Little Bit of Green

Over the last few years, the green initiative has taken over. While it was gaining momentum for a while, it really wasn’t until lately that it started to gain some steam. Many years ago there was only a small segment of the population that cared about the environment. These people were nicknamed “tree huggers” or “granolas.”

Things have changed from the old days where only a select few individuals voiced their opinions about the way we treat our planet. Living eco-consciously is the “in” thing to do today and many people are starting to live greener simply due to peer and societal pressures. It is suddenly cool to come to the grocery store with a reusable grocery bag! Whatever their motivation, it is a good thing that we’re all more and more concerned about adopting a greener lifestyle.

The best part of all is that because it’s become desirable in the marketing world to be able to offer up green alternatives, being green has never been easier! It used to be a more difficult adjustment, and we still need to be leery of supposed green companies that aren’t really green at all.

Looking for ideas for ways to get started? There are many simple and easy things that you can start doing. Even doing them every once in a while is better than not doing them at all, so don’t interpret this as me telling you how to live your life. For example, a couple of easy things that we can all do are:

Start using a reusable grocery bags for all your shopping. If we all did this, we can eliminate the huge problem that plastic and paper bags present. Beyond polluting during their production and transport to stores, paper and plastic bags also contribute to destroying ecosystems once they have been tossed out. For example, many plastic bags end up in oceans where they kill sea life. In fact, if we all used reusable bags instead of paper or plastic we could eliminate the need for billions of paper and plastic bags. Additionally, begin to use reusable dry cleaning bags for your dry cleaning to help cut down on plastic bag usage.

You can also do more walking, bicycling and carpooling. It might not always be convenient, but there’s really no arguing that doing any of the three saves loads of nonrenewable energy as well as pollution from car exhaust. Lobby for bike trails in your community. Start a trend by walking your kids to school if you’re within a reasonable distance. You won’t believe the amount of people in your neighborhood that will observe this and soon, you’ll have a whole community greeting each other in the morning as they save the planet and walk the kids to school.

Finally, start buying energy efficient lightbulbs for your house. Switching to compact florescent lights (CFLs) will reduce your energy consumption. In fact, if every house in America were to change just 3 of their normal 60-watt bulbs to CFLs, the amount of energy and pollution saved would be about the same as if we were to take 3.5 million cars off the roads.

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