My Journey to Green

In honor of Earth Day this week I am dedicating this post to going GREEN.  I’ve always been an earth conscious person but over the past year I’ve furthered my journey over to green.  You’d be surprised how a few small little changes can make a huge impact on our environment.  While I’m in no way 100% green, I do what I can and what I’m comfortable with. 

I’ve always recycled.  Ever since I was younger my parents recycled.  It was just something we did.  I’m slowly getting my husband to do it and find myself less and less pulling things out of the trash bin and moving them to the recycling bin.  Little by little I’ve added on other things such as using reusable shopping bags and most recently I’ve been buying more organic food. 

If you take a closer look around the produce section of your supermarket you’ll notice that a lot of them come from outside the USA.  The pesticides that are used in the US are bad enough that I don’t even want to think about what they’re using in Chile or Uruguay.  Not to mention what kind of genetically modified foods are also lurking in our supermarkets.  (those little stickers on your produce DO actually mean something other than price).  Eating organic drastically reduces your exposure to these harmful pesticides and GMOs, but it can also make for an expensive shopping trip.   To keep down cost I stick to the “dirtydozen” list and buy those items as organic. The Environmental Working Group publishes this list along with its partner list (the Clean 15).  The lists include the top foods that have the highest & lowest content of pesticides.  The highest (on the dirty list) are the ones that should be purchased organic and the lowest (the clean list) are OK to be purchased non-organic.

If you’ve thought of going green but don’t quite know where to start, try making one small adjustment in your life.  Whether that’s recycling, or using your own bags at the supermarket or carpooling to work.  You don’t have to make crazy changes in your life and you also don’t have to do everything.  These are some of the simple changes I’ve made in my life:

• Recycle all of my paper, metal & plastic
• Use reusable bags when shopping
• Use energy efficient light bulbs & appliances
• Buy organic foods off of the “dirty dozen” list  
• Changed to green cleaning products & laundry detergent
• Use reusable coffee and water cups at work
• Purchase oxybenzone-free sunscreen for summer

There are of course more aggressive things you can do to be green if you’re already doing everything I’ve said.  Such as:

• Switching to holistic medicine
• Buy a hybrid or electric car
• Use paraben-free makup
• Use sodium laurel sulfate (SLS) free shampoo & conditioners
• Implement Meatless Mondays.  It’s not just about being vegetarian. If everyone in the US were to eat meat one less day a week it would save 99.6 megatons of greenhouse gas emissions caused by livestock farming. (that’s the equivalent of taking 19.2 million cars off U.S. roads for a year!!)
• Composting kitchen scraps

If you want to read more here are some resources to check out:

• Environmental Working Group (EWG) – A Wealth of Information from Green products to GMOs
• Center for Science in the Public Interest – website that breaks down ingredients in foods
• Skin Deep Database – rates beauty products
• Just Label it – Genetically Modified Foods
• Non GMO Project – Genetically Modified Foods
• Clean 15/dirty dozen List – organic shopping guide published by EWG