Wooden Spoons

Do you think they are environmentally friendly? I don't know the answer, it's a question I've been thinking about lately.



I love my wooden spoons. Metal ones hurt my skin when they touch the bottom of a pot, and plastic ones melt and fall apart. Wooden spoons are cheap and easy to replace when they start looking a little worse for wear. But maybe that is not a good thing.



Do you think they make bamboo wooden spoons? I am going to have to look into that.

Un-Green Things

I can't be too hard on myself, we are already a lot greener than a lot of people we know, but I know there are lots of areas I, and my family, can improve on.

1. Electricity consumption - I know for a fact we could cut down on electricity if lights or televisions were ever turned off. Plus we have 3 computers going most of the time, even when people are not using them.

2. Water usage - If it's yellow....yeah that doesn't seem to fly at my house. My husband would not enjoy that AT ALL. I will admit to not flushing in the master bath if he is away, but he'll never find out. Of course the kids either flush all the time for no reason at all OR they never flush, even when it's brown. There is no rhyme or reason to it, so it's just kind of annoying either way, lol.

3. Groceries - I rarely, probably never on purpose, buy organic. I just can't bring myself to pay almost double for the same bag of carrots you know? I do try to buy as much fresh, unprocessed, unpackaged food, but I know I could do way better at that. And I would love to visit the farmer's market here in the summer, but driving there would consume a lot more gas than driving to the grocery store, so which is really better? I have been planing to call the coordinator for The Good Food Box program in our area and see how I go about being a part of that.

I know there's more, but that's enough to keep my thinking for a while.

Time for coffee, store bought, packaged, probably by children, coffee. I can't do it all at once. I do recycle the tins though.

How I'm Green

So what am I currently doing that I consider Green? It's not a lot, but like the title of my blog, I'm trying.



1. Composting - we bought a composter last year. It's likely made with plastic that was created in some factory that's damaging to the environment though. Plastic is the new 'bad guy' right? Anyways, we have one and until the snow in our backyard got so high we couldn't make it to the composter, we had been putting all our compostable refuse in it. It's very full now, and we only used it for a few months. We have not had it over a summer so I am anxious to see it in action once the heat gets here!



2. Curbside recycling - A program in our city where you pay a yearly fee and ever 2 weeks a truck comes by and collects your recyclables. They collect all plastics (not styrofoam though), glass, metal, paper and cardboard. There are other recycling depots in the city, but they only accept paper and metal. Once we started this program and started composting, the amount of stuff we threw into the actual garbage was cut at least in half.



3. Homemade Laundry Soap - I've been making my own laundry soap for a few years now. It's made of a bar of soap, borax and washing soda. I honestly don't know what's in all those things, but I don't think it can be any worse than what is in store bought soap. It's way cheaper too. I still use Bounce though. I thought about getting those dryer balls but then I read somewhere that the chemical process used to make them is more damaging to the environment than using Bounce. I have no idea if it's true or not, but it prevented me from spending the money on them at the time.



4. Cleaning Products - This is something that is definitely in the 'trying' phase. Not all our cleaning products are "green" and my husband loves paper towels. I have been making a conscious choice when buying new products to get ones that are labelled as Green or Environmentally Friendly. How much truth is in those labels is another question. I really should go all the way and just make my own. It will come...maybe.



5. Cloth grocery bags - We have lots of them. I try to remember them all the time but I don't. We still have an abundance of plastic bags, but I don't throw them away if I have too many, I recycle them.



6. Reusable cloth menstrual pads - Too much information, I know. I'll just leave it at that.



There must be more but that's all I have time for now.

The cost of Going Green

You'd think it would be cheaper to be Green wouldn't you?

A couple of years ago my daughter asked me why poor people didn't just go to a nearby farmer to get food if they couldn't afford the grocery store.

That should be the way shouldn't it? It should be cheaper for me to go to a local farmer and purchase some vegetables. They should be cheaper because the farmer didn't have to use chemicals on his crop. They should be cheaper because they did not have to be shipped across the country to a grocery store. Yet they're not cheaper.

It's cheaper for me to go into a grocery store and buy vegetables that have traveled further in their short lives than I probably will ever travel, vegetables that were grown in fields sprayed with costly and environmentally damaging chemicals. And it's even cheaper yet if I skip the produce section completely and head to the canned vegetables that have done all of the above, plus have been processed with preservatives to keep them edible for years, and then packaged in cans we're now told are often lined with BPA's.

Why is it cheaper for all of that extra crap being done to my veggies?

What does it mean?

Going Green?

Wikipedia associates Going Green with Environmentalism "a broad philosophy and social movement centered on a concern for the conservation and improvement of the natural environment ..."

Not necessarily defined as succinctly as I would like. Does it mean you are "Going Green" as long you have a concern for the environment? Or do you actually have to do something about it? Can it be somewhere in the middle?

I found a definition I liked better (where better than a blog to find sources to suit your purpose!) from a University of Marlyand site. It defines Going Green as "Adapting your lifestyle so as to do less damage to the environment."

I really like that one.

Adapting infers that it doesn't have to be a complete 180 degree change and that it can come with time. I think with all the hoopla regarding Going Green we lose track of that fact that we can make small changes that will still make an impact on the environment. And we loose track of those small changes still being worthwhile. It also says you are adapting to do less damage to the environment. Not no damage, I'm not sure that's possible. But the idea of being green meaning you make no impact at all on the environment around you is daunting. Maybe it's scaring people away from making greener choices?

I don't have to be completely Green. I can work at it bit by bit and find ways I can impact the environment around me that I can adapt to my lifestyle.

I'm just a mom, I'm not an environmentalist and I'm not a hippie, but I am trying to Go Green. Emphasis on trying. And this is my journey to a greener lifestyle.