Ziploc Evolve Bags Make the Effort Toward More Responsible

This past week my bloggy friend Anna, from the super cool Etsy shop Almost Precious, and I worked out the details for me to ship her a whole bunch of beading supplies. Then while grocery shopping I happened upon these new Ziploc® evolve™ sandwich bags and I was intrigued to say the least.

Made by utilizing 25% less plastic (than their original Ziploc counterparts), by utilizing less overall energy consumption in their production (intended to help reduce emissions), through the power of wind energy (up to 50% of the energy associated with the creation will come from wind power) and packaged in recycled cardboard (100%, 35% of which is post-consumer). These bags are a step in the right direction.

Now I know what many of you are thinking, they are still plastic, still using fossil fuels and still part of a ‘one and done’ mentality and that is definitely all true but sometimes change comes in the form of baby steps for some who might be more resistant. Busy parents who still package their kid’s lunch in sandwich bags at least have a more environmental option now. I feel better knowing that if they were going to buy them anyway, at least there are smart choices to consider.

Over time, this awareness in behavior might transition into packing sandwiches in reusable containers, but in the here and now I like to see companies making some kind of step, any step, towards a more responsible option. And they were only about $.30 more expensive for the box of 50 bags as compared to the store brand sandwich bags.

I can’t Leaf Rate the bags as I’m not really sure how they work, my whole intention was to use them for separation and storage during the shipping process and I imagine Anna will see to it they are disposed of properly as she is a fellow Greenie. Perhaps she will also be so kind as to let us know how they held up during shipping and if they are a decent storage option on the whole??

If you’re a person who plans to buy them anyway, I recommend looking into Ziploc® evolve™ as a more responsible option.

Eco Joe - Environmentally Friendly Home Selling Helper

My step mother is a Real Estate Broker so for years now I have known about the secret of the use of Saint Joseph that many Brokers use to assist in selling their listed homes. A small statue of Joe is buried in a particular location on the property and it is said he will assist in bringing in a buyer as he was always the guy who helped Jesus have a roof over his head.

The problem with most of the Saint Joseph statues out there is that they are made from plastic and if the Real Estate Agent or owner forgets to dig him back up again after the sale (or in our case can’t break ground due to snow cover!) the plastic and its coating can leech poisonous chemicals into the soil over time.

Probably not what Joseph had in mind all those years ago when he was working in construction right? Likely, no. So instead of using those chemically toxic versions Founder, Cindy Lin, developed and introduced us to Eco Joe.

The packaging Joe come in is minimal, from 100% post-consumer content and printed using soy based ink. It can also be recycled after use and it is recommended all over the box to do so. The company purchases carbon offset credits to account for its shipping impact and each quarter their proceeds support a different charity (they even take requests as to a new one to sponsor!).

But best of all is the statue itself. The 4-1/2” Joe statue is cast out of Earth friendly and non-toxic clay. It feels like one of those bare porcelain statues kids would get in ceramics class to paint but there is not a drop of paint on him. The price for the kit is reasonable too -- listed at just $14.99 as opposed to the plastic version at $10.99 -- well within range for most real estate pros.

With the strong likelihood that this practice will be adhered to by industry pros for generations to come I thin Eco Joe is a truly innovative product that helps keep the impact of divine intervention to the minimum possible, promotes social consciousness through donation to charity, is into recycling and minimal packaging and that is why I am awarding the ever elusive Five Leaf Rating to this cool concept!

Thanks for taking an already existing concept and improving on its planetary impact without compromising its function Eco Joe! ♥love♥

CVS Earth Essentials Paper Products from Recycled Content

CVS Earth Essentials paper towels and bathroom tissue (4 pack available online) are the final products I had the pleasure of testing out in this new and exclusive line. What I discovered is that I am really pretty impressed with CVS as a brand now!

I will start with the paper towels because this item is one that we had previously deemed extraneous in our household. Over the course of the last year or more we completely eliminated our use of paper towels and napkins in lieu of cloth versions. I was curious to test out the Earth Essentials towels however as I know there are many families who do still use them, so if this was a better choice I wanted to know about it.

