Lately, I've stumbled upon a lot of blogs of women who take their responsibility to take care of God's creation seriously. It made me think a lot. Yes, this world won't be around forever, but shouldn't we take care of what God has blessed us with, and not waste it?
Okay, confession: Luke and I don't recycle. Look at this picture taken out of our bedroom window, and you'll see why this is such a horrible thing:
Yep, those yellow bins are the neighborhood recycle bins. We are bad people :-PBut my eyes have been opened. It's silly for us to be so wasteful while the recycle bins are so close to our house! It's going to be tough, since we have absolutely no extra space in our kitchen. But I'm thinking about using some kind of stackable bin system to store our plastic, glass, aluminum, and newspapers until we take them down to the bins.
I've thought of some other things I'd like to implement at our house to be less wasteful.
1. Become educated! Find out where the products that I buy come from, and how far they had to travel to get here.
2. Buy locally. I stopped buying groceries at Wal-Mart about 9 months ago, but I still go there for lots of other things. I would love to support local businesses more because of the economy. Plus, if you buy locally, you know that your products weren't produced at a sweat shop somewhere, and they weren't shipped across the world to get to you. How much more fun would it be to buy my produce at a local farmer's market than at a big, chain grocery store?
3. Recycle (already mentioned this one :-P)
4. Waste less electricity and water. Luke and I are definitely guilty of leaving lots of lights on in the house. And I personally like to take extremely long showers, and I don't turn the water off while I brush my teeth. Just changing those things will make a huge difference on the imprint we're leaving on the Earth.
5. Buy less, consume less. This one will save me money, as well!
6. I'm toying with the idea of making my own cleaning products. At least for some things. Much better on the environment, and again, it will save money!
7. The craziest idea I've had yet is cloth diapers when we have babies. I know it's awhile off, but I'm contamplating the idea for when the time comes. I wonder how many diapers a single baby will use in their lifetime? Diapers can take up to 500 years to biodegrade. I don't know if I can justify using "disposable" diapers. Or maybe I'll just use cloth diapers at home, and disposable diapers when we are away from home. That would at least cut down significantly on the number of diapers used. I'm seeing dollar signs in my head just thinking about all the money we'll save!
Anyway, I'm not planning on implementing all of these ideas at the same time, because I think it will be overwhelming! But I can certainly start by recycling, using less, and buying local.
What ideas have you implemented, or want to implement in your own home to help take care of God's creation?
I think buying locally is a great idea! Have you heard of the movie Food Inc?
ReplyDeleteNo, I haven't heard of it...i'll have to check it out!
ReplyDeleteWhite Vinegar makes an excellent cleaning product, as does baking soda. Google it and there are tons of uses for them around the house. Also, I can't remember the blogger who wrote the post (perhaps Whitney) who talked about the different kinds of cloth diapers available noadays. They aren't just the white square cloth ones anymore.
ReplyDeleteWe try to carpool with people whenever possible and I buy most of our groceries at a local farm and a locally owned butcher shop. I also try to choose furniture companies at least on the same coast as me and who use wood from FSC forests. You can also be "green" in your gardening by using local indigenous plants.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure about statistics on diapers, but you end up using water and chemicals to get the cloth diapers clean, so it's a trade off.
I would say that the water used to wash diapers is far less worse then filling landfills with disposables that won't decompose in our lifetimes. There are also commercially available detergents that are earth friendly now, such as Arm and Hammer's Essentials. It uses palm based soaps as opposed to petroleum based.
ReplyDeleteEven better than recycling; Save money and the Earth and be clean at the same time. All businesses can do this. Get serious and add Bathroom Bidet Sprayers to all your bathrooms. Available at www.bathroomsprayers.com with these you won't even need toilet paper any more, just a towel to dry off! Don't worry, you can still have toilet paper, you can even make it the soft stuff and not feel guilty since you're using so little. It's cheap and can be installed without a plumber; and runs off the same water line to your toilet. You'll probably pay for it in a few months of toilet paper savings. Now we're talking green and helping the environment without any pain. As for water use a drought is always a concern and must be dealt with prudently but please remember that in the big picture the industrial water users always far exceed the water use of household users and in the case of toilet paper manufacture it is huge. The pollution and significant power use from that manufacturing process also contributes to global warming so switching to a hand bidet sprayer and lowering your toilet paper use is very green in multiple ways.
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