While we’re waiting around for our federal and state governments to pass effective environmental protection legislation, we can take a lot of action locally and leave a huge impact on the planet.  The best changes are local and that’s where people are truly empowered.

1. Eliminate bottled water.  Instead of buying cases of bottled water for functions, invest in a 2 or 5 gallon beverage dispenser.  Instead of selling bottled water at concession stands, sell team logo water bottles that players and families can reuse–or find a donor to supply them to your local teams at the ballpark or soccer field at the start of the season.

2.  Make the environment part of your organization’s mission.  Host a trash pick-up day at school or at your public park as an event and follow it up with a potluck picnic.  Invite families to plant a tree or flower in a public park–a lot of nurseries will donate supplies for free or little cost.  When people invest themselves in a place by cleaning it up and beautifying it, they’re more likely to keep it looking nice.  Adopt an abandoned lot or stretch of road for an annual garbage pick up. Ask your city council if abandoned properties might be better used as community garden space.   After each game, ask your Little League players to leave the ball diamond looking nicer than when they arrived.

3.  Raise money through environmentally friendly fund raisers.  Instead of selling more “stuff,” sell consumable things like soy candles, garden plants, or birdseed.  Sell services like babysitting at a kiddie corral.  Sell your labor–lawn care, window washing, car washing, gutter cleaning.  Service fundraisers have little or no overhead, meaning 90% profit or more for your club or organization.

4.  Keep your fundraising local.  Contact local shops and manufacturers and sell their products instead of catalog goods made in China and shipped out of California.  There’s a cheesemaker down the road?  Find out if they’ll sell coupons for certain items and share the profits with your group.  There’s a grocery store?  Ask if they’ll let you have a hamburger or chicken barbeque stand by their entrance on a Saturday–and help supply you with charcoal, buns and meat.  Invite local crafters sell their products at a fair and collect an admission or booth fee–combined with concessions and some local entertainment (magician, musician, kid talent show) and you’ll have a fun day everyone can enjoy and profit from.  Host a dessert buffet with local restaurants participating.

5.  Reuse supplies from year to year.  Most kids have more team t-shirts than they know what to do with.  Collect them at the end of the season and store them for next year’s players.  Hold a collection drive for used and outgrown equipment–shin guards, balls, bats, and shoes and distribute the gear to coaches and players at a tournament or the first week of practice.

6.  Reduce your organization’s use of paper by communicating via email or website.  You’ll also save money on postage.

7.  Double your efforts by working with another organization and increasing your manpower while not adding events to your calendar.  A high school sports team doesn’t have concession sales during their games or tournament?  Ask them if they’ll profit share if your group works their event.  Split the popcorn and Gatorade sales 50-50 (or 30-70) and both organizations benefit.  A local theater production might desire concessions made available at intermission.  PTA members might enjoy cheap onsite childcare while attending a meeting.  Enviro-Girl would gladly pay a group of Girl Scouts or National Honor Society inductees to babysit her younger children at a kiddie corral while watching her oldest play his Little League games.

Suggesting one “green” method for fundraising or managing your organization can send a BIG message to others and make a SIGNIFICANT change in your environmental impact.

Five ways to reuse a 2 liter soda bottle:

1. Make a terrarium — For how-to’s, click here.
2. Make a bird feeder — Use a knife to cut two holes at the bottom of the bottle large enough to slide a stick through for a bird perch (perfect use for a disposable chopstick). Next, cut a few holes above the perch for retrieving seed. Finally, fill with seed, tie a string around the top and hang.
3. Flower pot. Decorate the bottom half of the soda bottle and plant a flower (or replant your terrarium population).
4. Conserve. Fill the two liter bottle with water and place it in your toilet tank to use less water with every flush.
5. Water your veggies — Cut the bottom off and then bury most of the bottle upside down next to a tomato plant. When you water, pour into the 2 liter bottle and the water will go down to the plant’s roots.

Tips courtesy of The Green Daily.

Do you make these six common recycling mistakes? Apparently, even Recycla does and she now needs to go pull those pizza boxes out of the bin…

Courtesy of the Green Daily.

Contrary to popular belief, most tree huggers have an inner diva and embrace it. They don’t want to wear baggy sweaters woven out of hemp and long gypsy skirts. They appreciate that in order to be taken seriously (and their message is a serious one), they can’t look like they a) tumbled straight out of bed b) tumbled straight out of a Grateful Dead tour bus or c) tumbled straight out of Haight-Ashbury, circa 1968.
How does one look stylish and stunning without punishing the planet with their vanity? Let’s face it, fashion is a fickle thing, trends come and go so fast it gives the average person whiplash. Shoulder pads come around every 30 years, big buttons every 15. High heels with pointy toes are the rage one season, the next it’s flats with rounded toes. How can a fashion conscious tree hugger keep pace without filling a landfill with castoffs (parachute pants, anyone?) or contributing to a consumer mentality that generates so much waste and pollution?

A GOOD environmentally-friendly look

VS.

A Fashion Don’t

It was to Enviro-Girl’s delight that she saw this very issue addressed a month ago on TLC’s What Not to Wear. Stacy and Clinton gave a “Green” makeover to a very eco-conscious woman. The Rules of Green Fashion were 1) Reuse 2) Recycle and 3) Buy new from environmentally friendly clothing designers who use organic and renewable fibers in their lines.

Let’s dissect the rules:

1) Reuse: Since most fashion trends are recycled, thrift and vintage stores are excellent places to find unique pieces. Enviro-Girl is a fan of the thrift store–she wore a men’s overcoat throughout college (everyone begged to borrow it) and landed excellent wool and cashmere sweaters that would otherwise be beyond her budget. She has found funky shoes and shirts and scarves. The beauty of shopping thrift/vintage is the low price and the joy of discovery. The major drawback is the time spent culling through mounds of crappe clothes to find great treasures.

