Community Engagement

Hello my Green Beans, Welcome Back!

My objective is to share some tid-bits of information that I gleam from all the emails I get every morning on what is going on in the world; the good, the bad and the ugly.

Experts estimate it may take as long as 1,000 years for the average plastic bag to break down. When turtles and other sea critters get their fins on these bags, they sometimes mistake them for food, with fatal results.

I don’t know about you, but that makes me sad. First of all, I am a Feng Shui practitioner, but that’s for another blog, and turtles are good “juju”, I love them. We need to do what we can to protect them and all creatures.

We all know it is about reuse, reduce, and recycle but I think it’s about re-think! So, when I pick up something and just before I head to the garbage or recycle bag, I think about what else I could do with it. My most recent one was the plastic bags that bread comes in. Now I have been re-using them along with my milk bags but I just found a new use for the bread bag. You know those smaller garbage cans that really don’t have a liner that fits them, well my bread bag does! It’s a nice tight fit. That may seem like a little thing but all the little things add up. And it made me happy. The better answer of course is to ditch the bread bags altogether and get back to baking my own.

Here are some plastic things that you could eventually throw out and consider a better replacement:

• Ditch your disposable razors and buy a real razor. You can find them but they are pricey!
• Ditch your plastic wrap for beeswax wraps; takes a while to get used to them but persevere.
• Ditch those creepy, stinky, green-and-yellow plastic kitchen sponges – they are harmful to the environment; they're made from synthetic fibres that pollute waterways and the darn things aren’t even biodegradable. They are just taking up space in our landfills.
• Ditch plastic cleaning bottles and find a fill up station.
• Major ditch on plastic straws. If you don’t happen to like the paper ones, use a glass!
• Do I even need to say this – DITCH the plastic water bottles!
• Ditch the body wash plastic bottles, use bar soaps that come in recyclable paper wrappers. Now you could make your own soap and all the power to you but that isn’t in my foreseeable future.
• Same goes for all plastic bottles, find out which ones you can re-fill.

Many more ideas to come!

"Here is a test to find whether your mission on earth is finished: if you’re alive, it isn’t."  - Richard Bach, Illusions

Until next time, Stay Green…