Green Living Is Easy with these Meal Tricks

Don’t let the lunch hour escape your green living efforts! These three money-saving http://www.justmeans.com/On-Golden-Handcuffs-Other-Gilded-Cages/2936.html tips are easy and effective at reducing your impact. A long-time trend in the business world was to skip lunch, but why? Food is more than just fuel. Eating is an experience to connect with the resources that allow us to live, survive, and thrive. These quick tips will help reduce your impact and your budget for the green living types.

First, get yourself to the co-op and purchase a set of to-go ware! Or make your own. These handy sets of portable silverware will keep your traveling footprint to an all time low. Artists like Chris Jordan point out the obscene amount of waste created every year, most of which is only momentarily used. So when you get food on the go, you can be ready. Most sets are bamboo, and many come in recycled carrying cases that you can latch on to your backpack or inside of your purse.

Second tip, green living is about more than what you purchase. A one time investment in a cute lunch bag, sewn with your own two hands, purchased on Etsy or at the store. This can be a helpful reminder to bring your own lunch. It can also help eliminate resource use http://www.justmeans.com/Just-Use-Less/1216.html associated with paper or plastic lunch bags. You are never to old for a fashionable lunch sack!

The last tip is something you may know well, meal planning. It sound simple, and there are plenty of templates online for various food preferences. Yet, in reality meal planning escapes most of us. Why is that? The best solution that I have found is doing a week’s meal planning once a month. Then gradually phasing in meal planning toward a larger portion of the month. This will help you shop for what you need, and use food before it goes bad. Awareness of food waste is growing, with composting solutions and non-profits like Second Harvest offering solutions. But meal planning can be a proactive way to reduce the amount of consumption and waste in the first place.

Lunch is back in style! And not just for school children http://www.justmeans.com/Back-Basics-Healthy-Food-in-Schools/7272.html. Celebrities, politicians, and office workers alike are all investing in healthy lunches http://www.justmeans.com/Congress-celebs-alike-are-trying-tackle-healthy-lunches/12002.html again. Green living’s wide array of choices are also now including sustainable school lunches as investments http://www.justmeans.com/Sustainable-Food-From-School-Cafeterias-Investment-Portfolios/4553.html. So why not spice up your routine with some money-saving switches to help you get ahead of the curve, save money, and reduce resource consumption all at once?

Green Living Baby, The Bottle Conundrum

The public outcry over BPA, Bisphenol A, leaching into baby bottles got parents thinking. Green living doesn’t need to be a top priority to see the value in investing in glass baby bottles. Wee Go has created safe glass bottles with a protective plastic layer that will keep your bottle from breaking. The outer layer still lets you see and measure the amount of liquid in the bottle, making it convenient and safe. BPA caused such a scare due to its detrimental effect on humans, and in particular babies. Human’s most vulnerable state of development is during infancy.

The National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences rates BPA as having “some concern for its impact on the brain, behavior, and prostate gland in fetuses, infants, and children”. BPA enters the bloodstream typically through food containers that have been exposed to heat. A study conducted by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention tested over 2500 individuals six and older, with 93% of the population containing measurable levels of BPA.

BPA can be found in plastic and canned food containers. Glass, ceramic, and stainless steel are the recommended BPA-free options. Aluminum, originally touted as BPA free, has actually been found to contain BPA and leach metals into food and drink after being exposed to heat. Due to the delicate nature of infants, glass bottles are the way to go.

The downside is that glass bottles are heavier for both the parents and the baby, and they can break. Relative to the developmental damage posed by BPA, these are more inconveniences than threats. The Wee Go bottle has been highlighted in trend-setting and parenting magazines over the past years, and parents have given the bottles excellent reviews.

When profiling bottle options for your baby, disregard BPA-free statements since many have recently been proven false. Selecting glass bottles that are easily replaceable in the case that it does break will help not only your green living regime, but also protect your baby’s health.

You may also want to review your own food containers, aluminum, canned food containers, water bottles, plastic food containers, and films have all demonstrated traces of BPA. Green living enthusiasts that may be measuring their chemical body burden may want to invest solely in paper, glass, and stainless steel food containers. The threat of BPA is greatest for infants, but adults should be equally aware, as their sources for exposure are quite high.

Protecting your baby’s feeding cycle and your own can keep you both healthy and chemical free. Green living takes dedication and keeping up on the facts. Health authorities like the NIH, NIEHS, and the CDC can help keep your head on straight with all of the health scares swirling around. Wee Go and other glass products can help protect you and your family’s future.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Wee Go

Wrap your baby up in renewable resources

The clothes, blankets, and bibs that surround a baby during early developmental phases are safer when sourced from renewable resources.

With that button nose and those big pudgy cheeks, is your baby swaddled in renewable resources? Baby clothes fly into the market with adorable animals designs and favorite cartoon characters, yet what we may not realize is what’s woven into the fabric. The majority of clothes on the market today are made with synthetic materials or harvested through a process extremely dependent upon them. So although a baby’s physical footprint is small, the footprint of their clothes, blankets, and bibs may be obscenely high. We typically choose baby clothes and products based on their “softness”, an important thing for our precious little ones. This has resulted in an array of cotton, bamboo, and synthetic fabrics. Let’s take a look at what that means for your baby and our environment.

Cotton requires an intense amount of pesticides when conventionally harvested. This dependency keeps it from being truly one of the renewable resources that we look for when designing green lifestyles. Outside of just the harvesting and environmental impact of conventional cotton, is the possible impact on your baby. There are a limited number of studies reviewing chemicals used on crops and their subsequent health impacts when manufactured into something that sits consistently close to the human body. At present, there are few conclusive studies but when you think it through you can understand the possibility.

