Are you ready for a green Thanksgiving celebration? If you are struggling to come up with ways to be eco-friendly and still celebrate in style then just follow the three L’s for a truly green Thanksgiving;

http://www.flickr.com/photos/48089670@N00/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Green Thanksgiving - Follow Our Three L's

Buy produce with LESS packaging… Reduce waste before the food even hits the table!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/coollibrarian/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Buying bulk foods uses LESS packaging

We have been using the Berkeley Institute of the Environment carbon footprint calculator to track our average ecological impact and our progress is shown below. When we started tracking our carbon footprint back in March 2009 we assessed that our household produced a shocking 68 tons of CO2 per year, this is equivalent to 158 barrels of oil in energy and would require managing 13 acres of forest to offset!

This was simply un-acceptable in our eyes. We purchased our current home 2 years ago, it is an older home and needed lots of upgrades to make it more energy efficient.

Our Carbon Footprint Back in March 2009 shown below…

Our Carbon Footprint in March 2009

Back in March when I saw these results I decided to really commit to reducing our household energy consumption and check our progress at the end of the year… (more…)

Here we are at the start of the Holiday season, around our house, Thanksgiving plans are in full-swing! What can we do to get our holiday season off on a green foot? A lot!
How about shopping for your Thanksgiving meal with two words in mind, organic and local. If you buy local, you enjoy fresher food and you support your local economy. If you drink wine with meals, consider buying organic wines to be more eco-conscious.

Instead of planting yourself in front of the TV for the day, well maybe just for the Football game, consider getting out some and getting fresh air or play a board game. Take advantage of the time together with family while decreasing your energy usage.

If you are going to someone else’s home for dinner, consider turning down the thermostat and turning off the lights to save energy at home while you are gone.

Don’t forget to recycle. Encourage everyone to pitch in and put the recyclables in bins. Recycling all the packaging from the fixings for the meal, as well as any beverage containers, will significantly reduce the number of times you have to take the trash out, as well as the amount of garbage you send to the landfills.

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I was contacted yesterday with a request to write an article about a relatively new company and I approached the request with equal amounts of skepticism and intrigue! The request was to write about a company that takes used cardboard boxes and sells them back to businesses and the general public at low prices. What I found was an extremely environmentally aware business whose value system is centered around reducing waste and recycling as many cardboard boxes as humanly possible;

“You don’t have to cut down a tree, to make a used cardboard box!”

The founder of the company, Marty Metro, started selling used cardboard boxes in his local neighborhood back in 2002 and he saw the potential for a big business;
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I’m always on the lookout for new green products and last week I found another great addition to th our everyday green household. Scotch Brite have come up with an awesome product for any eco warrior which keeps cleaning dishes and kitchen counter-tops green and biodegradable. New Scotch Brite “greener clean” sponges are made from 100% natural materials including 23% recycled paper, they are certified as biodegradable to the ASTM D6400-04 standard and they work great!

Scotch Brite Scrub Pads

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We experienced a family crisis late last week, everything in our house started to break, our happy infrastructure was literally falling apart. First to quit on us was our fridge water dispenser, closely followed by the ice maker, then our clothes dryer decided to stop drying!

We easily managed without the ice maker and water dispenser but we quickly realized that the clothes dryer was a fairly critical piece of what makes our lives tick by so smoothly. Without our clothes dryer the pile of dirty clothes quickly reached new heights and a pile of already washed rugs started to stink up the laundry room with a rather nasty “sour” smell…

Our Old Washer and Dryer (In a Messy Laundry Room!)

But as the saying goes, for every cloud there is a silver lining, and our silver lining was the chance to upgrade our out-dated washer and now broken clothes dryer. We went to our local Lowes store and spent about an hour checking out the new features and ratings for the “high efficiency” front loading washer and dryers.

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