Going Green......Have you done your part?

Every little bit really does help! I try to follow 'reduce, reuse, recycle' in order. *I use cloth bags for my groceries. If I am only buying an item or two at other stores, I ask for no bag. (The woman at the Verizon store last night thought we were crazy!) It means far less plastic that has to be recycled! *I buy in bulk for as many things as possible. This reduces the amount of trash because there is less packaging! *The light fixture in our bathroom has 3 lights. We only use 2 of them. Two lights up the bathroom just fine, so there is no need for the third! *Most times we have only one light bulb on in the living room. We aim it into the corner so that it reflects over the back of the couch where we sit. No need to light the other side of the room when no one is there! *I have a resuable water bottle that I refill rather than having to buy a new bottle of water all of the time. It isnt always possible to reduce things completely, so we try to reuse things as well. *I am currently working on trivets to sell. They use scraps of fabric and bottle caps. We have a bartender friend that collects the bottle caps for us. It keeps them out of the trash and I get to make a little bit of money on it! *Rather than buying plastic bowls for your kids' snacks, wash out the margarine tubs. They are a great size and you already have them! (This works with any plastic containers you get.) Recycling is the last resort. But the other half of that is using recycled products! *We use yesterday's news cat litter. It is recycled newspapers. *I look at the packaging of containers I buy. I recently bought a new bottle of vanilla. One of the reasons I picked the one I did was because the bottle was made of recycled plastic! Some of the things we do were orginialy for the monetary benefit. Using less electricity = more money in our pockets! But I also look at the environmental beneftis now!

We recycle cans, newspaper, glass and plastic and the brown cardboard, food and garden waste is taken to make compost. We did replace all our incandesent light bulbs with the new energy saving bulbs, but have had to find an alternative because these bulbs are a lot duller and they were making us feel ill and depressed. There have been quite a few reports on the health effects that energy saving light bulbs can pose including skin damage and migraines. More information about this can be found at http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7661462.stm and http://www.edie.net/news/news_story.asp?id=14037 Does anyone else here suffer health side effects from the energy saving bulbs? We still realise the damage that using incandesent light bulbs can have on the environment so we didn't go back to these. We are now using halogen light bulbs. These do not save as much energy as the low energy bulbs but still reduce your emissions. I feel a lot better using these than the other low energy bulbs.

I try a bit to be green, by recycling newspapers, cans, etc but I find it really hard when it comes down to electrical appliances i'm all right at turning the T.v and radio off but the computer is a different issue I leave it for a few minutes thinking that it wont matter, but I also do that for a few hours thinking the same thing. I know it's not good but I can't help it.