2) Recycle: On What Not to Wear, Stacy and Clinton found Tara some excellent pieces of jewelry including one necklace with a vintage beer bottletop pendant. Enviro-Girl has found handbags and purses, jewelry and shoes made from recycled materials. Vendors on ETSY are an excellent source for such items, as are local art fairs and boutique stores. The cool thing about using recycled materials in jewelry and handbags is each one looks unique and special–you won’t cross paths with your style “twin.”

3) Buy new from environmentally friendly clothing designers who use organic and renewable fibers in their lines. Enviro-Girl doesn’t care to shop in malls, but she knows the following labels are available in many retail outlets or online. Take a few minutes and click around!

Bamboo Clothes

Del Forte

Ecoganik

Horny Toad (One of Enviro-Girl’s faves)

Loyale Clothing

Levi’s

Margaret O’Leary

Of the Earth

Patagonia

People Tree

Timberland

Turk and Taylor

Twice Shy

Sameunderneath

Enviro-Girl has one more thought on environmentally-friendly “style.” Go for a classic, simple look and avoid the trends. Invest in a “look”–whether it’s suits or blue jeans and t-shirts and stick with it rather than buying into every single fashion option that designers offer you. Timelessly classic looks leave a smaller footprint because they never go out of style.

As the growing season gets underway, look to your coffee maker for a garden essential. Use coffee grounds to fertilize tulips, rhododendron, and other plants that love acidic soil. Or pick up used grounds at your local coffee shop.

When you set your table for dinner, do you ever think about how you can save Planet Earth through such a simple daily act? It’s true, you can AND make your table look a little prettier in the process. How? Use cloth napkins.

On average, each American uses a staggering 2,200 paper napkins a year, none of them recycled. Why not reduce waste (and deforestation) by choosing cloth instead?

Recycla’s family uses cloth napkins with dinner almost every night. Recycla has collected a variety of napkins over the years, and her daughters like to choose which napkins they use each evening. Not surprisingly, the girls skew toward florals.

Recycla particularly loves the selection, quality, and prices of napkins at World Market. A locally-owned shop nearby sells Ten Thousand Villages products — a wonderful source of Fair Trade goods from all over the world, including some beautiful napkins. One can also find a large selection at Target, which is where Recycla found her favorite striped napkins.

Other inexpensive ways to purchase cloth napkins:

• Scout out thrift shops and other second-hand stores.
• For fancier meals, check out local antique stores for old linen napkins.
• Does your grandmother have any old napkins she’d like to share?
• Make your own: If you have any fraying shirts, such as oxford cloth men’s shirts, cut out squares and you’re ready to roll. Hemming the edges is optional.

Some people would argue that using cloth napkins uses resources too — the napkins have to be washed. True, but the overall use of resources is less and the napkins don’t add much bulk to one’s laundry. And, of course, the napkins don’t have to washed after each use. And, no, Recycla does not iron her cloth napkins.

Recycla must confess that her family only uses cloth napkins during dinner but not during other meals. Yes, Recycla knows her family should use cloth all the time, but she’s not perfect and she’s trying to make easy changes where possible. The family uses Seventh Generation 100% Recycled Napkins for breakfast and lunch. These napkins aren’t pretty, but that’s not the point. By using napkins made from recycled paper, Recycla feels slightly better about her wastefulness.

If the idea of switching from paper to cloth seems a bit much, ease into it. Use cloth napkins for one meal per week, such as Sunday dinner. Doing so helps cut back a little on waste and we all know that every little bit counts.

With all the recent news about plastic bottles and how they’re not safe, you may be wondering what to do with all that #7 plastic in your cabinets. This article by the Green Guide might be of help. The article also mentions the differences between two different kinds of #7 plastics — one safe and one not.

Recycla is mighty irked with herself. The Easter Bunny bought new water bottles to put in her children’s baskets. Did Recycla check what type of plastic they were? No. Has Recycla just wasted over $30? Yes. Sigh… Time to find some different bottles.

Americans get an estimated 19 billion catalogs a year — at a cost of 53 million trees. Now is a good time to spring clean your mailbox. Log on to a new FREE service called Catalog Choice. You tell them which merchants’ mailing lists you want to opt out of and they handle the rest. Say goodbye to waste.

Time.com recently put together a list of the Top 15 eco blogs.  Alas, Eco Women didn’t make the Top 15, but there’s always next time.

For your reading pleasure, here’s the list for you to peruse:

1. Grist
2. TreeHugger
3. DotEarth
4. ClimateChange (Guardian)
5. RealClimate
6. EnvironmentalCapital (WSJ)
7. No Impact Man (Click here to see what the Eco Women have to say about No Impact Man.)
8. EcoGeek
9. Ecorazzi
10. Switchboard
11. Mongabay
12. ClimateEthics
13. Climate Progress
14. WorldChanging
15. Planet Ark

Between the two of them, Recycla and Enviro Girl read a lot of eco blogs, but they haven’t even heard of some of the ones listed above, so they’ll be adding these to their Google Readers in order to continue to learn more about ways to help save Planet Earth.

Have you read any of the blogs above? Let the the Eco Women know which ones and what you liked or didn’t like.

Sticking to the speed limit can help you save gas — and money. According to the Department of Energy, each 5 mph you drive over 60 is the fuel-efficiency equivalent of adding a whopping 20 cents per gallon to your gas bill.