Help Your Family Create an Everyday Green Routine
Healthy Lifestyle and Green-Living Expert and On-the-Go Mom, Beth Aldrich, Shows How Small Green Steps Can Make a Big Environmental Impact
How you treat yourself, your family and your home all add up to how we collectively take care of our planet. Green-living expert and mother of three, Beth Aldrich, knows that in today’s busy world, it’s not always easy being green, yet explains that you can help create a sustainable future by making simple changes to your daily life. By following her tips, your family can create a new routine to support the environment and establish everyday green-living habits.
- Drive More Efficiently: Create a carpool with neighbors for driving to school to cut down on carbon emissions, or consider purchasing a hybrid car. Carpool lines love hybrids because the combination of a small gasoline engine with a battery-powered electric motor doubles the mileage of conventional cars and reduces the more than 97 million billion pounds of carbon dioxide released into the air from fossil fuels each year.
- See Green to Live Green: Keep your family’s eyes healthy while helping the environment by purchasing new eco-friendly Airwear® eyeglass lenses. Now manufactured using 100 percent recycled water and packaged in 100 percent recyclable cardboard, the lenses are greener than before.
- Swap-Out for Greener Staples: Try to buy local, fair trade and organic foods when you can, since most food has to travel more than 1,200 miles to land on your grocery store shelf or dinner table. Shopping local will reduce fossil fuel waste, support the local economy and provide your family with healthier food options.
- Use Non-Toxic Products: Look for plant-based household products to cut back on chemicals in your home. In general, buy from companies that use environmentally aware practices.
- Reduce, Reuse and Recycle: Cutting down on waste can save 4.4 pounds of garbage a day, 29 pounds per week and 1,600 pounds a year. Clean out clutter by recycling old papers and giving away kids’ outgrown clothes. Before going shopping for new items, take inventory and identify what can be reused so you only replace what you really need to avoid adding unnecessary waste to landfills.
- Change Your Light Bulbs: Switch the light bulbs in your house to energy-efficient, inexpensive compact fluorescent bulbs. If every household in America exchanged five light bulbs, the energy savings would be equivalent to taking 8 million cars off the road.
- Turn Off and Unplug: When you’re not in a room there’s no need to keep the lights on or electronic devices plugged in. By flipping the switch, you’ll reduce your family’s exposure to electromagnetic radiation, and save on energy and carbon dioxide emissions. You can start tonight by having dinner by candlelight.
- Re-Think Your Laundry Plan: Make sure you throw a full load in to make efficient use of your washer, use cold water and line dry when possible. You’ll end up doing less laundry, and can save more than 500 pounds of carbon dioxide and more than $600 a year.
- Bring More Green Into Your Life: Plant a tree, or any plant, in your yard. This is a great activity to do with kids to mark special occasions and help them become stewards of the earth. Over the course of its lifetime, a single tree can absorb one ton of carbon dioxide. Go organic if you can and avoid gardening with pesticides.
- Ditch the Plastic: Help “green our world” by drinking from a reusable water bottle. Plastic water bottles take an estimated 1,000 years to break down in nature. Instead, choose a stainless steel reusable water bottle that prevents harmful plastic or aluminum from leaching into drinking water. Also, carry a compact reusable shopping bag in your purse or car to avoid using bags at the store.