Steps to Going Green

I've been thinking a lot lately about steps we can take @ our house to go green. Today I went to the grocery store, I needed to buy the kids some more peanut butter. I decided not to buy a product in a plastic jar, but a glass one. I figured that glass is much more likely to be a recyclable item than plastic, at least overall.

We've talked about recycling glass, plastic and aluminum @ home for years. Where we live, we don't have curbside recycling. So today I got on my city's Freecycle page and but in a wanted add for 3 garbage cans that I can put on my back porch. Fortunately, the back porch is right off of my kitchen. Can't get any easier than that!!! I also e-mailed my out-of-town friend in hopes that she would put an ad in for me in her city's freecycling website. I really hope that in about a week or so something will turn up for me!!!

My "stay-at-home-job" is selling things on e-bay. I think that being a successful seller has inspired recycling in me. I love that things I don't want or use are usable to others. Things that I am not able to sell I either give away or take to the local Goodwill. I try not to treat anything like "garbage" but ask myself: can i sell this? could someone i know use this? is this goodwill worthy? or is it just plain garbage?

Today I thought about calling a friend and asking her what the title of the going green book she recently bought. Then I thought, why waste paper? The internet has tons of information and saves a tree.

Another step I've recently taken is to use one-sided paper I would have thrown away as printer paper. When I ship e-bay items it prints on a whole sheet of paper but you only use half to tape on their package. When I was going through files to sell on e-bay I found I had a huge mound of paper that needed to be thrown away. Thinking that it would be a pretty wasteful thing to do I started a big stack, at least to use for notepaper. Then I got the idea of putting the printed side up in my printer and using it for e-bay mailing labels. Haha, I think that's a genius idea!

Recently I ran out of bubble wrap to use in packaging breakable items. I go through the self-check out @ my grocery store regularly and all they offer is plastic bags. I always save the bags, but for what? It has turned out to be much cheaper using discarded plastic bags instead of bubble wrap in shipping my items.

If you stumble across this post please let me know some things you do to create less waste.