Tasha Goes Blue-Green
So I promised you that if I can make a green effort, that you can too! So here are some of the small things my family and I have done to make a difference…a small but important difference!!
The Earth’s future lays in the hands of our children and if we do not teach them about being Earth Friendly, who will? Here are some facts about kid’s lunches: The USA alone is using 100 billion plastic bags each year!! If 1 out of 5 people in the USA used a reusable bag we would eliminate 1,330,560,000,000 plastic bags in a lifetime! That is a lot of plastic bags and a lot of oil (not to mention a lot of zeros)!! The average American child generates 67 pounds of lunchtime trash, children’s lunches create 3.5 billion pounds of garbage, and 18,760 pounds of trash are generated each year from the average elementary school. Those are some crazy stats!!
Plastic Baggies – You have read the statistics about the amount of trash we throw away! We have been making an effort around our house to use reusable containers instead of plastic baggies. My boys adpated to this idea very quickly. It’s amazing how much of the things we do are just habit! Put the baggies away and you will be surprised how easily you forget they were ever there!
Water Bottle Madness – With our Klean Kanteens in hand, it’s easy to give the water bottle the boot! Using a sport bottle of some kind rather than grabbing a water bottle is quite easy and convenient! And if you can’t stand to give up your water bottle habit, or if that’s all that’s available to you (like at the Little League concession stand after you have forgotten the reusable sport bottle you left in the fridge at home! ahem…experience talking here…) at least, at least, recycle them!!
Clean and Green – I have found a little trick for saving on plastic use and a more natural approach to washing up! Instead of buying the plastic bottles of body wash and hand soap, we have switched to bar soap. The packaging is far more Earth Friendly and you can find bar soaps with a much smaller amount of ingredients added to them! I heard somewhere (don’t ask me where – I can’t remember the water for baseball night, so do you think I can remember where I heard this random fact?!) that gel soap is chemically altered to be in a gel form whereas bar soap is more likely to have less “stuff” added to it. Now I’m sure it all depends on what kind of soap you buy, gel or not. (That’s my little “I may be wrong, I’m not an expert” disclaimer.) But I do feel better knowing that I am using less plastic packaging and giving our washing up more thought!!
Recycle – DUH!!! Recycling is probably the single biggest thing you can do to make a difference that will count! Even my youngest has learned what the three little circular arrows on the bottom of plastic containers mean! No matter what the size of your town, most have some kind of recycling program or at least somewhere you can bring your recyclables. And if you have to go to the next town over, do it…for the love of Earth!!!
