What I'm Doing To Be "Green"

I actually get asked quite often what I am doing to make my life more "green". I am trying to recall the things I do in order to make my life simpler and more eco-friendly. It takes some huge changes as well as some super minor things that everyone can easily achieve.

1) RECYCLE! I love recycling- It's a way for me to make money and help the environment! My parents have always offered us the money from recycling cans and all if we sort through it, so that has always been a part of my life. But-- in the past year or so, I have taken recycling into my own hands in many different aspects of my life. My school just received blue recycling bins for every class thanks to the ASB and we now recycle regularly. Unfortunately, not only cans and bottles are thrown into the recycling cans, so my school ships the recycling off to some plant and they sort it and get all the profits from it. I've become labeled the "greeney" at my school, so whenever I see someone throw a plastic bottle or can into a regular trash can, I pick it up with my bare hands (gross, I know... but I always carry hand sanitizer and I wash my hands immediately after) and place it in the blue cans. It's pretty ridiculous how people don't take the extra 3 steps to throw the recyclables into the blue bin. It's ridiculous and frustrating.

2) Take shorter showers: I used to take 10-15 minute showers. Now, it's about 1:30 to 2:00. (Yes, I time myself...) It all started when I started to be involved with WalkTheirWalk (http://www.walktheirwalk.com/) and realized how truly precious water is to our world. So, I cut them down. For a while, it was a game for me, I would race my time and see how much i could cut the time down by. Now, it's routine. I have yet to calculate how much water I am actually saving, but my logic is that the shorter I can make them, the more I offset the water Starbucks wastes! Woohoo!

3) Turn off the light! My mom always got mad at me for leaving my lights on, (I have a feeling she was actually the one that planted the 'live a greener life' seeds into my life, although she would never admit that) and so now I am more conscientious of how much electricity I waste. Although turning off the lights is a great start, replacing all your light bulbs with energy-efficient fluorescent bulbs makes a HUGE difference in our energy consumption. They pay for themselves-- TRULY!

4)Unplug it! If you unplug things when they aren't in use, it really saves a bunch of electricity as well. Things left plugged in, even if they are not in use, still suck energy current out of the socket! (They now sell super nifty 'current stopping' power strips at stores but they're pretty pricey- I say just unplug it!)

5) Save gas- drive smarter! There is this rad thing that my family found out about called "hypermiling" which increases your MPG pretty dramatically. Google it- you'll be surprised at how much you squeeze out of your tank. My MPG went from 19-20 to around 23-27. It's pretty cool! Even though gas has hit under the $2 mark, it's still necessary for us to be conscientious of our carbon emissions and our gas consumption!

These are just the 5 that I could think of off the top of my head right now, I'll update this when I think of more.

The most important thing that I have learned from this whole experience of "greening" up my life is that this saves money! Everything that I do is so much easier and more cost-efficient for me and my family, so it's completely a win-win situation.

Yay life.

Yay GREEN life.

My Starbucks Boycot

So after a few months of Starbucks boycotting, I am still on the verge of whether I am going to be returning or not. Brian Berry asked one of the Starbucks' managers some questions regarding recycling and their water consumption, and it answered some of my questions as well as confirmed the sad reality that water is in fact being wasted. 

I started to receive tweets from Starbucks and she said something about their (PRODUCT RED) campaign and all that that involves. Apparently, 5 cents from the purchase of the (PRODUCT RED) drinks is going to be donated to Africa charities. Cool? I'm not sure.

I mean, obviously, that is AWESOME. Starbucks and Africa-- two great things put together! But.. 5 cents from these drinks is approximately 1% of the price of the drink, if you get a Grande. Which I think is pretty ridiculous. Come on-- you're a multi million dollar company, you can afford more than 5 cents per cup. AND, it's only 3 specific drinks from the whole list of all the drinks available. That is even more ridiculous to me. What if I don't want a Peppermint Mocha Twist but I still want my 1% to go to the kids in Africa? This whole campaign is very confusing. 

So, I tried to put it in perspective. I figured (with my mom's help, of course) that I should try to figure out how much Starbucks donates to charities aside from this new campaign. So I googled it and didn't find jack. I'll have to get back to that later- but here is what I did find...

     Starbucks has the campaign "Grounds for your Garden" and has since 1999- a great thing for our environment and our landfills because coffee grounds make up an astounding percentage of our landfill space believe it or not... 

     In 2004, Starbucks reduced the size of their napkins and store garbage bags which reduced their solid waste by 1.8 million pounds. That's pretty sick...

     Apparently, the FDA approved the first ever approval to use recycled content in food packaging for Starbucks coffee cups. That's a major thing for me too- although they don't allow us to readily recycle the cups they give us, at least they've been recycled once before!)

   The 2005 National Recycling Coalition Recycling Works Award went to Starbucks because of their contributions to the environment. (the pessimistic part of me says that the NRCRW doesn't have very high standards but good job Starbucks..)

   Starbucks beans are COMPLETELY AND SOLELY FAIR TRADE. To me, the people and the environment and the economy all work together. It all works together and this is super vital to the eco-friendlyness of Starbucks to me.

     Starbucks was ranked #15 on the EPA's Top 25 Green Power Partners for purchases of renewable energy. Interesting...

On a negative note... Starbucks wastes 6,181,626 gallons of water a day (according to the UK Sun) In some ways, that outweighs some of the above things..

Thus, my quest for eco-frendliness continues. Hopefully a "green" coffee-house comes close to me because I really am missing my coffee. 

I'm sure this will be an ever going debate for me, this is not over yet!