Gorgeously Green

{Photo: Gorgeously Green}

I am one of those people that loves the idea of going completely green. It's buy into the belief that I would be sooooo much healthier if I eat nothing but local and organic, and a better person if I use more natural cleaning products and so on and so on. I feel like I'm aware of the things I could and should be doing, but don't always do them. Like when I forget to take my reusable bags to the store with me- I can't even go grocery shopping without feeling guilty about taking the plastic bags that kill birds or something like that. Geez, those poor birds were depending on me!

It all started when I did an internship in college and one of my projects was working on a Keep America Beautiful campaign. This is where I learned that it takes 2 million years for a glass bottle to decompose. And this is where I learned about the number printed on the bottom of plastic products that tells you if it can be recycled.

Believe it or not, my college internship days were before the whole go green trendy thing had kicked off. Ironically enough, the internship was in my hometown, where they still to this day don't pick up recycling with your regular trash pick-up! I'm lucky to live in a place now where recycling is a piece of cake. We can throw EVERYTHING in our magical blue recycling trashcan and don't even have to sort out the cans from the paper anymore. Newspaper and junk mail, cereal and pasta boxes, spaghetti sauce jars, cans from veggies or soup, plastic salad dressing bottles, etc all go in the one blue trashcan. We roll it out to the road on our trash day and poof- it's recycled.

While I don't think I could go to the extremes of 365 Days Of Trash, recycling is an easy step that everyone should be doing by now. I knew I had come a long way when on vacation, I couldn't bare to see the gazillion water bottles we consumed thrown into the regular trash. Since I couldn't afford to buy a water filter and BPA free bottles for all of us, recycling was the next best thing. So we set up our own little recycling center and saved a rain forest or two by recycling tons of soda cans, water bottles, and glass beer bottles. Does this make me a treehugger? Or maybe a scuppie?

So the point of this post isn't to preach to you or spread my personal "green" guilt around. I'm hoping that it simply gets you thinking about the small things you can do. And since there are much more experienced treehuggers than me, here are some sights I've been following for a little green inspiration.


- Life Less Plastic

-Naturally Savvy

-Gorgeously Green

And to prove that I'm trying to walk the walk- I joined the Gorgeously Green 30 Day Pledge.