At only about $0.80 per roll (online) the paper towels are a solid bargain considering they are two ply. The new trend in paper towels with the choose your own size means there will be less waste as a smaller piece can be used to take care of the same job. Best of all they are created from 100%, non-bleached recycled content (a minimum 60% of which is post consumer). In a final flourish, the quilting on the towels is in the shape of a heart; as if to say love the Earth.

The exact same post consumer recycled content and overall percentages holds true in the bathroom tissue as well. This truly impressed me but I was nervous to try it as it was only one ply and not puffy and quilted like my standard brand. What I discovered is that although it is not the softest brand I have ever used, it was absorbent and not completely reminiscent of sandpaper. Very important as a girl!

I am not sure if the packaging these items come in is recycled as well (paper towels are plastic wrapped, tissue is a tissue paper) and I wish there was a little more information available online as to the environmentally friendly manufacturing process.

Overall this product impressed me and if paper products have to be used at least they are created from a lengthened lifecycle of something else. With that said I am granting these paper products a Three and a Half Leaf Rating!

Overall I am very excited to know that my local CVS Pharmacy is concerned with doing something positive for our planet in creating this exclusive line of Earth Essentials. I hope to see the line expanded in the future with an even greater focus on the benefits of being eco-friendly! ♥love♥

Green Shame

We have talked at great length over here at GLR about the Earth, how we can all make our world a better place and ways to be a bit more eco-friendly, but in the process of sharing all those nuggets of awesomeness everyday I have insisted that by no means am I going to claim to be perfect; I live the life of tradeoffs just like the next planet lover. So today when I read back through some of the more recent posts of one of my favorite bloggers, I could not stop laughing at his Earth Day Can Blow Me post. (Please note there is very strong language in almost all of his writing) Just in case some of you do not have time to head over and read his witty banter I will summarize for you here.

Jim’s wife went into a coffee shop to purchase a cup of hot Joe one morning on the way to work. She requested a second, empty cup due to a sensitivity to heat. The server offered a cardboard sleeve. She asked for the other cup again and the clerk essentially said he did not want to give it to her because he wanted there to still be trees for his grandchildren. Jim’s wife was shocked (as I think all of us reading the story were) but acquired the cup anyway and went on her merry way.

Now as a self proclaimed tree hugger (in only the loosest sense of the word remember we have talked about the eco-tradeoffs of the lifestyles we all live, most especially me) my immediate reaction to his 1,000 word ranting was to ask what exactly the cardboard sleeve was made from that server offered instead? If it was not created right in the back room of the establishment, by hand and made from hemp or some such other environmentally friendly fabric then how would using that item be any better for our planet than the second cup (potentially created from post-consumer recycled content)?

I thoroughly enjoy sharing the tips and tricks, products or items I have discovered in my travels that could help us all be a little greener and in the future I really hope that the coffee server follows that lead by instead saying something to the effect of ‘you know for an extra dollar I can put your coffee in a reusable travel mug that might better protect your hands’.

As I have said before, in the end simply being aware of the choices available to us is going to bring the most change but each of us will need to make our own informed choice as to what works for us and what does not.

Have any of you experienced green shame while out and about? How did you react?

Eco-Friendly Ways to Use Paper

As a person who always looks for ways to creatively reuse items that come into my house I started thinking of the number of pieces of paper that show up on a daily basis. The first eco blog I posted over at The Organic Mechanic was on creative uses for shredded paper and recently Charmaine sent me a link to paper flowers. In our conversation after receiving the link I commented on a way to use newspaper as wrapping paper. I wondered if perhaps there were even more functional or funky ways to use paper.

A moderate level of paper makes its way into my home and I find much of it ends up in the shredder. Generally I would just place a paper bag full of the tiny strips in my recycle bin but then a while back I ordered a gift and when the box arrived I was immediately impressed with the packing material used by the seller -- shredded paper. It opened my eyes to a new use for this material so when we moved we used shredded paper to pack items like dishes and it worked like a charm!

