Pick Your Favorite To Go Green And Healthy

So, this week I’m working with Double Impact and Treehugger to make sustainable actions court for charity. You get to do good by being sustainable – a win-win in the real sense of the word (and not so much how politicians use it).

So, this is how it works. I’ve picked three fairly easy sustainable steps any person can take in his or her everyday life, and I’ve explained why I picked these three actions below. You vote on which idea you like the best. The top idea will go live at the end of week on Double Impact’s website, and then that action can be used to count towards a charity, such as Healthy Child Healthy World.

You get an opportunity to win fabulous prizes for voting, and in the long run, Earth may be the real winner. This week, you can win Earthbound Farm coupons for voting.

So, the three actions I picked are:

(1) Go reusable with produce bags.  Go beyond the reusable shopping bag and eliminate plastic produce and other bags. Most of us probably usually choose reusable over paper or plastic at the grocery store, but then still use plastic produce bags. Did you know the world consumes just about 2 million plastic bags every minute? That’s right. It is estimated the world consumes 1 trillion plastic bags per year.  Dividing that out, it means we consume 32,000 plastic bags a second. And that with the exception of the very small amount of plastic that has been incinerated, every piece of plastic made in the last 50 years is still around in the environment? When it comes to plastic bags, only 0.5 to 3% are downcycled worldwide. So let’s get rid of those plastic produce bags too. I found so wonderful options on Etsy, but there are also organic cotton and other options on Amazon.

(2) Skip single serve convenience containers. With the school year getting started or about to get started, those single serve convenience containers are attractive for lunches. But, most of those containers are plastic. And plastic doesn’t just go away – it lives on in our environment. Even recycled, it is just downcycled into another plastic item that will persist. Single serve containers are also virtually always much more expensive. And plastics may leach harmful chemicals into your foods. So, pick up some glass or stainless steel containers. You may think that glass doesn’t work with kids – but those shatter resistant glass items with plastic lids (that usually don’t touch the food) made it through the  year with my kindergartener.

(3)  Take off your shoes before coming indoors. This is to reduce exposure to toxic chemicals. We track in lead, cadmium, pesticides and more on our shoes. Did you know that they still find DDT on kitchen floors in the US even though it was banned more than 30 years ago? We track it in on our shoes because it persists in the environment. But, by taking off our shoes before we step inside we can reduce exposure by as much as 65%.

Okay, so go vote.

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