliminate the need for at least 50 plastic disposable bags over its 5 year lifetime. If they sell all two million bags in the first product offering, Wal-Mart will avoid having to produce 100 million disposable plastic bags, which would require the use of 1,185,000 pounds of plastic resin.

*Each of the black reusable bags are made with recycled polyethylene terephthatlate (RPET) plastic generated from approximately four soda or water bottles.

*About the size of a regular paper bag, the reusable bags are expected to hold approximately the same weight as 2-3 regular, disposable plastic bags.

*When the bag wears out, customers can return it to their local Wal-Mart store for recycling.

Did You Know?

* Today, only about 1% of plastic bags are recycled.

* A single sturdy, reusable bag needs only be used 11 times to have a lower environmental impact than using 11 disposable plastic bags once.

* When one ton of plastic bags are reused or recycled, the energy equivalent of 11 barrels of oil are saved.

*In New York City alone, one less grocery bag per person per year would reduce waste by five million pounds and save $250,000 in disposal costs.

(*info provided from Wal-Mart)

It's Earth Day

I've always had a thing about wasting stuff, and I'm not quite sure where it comes from. I just have a hard time throwing things out. I'm not a hoarder, per se, but I would much rather see an item that is not useful anymore to be reused in some way or recycled, than end up in a landfill. As a kid growing up in New Hampshire, my parents saved money by taking their garbage to the dump on Saturdays instead of paying for the curb side pick up. We generally had 1-2 bags of garbage, and also a bag of things to recycle. The recycle bins were the first thing you saw when we drove into the landfill. I always had fun throwing the glass into the bin and hearing it crash inside. One day that we went, I found this little wooden school desk. It was perfectly in tact and we took it home. My dad sanded it down, and varnished it and we used it (until it was sadly stolen from my brother's garage many years later). I guess someone else out there saw value in it as well. And to think it would still be rotting at the dump had I not found it.

Sadly I think a lot of people in this world, and especially in this country, just have this attitude that the resources on this earth are never ending. Unfortunately, this just isn't the case, and we ALL need to do our best to reduce our global footprint. Many years ago I started to read a lot about the environment, and I started to make some changes in my lifestyle. One if which I started to recycle. Sadly, the town we lived in at the time did not offer a curb side recycling program, so I searched for places that I could bring my recycling to. In my search to be more environmentally friendly, I found out that eating meat is really bad on the environment. From the animal waste that gets piled up and contaminates our water, to all the water and other resources it uses just to get to my plate, I thought that giving up meat would be a really easy way to conserve.

Being conservative with our resources takes some effort, and there is always a balance with effort and convenience. I know that I have been more lax lately because I have fallen out of the habit of being more conscience of it, aka I've been lazy. However, with Earth Day today, and a new reason to care about the future of this planet (my son), I have decided to be more aware of my habits and start to change my habits to be more earth friendly. I also encourage everyone out there to look at their own habits and find new ways to conserve as well. After all we only have this planet to live on, we might as well care for it. Please Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle.