Most of us will be doing (or at least buying) less this holiday season, but there's no reason to feel down about it. Less is good for your wallet, your spirit and certainly for the earth. Our plan is to take the subtitle of Anna Getty's book I'm Dreaming of a Green Christmas to heart - Gifts, Decorations, and Recipes That Use Less and Mean More...
Although we wonder if the individual pieces have the same mobility as lighter materials, wood mobiles will last a long time and may transition to other areas of your home more easily than fabric, plastic or paper ones...
As we were reminded on a recent vacation, our driving skills are getting slightly rusty after almost fifteen years living in New York City. Sure we'd love to fill up a car trunk with groceries or cart home cheap furniture from garage sales, but we sometimes forget how wonderful it is to have almost all our necessities and amenities within walking distance (not to mention not having a car to take care of). We recently went online to find our own Walking Score (100/100 - w00t!) and realized that our choice of neighborhood is one of the greenest things about our lifestyle...
It's great to see so many kids using reusable water bottles at the playground and out and about, but (as Tammy pointed out) there are a few popular brands and it's easy for bottles to get mixed up when you're with a group. We're used to swapping spit with our own son, but we've rather not do so with the rest of rugrats at the park. Enter personalized water bottles by Lima Bean Kids so you can keep your germs in the family...
Not to be confused with these Lunchbots, LunchBots offer an alternative to plastic for food on-the-go. Perfect for school lunches, it's summertime so we're thinking this could be our new vade mecum for toting snacks or lunch to the playground or park (your Sigg or Klean Kanteen will be happy for the company)...
Now here's an all-you-can-eat salad bar worth going to! We've really enjoyed popping out to the backyard to snip herbs from our pots these past few weeks, but, wow, it would be pretty amazing to grow and pick lettuce and other greens out there as well...
Brought up on Helpful Hints from Heloise, we didn't know a home "how to" book could be so...cool. Hand written and illustrated by Raleigh Briggs, Make Your Place is a gem of a book full of information and DIY ideas for non-toxic clean cleaning, natural body care and gardening. Its zine style makes it feel like it's written just for you by an informed, helpful friend...
Spring cleaning is not only a good time to give your home a good top-to-bottom clean, but to evaluate how you clean and what you clean with. While we'll probably keep our Chore Boy scrubber around for some of our tougher jobs, we like the idea of switching to more environmentally-friendly, reusable scrubbers for our everyday dishwashing. Called Tawashi in Japan, we've found some you can buy and some you can make. Links below the jump...
Our husband really enjoys using the swiffer mop and dusters - hooray! But refills (even the non-Swiffer brand drug store versions) are expensive. And, throwing the dusters and mop pads in the garbage when we're done doesn't sit well with trying to be earth-friendly. So we went on the hunt for ideas to make our own and found these two super-simple tutorials...
We all have orphan socks, victims of the Bermuda Triangle otherwise known as the washer/dryer (and why is it that it's always the cute ones to lose their partner?), but before you throw them away consider this clever idea.
Yesterday we showed you Allyson's strategy for keeping cloth handkerchiefs handy around the house so now our mission is to procure handkerchiefs. We saw a pack at our local discount store the other day - they were cheap, but also flimsy. We're considering sewing our own with some soft cotton from our stash or we might splurge on these beauties from Hank&Cheef.
We've switched to CFLs, outfitted the family with Klean Kanteens, dutifully recycle everything we can and are looking for the next painless green step we can make in our household - the reusable hanky. Handkerchiefs have a quaint old fashioned quality to them and many of us have fond memories of our fathers (who likely still carry them) wiping our noses, cheeks and eyes with them over the years.
Bambu is jazzing up their kids' utensils line with some prehistoric appeal. Still made sustainably with organically grown bamboo, Bamdino makes a nice alternative to metal or plastic, especially for tucking in your bag for outings.
We got on the reusable bag bandwagon a while ago and it's been great to see them enter the zeitgeist and proliferate our neighborhood en masse. (And, we've finally stopped getting strange looks and having to explain ourselves at the cash register.) But we're no longer a single gal cooking for herself; nor are we eating two meals a day at the office, so we're finding that we don't have enough bags for the weekly "big shop." So we hunted through the Ohdeedoh and AT archives to find a list of candidates (as well as a few new ones we're considering).
No matter how many times we tell our husband that yogurt containers aren't recyclable in our city, we still regularly dig them out of the recycling bin. And we notice most of the tenants in our building make the same mistake. In fact, tons of products that we regularly buy, like sour cream, cottage cheese, ketchup, hummus, and medicine are usually #5 plastics and a big no-no in our recycling program. Good news though - we just read about Preserve's Gimme 5 recycling program being piloted in a selection of Whole Foods stores.
posted originally from: OhDeeDoh
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