The paper flowers that I was introduced to are nothing like the crepe paper and pipe cleaner style most of us made in kindergarten. The paper items that Revolt Media creates are made from scrapbook and other specialty papers and are sophisticated and classy. Currently they are working on a custom order of origami style flowers in red and black for a wedding party. Upon the end of the ceremony the flowers can simply be recycled!

Charmaine was questioning what to use for wrapping paper since she had used up all of her brown paper bags. I suggested painting newspaper with appropriate holiday colors and then use it as home made gift wrap. This could be a fun project to complete with kids to make their gifts personalized. Everyone would have unique wrapping, making not just the gift but its packaging really special.

Writers can find many uses for old papers such as creating a personalized journal. By taking papers due to be recycled, cutting them down to the same size, stacking them and then Japanese stab binding the pages with a front and back cardboard cover, a journal is born!

Making furniture from paper has become not only an art form but a career for artist Jens Praet. By adding a bit of resin to simple shredded paper Praet has created everything from bookshelves to desks and he claims the pieces are even stronger than wood. It might be cool to keep those Christmas cards we never know what to do with at the end of the season by turning them into an end table.

With a little creative ingenuity we can find even more uses for all that paper we look at once and throw away.

The Everything Green Living Book

About three weeks ago at my local Barnes and Noble I quite by accident stumbled across this book and wow am I ever happy I did! The Everything Green Living Book is a thorough guide with oodles of pertinent information, but it is written in a very easy to understand voice making it a fantastic resource for not only a beginner but an expert looking for a few new tips or tricks. The cover caught my eye immediately, due to the words Green Living, and as I continued to visually scan it, I noticed the recycling symbol in the upper left corner. This book is printed on 100% post consumer waste paper. Hooray! I was intrigued and began to flip through.

There are twenty chapters, 277 pages of jam packed information, covering everything from the world as it stands now through how to be environmentally responsible even when we die. The foreword is written by Christopher J. Maron, Program Director of the Adirondack, NY Nature Conservancy and he encourages adopting our own conservation ethic. Flipping the page, prior to even viewing the Introduction, there is a list of Ten things each person will take away after pouring through this book and the final one caught my eye “If you take an ecovacation, you’ll be helping the environment while supporting a local economy and having a great time.” Again, this piqued my interest but I was determined to read through the Introduction before going back to the table of contents to scan for the chapter containing information on ecovacations.

Upon reading the Introduction I chuckled as it clearly states “Many people may be surprised at what topic piques their interest.” I was not as much surprised as I was curious what advice this book would include for taking an ecovacation so as I completed the Introduction, I flipped right over to Chapter Thirteen, Vacations and Travel. The thirteen pages in this chapter review terms, pros, cons, how to do it, parks (in the United States), souvenirs, festivals and stay-cations. Included are questions, facts, tips and alerts in separate little boxes to punctuate the information. This format is true for all the chapters and not only does it make the book extremely easy to navigate but helps to hone in on specific bits of information within each larger category as well.

The end of the book includes three Appendix sections including resources (books and websites), a glossary of terms and finally a quiz to determine our own footprint. After completing reading the section I was most interested in it was clear that the level of available information could not be matched in any of the other books I owned and I went back to the beginning to read through the entire book in just two nights! When I came to the very end my brain was buzzing with such a great feeling I was truly inspired -- this book is one of the reasons I started writing this blog, researching local groups and decidedly becoming more involved in maintaining the environment around me. For all of these reasons and more I recommend that everyone check this book out (as a side note I checked with my local library to see if it could literally be checked out however the network of libraries that includes my town does not carry this particular title however I strongly encourage everyone to look into that in their own area as a greener option).

With all of this in mind I am bestowing a Five Green Leaf Rating on this wonderful resource material!

To purchase the title you can either click on the cover image above and be taken to Barnes and Noble online or feel free to check out the Adams Media associated website where the book can be purchased direct.

Please note the cover photo is not stolen from the internet but is my own book which I scanned in.