With millions of gallons of pesticide being used to maintain productive cotton crops, the plant will intake a portion of those chemicals. Studies continue to come out on our “chemical body burden” explaining how chemical exposures through the air, body products, clothes and our environment actually cause the build-up of chemicals in our systems. During the fragile developmental stages of a baby, it would be wise to swaddle, dress, and feed them in clothes that are free from these chemicals. Two simple solutions are buying organic cotton, which can be harvested and made in the US and is a more true renewable resource. Organic bamboo, which is almost always a product of Southeast Asia, is another option and is considered a renewable resource because of its quick growth cycle. They both promise reduced chemical exposure for your baby, and a significantly lower ecological cost.

Synthetic materials, such as polyester are also on the rise. As we become increasingly more adept at creating softer and lighter fabrics the options expand significantly. Yet most of these synthetic ingredients are byproduct of petroleum or other crude manufacturing processes. After learning about harmful offgasing of certain materials, Europe and the United States have put in place higher standards on what can be utilized in clothing. But as our chemical manipulations grow exponentially, it is difficult for regulating bodies to keep up. Personally, I stay away from synthetic materials as often as possible since the health risks are understudied and their resource use can be astronomical. It is very dependent upon the type of material used, how it is manufactured, and where it was originally sourced.

So keep your little one safe with organic cotton and bamboo fibers.

Green Living in the Shower

Does your green living regime include your shower curtain? If so, it may be toxic to your health.

Does your green living regime include your shower curtain? There have been many debates, and in some countries even regulation, regarding plastic shower curtains. The main concern of the EPA and CHEJ has been PVC that research found to emit hazardous chemicals while users were taking hot showers. Now IKEA and other major retailers phased out PVC-based shower curtains as recent as 3 years ago. IKEA was the leader, phasing it out over a decade ago, while other American-based big box stores have been slow to remove the toxins. They publicly announced they would reduce the amount of PVC-based shower curtains available, but failed to provide a timeline or details.

So what are they replacing it with? More plastic. Your internal green living guide may tell you that this doesn’t seem like the best solution. And you are most likely correct. There is significant disagreement over the long-term health impacts of exposure to plastic. It depends on the type of plastic, the type of exposure, the weather, the age of the plastic and so on and so forth. Your best bet? Take a preventative approach and reduce the amount of plastic in your home, starting with items that may be exposed to heat like shower curtains, water bottles, and Tupperware for hot foods.

As for your green living bathing regime, there are three solutions. The first is to eliminate the curtain all together. It is negotiable whether a glass door entry has a lesser impact than the other cloth options, but over the long term it just may. If you are designing your house from scratch, you may consider this option. Some showers don’t even have doors anymore, everything is angled. It will just require some cleaning and upkeep. The more common solutions are organic cotton and hemp curtains.

These two options may have a higher initial investment, but if you take good care of them, you shouldn’t need to replace them for quite some time. So their long-term payback time is good as well as the potential health risks plastic curtains pose. Each curtain is different, but most curtains should be washed regularly. After your shower, just squeeze out the corners holding the water and let the curtain dry. Make sure that your bathroom is well-ventilated to allow the curtain to fully dry. Also, be aware that some cloth shower curtains may shrink considerably, so check with the manufacturer when deciding what size you may need.

Recycled polyester plastic shower curtains and other ‘eco-options’ have also sprouted up in the green living market over the years. Personally, I am working on living a plastic-free lifestyle. So although I am happy to see plastic being recycled into new goods, I would like to keep them off my body and out of any heat-prone areas of my home.

Best of luck finding the eco-option that best suits your lifestyle.

Conserve (your own) Energy

Conserve energy you spend shopping with the simplest of actions, seeing what you already have.

“Wait , stop, check your own stock.”
~ Mom

Conserve energy you spend shopping with the simplest of actions, seeing what you already have. When we frame consuming in an ethical nature, we sometimes forget that this includes what we choose not to purchase. Where we realize we already have something suitable in our closets, or we devise a homemade remedy that works just as well, we can save money and resources by being conscientious of what we already have. The top three areas we often overspend are grocery shopping, clothes, and personal hygiene.

Grocery Shopping

Take inventory of your shelves once a week and make a list. This will help you remove expired food as well as refresh your memory about what you do have on the shelves. This also allows you to conserve energy typically spent at the store trying to remember what you need. Making your trip efficient and hopefully reducing the cost a little bit. One great tip for ‘using what you have’ for us non-cooks are online recipe sites that let you enter the ingredients you have and viola! recipes galore. This has helped me save a pretty penny, use all of my food, and learn how to make something new!

Clothes

Ah yes, our wardrobe constantly needs refreshing, but how much is too much? By making sure you have a good set of ‘basics’ like undershirts, black pants and tops, and things to go under nearly everything, you can use the rest of your budget for a few fun pieces of flair. The best part about the basics is that they never go out of style. So you don’t have to wait for the 1980s to come back into style…even though they have, to be fashionable. You can create one of a kind pieces by transforming your old clothes into new creations. For those of us that like to conserve energy in the creativity department, check out organic, fair-trade, an ethically sourced stores for feel good flair.

Personal Hygiene

How long is a toothbrush good for without that blue line thingy? Is my mascara ruined after baking in the sun for three days? Sound familiar? Well one quick fix is to take inventory and make a list, like groceries, but the second half is to explore the realm of product upkeep. I myself was new to this, but determined to only buy something when I was out, I found a lot of resources on the lifespan of makeup and other personal hygiene products that can help you clean out your closet faster than before.

Now I didn’t share this to point out the obvious, I wanted to encourage everyone to turn this simple step of “checking” into habit. I know this step, although simple, has taken me awhile to “house-train” myself. So I wish you all luck in reducing your impact on the simple things to make a big difference for you, the environment, and hopefully your pocket book as well.