Friday, June 5, 2009

Becoming Greener

So I've been wanting to compile a list of what we've done to move towards our New Years Resolution of being greener.  Yes, our resolution also included the word "leaner" in it, but since we haven't really made any progress towards that, there really isn't much to talk about there. :(  So, on with the greener (and much more successful) part of our New Years Resolution for 2009.

One of the first things we did was buy a water cooler.  While it's not as green as I'd like it to be, it's still a large step up from the water bottles we were using.  At the same time we bought the water cooler we bought our little recycle thingy... yes, it's a laundry sorter for most people... but it's our official recycle bin.  Hey, it looks pretty nice. I think I might do this in list form... it'll be more impressive I think.

*Water cooler instead of bottled water
*Recycle bin, we now only have our garbage emptied about once a month instead of 4 times
*Making our own laundry soap
*Using ok-for-the-environment dishwasher detergent
*Using ok-for-the-environment dish soap
*I wipe the kids' noses and my own nose with burp cloths instead of toilet paper or kleenex
*We have a compost pile
*We are vegetarian
*We use cloth grocery bags
*I re-use our containers from sour cream, cottage cheese, and feta at least once.
*I stopped using Ziplock bags
*I stopped using saran wrap 
*We've cut way down on using foil and parchment paper
*I save the bag from cereal boxes to use in place of wax paper
*Logan doesn't take as many baths as he used to (probably 3-5 a week instead of 7-14)
*Josh and I both have re-usable Starbucks cold cups that we use in place of Venti waters... this is pretty huge I think.  We would both get one every time we went there, and Josh would bring one home every single day.  We would reuse them, but we still probably went through at least 7 per week.
*I save most of my produce bags and use them to wrap our bread in

That's all I can think of for now.  If I think of others I might just come and add to this list.  :)

No comments: