Summer is a great time to take a "green" inventory of your home and lifestyle. It is, after all, the thing to do these days.
Last weekend my husband and I went to a "Home Show" here in Florida in the hopes that we'd find an affordable way to remodel our bathrooms and kitchen over the next few years and go "green."
It seems that going green takes a lot more "green" than I anticipated.
We've been a green family since the beginning. Although I admit that there have been times when we were shades of green and not true green. We were not doing the popular thing back then, and now that going green is the popular thing, we don't feel so special anymore.
Kermit the Frog said that "it isn't easy being green" and in a way he's right. But that's when 'green' was unusual, unexpected, and unique.
I'm looking for ways to teach our kids to go green that are affordable and easy to incorporate. If you could share with us how you've taught your kids ways to save our precious resources, I will make a Kermit Green List.
There are lots of articles and websites devoted to going green, but I want to hear how families do it every day. Let us know.
Here's what we do and have done for more years than I'd like to count.
- We used cloth diapers when our children were infants (yes, it used more water; no, they didn't end up in a land fill).
- We use hemp shower curtains that we could wash
- We've been recycling since we married in 1986 (and that meant taking it to centers no where near our home)
- We compost our kitchen scraps, lawn clippings, etc.
- We replaced our light bulbs with the curly looking ones back in 1994.
- We use cloth napkins, not paper.
- We avoided buying prepackaged foods; stayed as natural as possible.
Now we're looking for ways to save energy in bigger and better ways. Getting our kids to turn off lights, ceiling fans, and the XBox are huge improvements!
What can you do?