Earth Day 2007

Yesterday, April 22, was the global celebration of Earth Day. As you may have read in my previous post we were very awakened after watching the film An Inconvenient Truth. Then this past Friday Oprah did a show on how each one of us can make little changes in our daily lives that can make a big impact on our planet.

As a family, we already live fairly green. I think one of the guests on Oprah said she was "mint green". We recycle, we ride our bikes as much as possible to work, camp, and school, we use compact fluorescent light bulbs, grow some of our own food. We are aware of our environment and try to make good choices.

After having seen Oprah, Brent and I decided that in honor of Earth Day we would make some of these simple changes in our family's life we encourage you to do the same:

1. Switching from paper to cloth napkins. On average people use 2,200 napkins per person per year. If we all gave up only one napkin a day, we could save a billion pounds of paper waste. Cloth napkins are much nicer to use anyway and can be used multiple times between washings.

2. Not taking a receipt at the ATM. According to the author on the show, if everyone left their receipts in the machine, it would save a roll of paper more than 2 billion feet long—enough to circle the equator more than 15 times.

3. No more bottled water. We buy cases of the stuff for soccer and things of that nature thinking that as long as we recycle the bottles we are not harming anything not stopping to think of the resources required to fill that bottle with basically tap water. From now on we will use our filtered refrigerator water in sports bottles that can be used over and over again.

4. Re-usable grocery bags. Our first stop on Earth Day was to our local Trader Joe's. We were low on wine if you want to know the truth. Anyway, we picked up 5 of these re-usable grocery bags for only .99 cents each!


5. Re-fillable coffee cups for Starbucks runs. Rumor has it they will even give you a .10 cent credit on your drink if you bring your own vessel to drink it from.

6. Ecofriendly cleaning products. As we run out of our toxic cleaning supplies we will replace them with more earth friendly versions.

These are just the things we are going to start right now, I am sure more will follow but for now it is pretty easy to implement these changes. When I told Madison about the changes we were making she said "we are only 4 people Mommie, how can it make a difference at all?" Good question indeed, I simply said that we needed to do our part to save the planet for her children. She just smiled.