I was reading an entry on
Postcards from the Mother Ship about the
BlogHer Act Canada September Challenge which is about taking better care to live our lives with less packaging. I read a lot of the entries that others had submitted, nodding to myself as I read familiar suggestions about ways to reduce, reuse, recycle in the day-to-day activities we find ourselves doing.
So I was thinking about what changes I can make and being more conscious of what I do and how I do things and what things might make a difference. It's like saving money or losing weight - the seemingly insignificant changes we make, by themselves, aren't much, but added together make a difference.
Here's my brainstormed list of things I can do:
Dry my hands with just one paper towel in the restroom at work instead of using two.
Turn off the office light when there is enough natural light coming in.
Turn off the ceiling fans at home when no one is in the room.
Only pull out one napkin from the holder at lunch rather than a small stack. When it's just me and DH, we don't need a stack like we do when the boys are with us. If I need another napkin, I can get it then.
Put the grocery store paper bags back in the car to take with me to use on my next grocery shopping trip. We have so many already that I can use them several times and when they are about used up, I can then use them for holding our recyclable papers.
It doesn't sound like much, but every little bit helps, right?
What are you doing to reduce, reuse, recycle? Share your thoughts and ideas with me!
3 comments:
I SO got into the habit of taking a huge pile of napkins I don't need. Such a good suggesiton. It is the little things that make a big difference.
I wanted to let you know that you won a prize for your post over at BlogHers Act Canada. Congrats!!!
You can send me your mailing address to have the prize sent to you at bloghersactcanada@mac.com
Cool on the prize, Cyn. Now you can lunch in style! :^)
My MIL tells me that where she lives (central Texas), the stores won't let you reuse brown paper grocery bags. Weird, huh? I've been doing that for years - we store them in the car. It helps that many of our grocery stores provide an economic incentive as well - typically 5 cents per bag that you provide!
I heard something on the radio the other day about printing documents with narrower margins (e.g. when printing drafts for editing). I don't have access to any printers that do double-sided printing, but I do 2-up almost all the time (2 pages printed onto one piece of paper). And actually, I try to do most editing on the screen, but sometimes I need a hard copy (and it's usually a shared document, where I can't be messing with the margins, so 2-up is my best bet at reducing paper usage).
My officemate reads the newspaper online, instead of subscribing. I tried that for awhile, but our local online paper is incomplete so I had to go back to the print version. It all gets recycled (we have great curbside recycling in our town) or used as worm bedding, but that daily paper is probably the biggest place where I could make a change.
I like your list. There are some good ideas there. So far, I've made little changes as well, like using the environmentally friendly light bulbs (really not too bad), cloth grocery bags (when I remember to bring them with me!) and drying clothes on a line instead of the dryer whenever possible.
BTW, you may want to check out the following site about blog action day (october 15th). It's just another way to make people aware of environmental issues:
http://blogactionday.org/
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