Green Living in the Real World

We're in the process of closing some of our web sites and consolidating our links, and in honor of Earth week I thought I'd re-post some of the Green Living articles here. Enjoy!

An Earth Day Challenge

I am an old hippie and a life time pagan (with brief periods of adulthood!). I was raised in Southern NJ and had no idea that the rest of the country was not as pro active as we were in the 3 R's (reduce, reuse, recycle). This Challenge is and invitation to find ways to reduce, reuse and recycle. It will run for as long as it takes to get everyone into a mind-set of environmental activism.

This is the Challenge:

We make a lot of routine purchases all of which cost of extra money. These are marketed for the convenience. Many of them we've grow up with, but have you ever stopped to consider the fact that before these items were mass produced and mass marketed, our grandparents did just fine without them?

Re-evaluate all of your routine purchases of disposable products (this is harder than it sounds!). Which of these items really need to be disposable and which can you substitute for a reusable?

How many of your routine purchases include more packaging than product? Can you buy that item in bulk and reduce the amount of waste? Can you reuse the packaging, such as butter containers?

Do you compost organic waste? This is much more efficient and cheaper than chemical based fertilizers, and it's free!

Have you considered a rain barrel? Recycled rain water is much better for your plants than the chemical laden water provided by your municipality, and this is also free!

Do you donate items that you no longer need rather than send them to the landfill?

Going Green

I thought I'd start a list of the things we've changed in our lives in order to cut down on the amount of trash going into the landfills and save money at the same time. Maybe you can add to this list. I'm certain that there are still many things I haven't thought of that can be added!

Cloth napkins instead of paper napkins.

Rags instead of paper towels.

Hankies instead of tissues (except when there is a respiratory infection)

Bread wrappers and other "clean" plastic bags instead of "zip lock"

Butter and plastic ice cream containers instead of store bought plastic containers.

No disposable plates, cups, forks, etc.

Reusable cloth shopping bags, even Walmart has these now but you'll have to look around to find them.

Aluminum foil , which can reused and recycled, instead of plastic wrap.

We buy our drinking water from a local spring for 20c a gallon and refill travel mugs, instead of buying bottled water.

Reusable coffee filter screen instead of paper coffee filters.

We also compost all of our organic waste and use it on the garden.

We have a rain barrel and water the garden and indoor plants from that.

We freeze leftovers and reheat them at a later time instead of buying "microwave meals"

We bring our own place settings to pot luck dinners, complete with cloth napkin!

Also. They now make form fitted cloth baby diapers. These are also water proof and very cute. A great option instead of disposable diapers that will be in the landfill for 500 years!

Six Principles for Green Living

by Dr J Mercola www.mercola.com

Living by “green” principles can be extremely satisfying, but how do you do it? Surely, it’s not by purchasing more “green” products, because buying and using more “things” is all part of the problem.

1. Strive for Simplicity: More stuff means more complexity; more upkeep, more keeping track, more things to do. In global terms, it means more wasted resources.

2. Fairness: Much of our consumption-driven market is based on unfairness. If everyone along the chain, from a Bolivian granny making hand-woven grocery bags to the Wal-Mart worker, actually were paid what you’d expect, that hand-woven grocery bag would be out of most people’s price range.

3. Community: If you’ve ever had the pleasure of attending a local farmer’s market, you’ve experienced something few of us do these days: an encounter with a part of your community, an actual living and breathing person, who made that which you’re about to buy.

4. Sustainability: A system is sustainable when the negative outputs of that system are accommodated and turned into positive outputs. However, most of our global production is not sustainable.

5. Planning: Planning means looking ahead toward a desired outcome. It also means thinking a little bit about the community that isn’t here yet and dealing fairly with them. The decisions we make now will create the conditions our grandchildren and their grandchildren will have to deal with.

6. Transparency: Planning, community, fairness, and ultimately sustainability require transparency, but most decisions these days are made behind closed doors

The Hemp Revolution

Does it make sense to ban a crop in the United States that can have a large, positive economic and environmental impact and is completely harmless? That is exactly the position of the hemp advocates.
Because hemp is a relative of marijuana it is lumped by law into the illegal drug category. It is against the law to grow it, although some products made from it can be imported from other countries. And most importantly, industrial hemp is not marijuana. It contains just 0.3 to 1.5 percent of THC, the chemical that gives marijuana its drug-like effects. By comparison, marijuana contains 5 percent to 10 percent THC. Smoking hemp is not going to make anyone high.

But what are some of the benefits of this harmless crop?

*For starters, Hemp can make take-out containers, and save our landfills from styrofoam.

* The fiber from the hemp plant possesses strength and durability, resists rotting and is easier to bleach than wood pulp, which means whiter paper at lower cost. That would be a boon to the book-publishing industry, to cite one example.

* Hemp oil was used to lubricate the engines of Navy fighter planes in World War II, and hemp activist Woody Harelson used it to power a diesel vehicle to demonstrate the benefits of it. It can also be fermented into an alcohol-based fuel, offering a potent and truly renewable energy source.

* Hemp won't put an end to the logging industry, but it would spare some forests from being cut down for paper products.

* Unlike trees, which take years to grow to the point at which they can be harvested, hemp plants can reach a harvest-able state within four months. For paper manufacturers and users it could provide a cheaper source of pulp than trees, which take too long to renew.

Happy Earth Day!!