Ways I have GONE GREEN

I wanted to do a post that included all the things I have changed in my life to better the environment. I thought it would be a good way to give others ideas and hopefully you can leave me some MORE ideas in your comments below. I know there is room for improvement in my life. Let's see my list...


We would like to use less plastic packing, everything seems to come in plastic. Rice bags, bread bags, pizza crust, etc.. Why do I HATE plastic so much you may ask??? Because I find it so very wasteful. It's made from crude oil and takes over 100 years to biodegrade. So much plastic ends up blowing around in our trees, gets in our rivers and lakes and ends up in the ocean. This is one of those "REDUCE" things. When recycling isn't good enough in my opinion.

We finally found organic pasta that comes in a cardboard box! I won't buy strawberries that come in the little plastic container anymore. We buy our mushrooms out of the bins at the grocery store. I also buy celery now that doesn't come in a plastic bag. If there is a "better" package option, I buy it. We will probably start going to Whole Foods to buy more things in bulk and make our own bread more often to help cut down on plastic.

This is one of those super easy things that we can all do. It makes me sad when I see people at the grocery store getting 10 plastic bags and thinking to myself, "Those are probably going to go straight into the trash can." We have three really nice grocery bags that seem to always be enough for us every trip to the store. I have the foldable one I use and keep in my purse for all our other shopping.

We still get looked at like we are crazy sometimes. Lots of cashiers are caught off guard when you pull out your own bag. I even do it for tiny items because I want everyone around me to see me with my bag. People NEED to see them and get used to the idea. We also are currently reusing our plastic produce bags week after week. I plan to buy the cloth bags eventually, but the plastic ones are working out fine. It's the same thing as getting a new one every time. They do just as good as a job the second time around. Less plastic, less waste, less need to recycle them and less wasted crude oil. YAY!

This one is more Cody then me. He only uses bar soap now. No more bodywash. I however tried the bar soap thing and hated it. I missed all my suds from my bodywash. I currently have been using the same huge gigantic bottle of bodywash for months. When it is close to running out I plan to start making my own bodywash from bar soap and reusing my big plastic bottle. What to do about all those plastic shampoo bottles though? I've seen shampoo that is actually a bar of soap but haven't tried it yet. My hair is bleached so I need stuff for damaged hair. Any suggestions?

Cody got a straight razor for Christmas. He hasn't actually started using it yet because it has to be sharpened. It's so funny when will tell people about it because they seemed scared for Cody. Like he is going to cut his throat open. This decision was all his. No more plastic razors!!!

We are now using our own homemade laundry detergent. We have been using it for almost 2 months now. Everything seems clean to me. :) It doesn't have a strong scent to it but I suppose we could add more scented oil. We also switched to biodegradable dryer sheets. You can view my blog post about us making our laundry detergent HERE.

Instead of recycling all our glass jars, we reuse them to store our rice, peanuts, spices and other food in. It's way cheaper then going out and buying a bunch of glass jars or canisters. We already paid for them so why not use them?

I am a firm believer that buying bottled water is a joke and a waste of money. We used to do it though. Week after week. We liked that "filtered" water taste just like everyone else. We purchased a PUR water filter for $25 and hooked it up to our faucet. Now we have filtered water when ever we want it and use reusable plastic bottles. Paying for water is silly and wasteful. There are countries that don't even have clean drinking water! :(

We used to go to Starbucks a lot, so it made sense to me to just buy a glass reusable mug from them. I use it everyday when I go to work also. They give you a discount on your coffee if you bring your own mug. All the plastic cups that us coffee addicts drinkers waste everyday is mind boggling! When all we have to do it take our own! You can read my blog post about the coffee mugs HERE.

We recycle tons. Almost everything we use is recyclable. We use so many less trash bags. One bag a week and it's never stuffed full. It's mostly all food waste so in the spring we plan to start composting what we can. We are also switching to biodegradable bags. We don't mind spending more on them because we don't even use that many anyways. :)


One of my things on my 32 Things Before 32 List was to recycle, reuse and reduce MORE.
In a perfect world I would bike everywhere everyday. That may be in my future eventually.
Also buy a Prius. My dream car, complete with bike rack...


Okay, now give me some more ideas please...
This post is part of my MAKE A DIFFERENCE series. View more posts like this one HERE. All the images are mine taken using Instagram.