Earth Day

In celebration of Earth Day, or maybe just a coincidence, our re-usable shopping bags arrived today. We ordered them last week, after a dinner conversation sparked by a new Science World magazine that I had been using with my classes. I knew that both paper and plastic bags were bad for the environment, but this article pointed out some alarming details that I hadn't heard about. We have discussed in the past how we should just buy some canvas bags, keep them in the trunk of the van, and use them on every visit. But we never actually looked into buying them and convinced ourselves that recycling the plastic ones was good enough.

Anyway, that same night Ben started looking on the internet for shopping bags and found some that were reasonably priced and made from recycled materials themselves. We were amazed at the selection and price range of these bags. Starting with his usual Sunday grocery shopping this weekend Ben will use those bags. And he may be the only person in Marysville - we've never seen anyone else use them.

Over the past two years, we have changed almost all of our light bulbs to the super efficient fluorescent type, stepped up our recycling efforts for aluminum, plastic, and paper, and quit buying/drinking bottled water (when we got our new softener at the beginning of the year). Still don't have a Hybrid yet, but every little bit helps!

P.S. Sam's Kinderpaws group have been recycling there and talking about Earth Day a lot. They "recycled" old T-shirts (Tye-dyed them) and all wore them to the Earth Day celebration today. He takes aluminum cans out of our recycle bin, puts them in a bag, and takes them to Kinderpaws to recycle. So cute!