Green Living Ideas
EnergyBe Eco-friendly at the Grocery Store
Grocery shopping is a fact of life for most of us, making it a great candidate for green living. If we change our grocery shopping habits just a bit, we can make a significant contribution to green living and still keep our fridges and pantries stocked with our favorites. Try these green living suggestions on for size.
Bring your own Bags: Avoid the grocery store's plastic bags and bring your own. A lot of grocery stores, like Whole Foods, even support green living by giving you a small discount for each plastic bag you save. I prefer to bring a couple of backpacks (one for my back and one to carry in my hand or wear on the front, depending on the weight) as my nod toward green living. If I need to, I can always use one of the grocery store's bags (which is still better than four or five!). Grocery stores often sell their own reusable bags to help customers practice green living.
If you can't carry that much weight, buy a cart on wheels to avoid the plastic bags and help further green living. Or, if you're only buying one box of cereal or one gallon of milk, why not just carry it and avoid the bag issue completely!
Combine Errands and Bring a Friend: Just as I promote in the green living article on combining errands, reduce your number of trips to the grocery store by buying more on each trip. I often purchase family-size packages of meat to freeze until I want to use it. Another fun green living suggestion is to grocery shop together with a friend, using only one car.
Choose Eco-Friendly Packaging: To practice green living, avoid individually wrapped containers and favor larger ones. This will reduce the total amount of packaging waste (and indirectly the energy used to create the packaging in the first place). Also, in light of green living, look for packages made of materials you know can be recycled or are biodegradable.
Organic Food: The term "organic" is thrown around a lot in green living circles, and at its heart it really just means any compound that contains carbon. All food is inherently organic. What the green living "organic" trend is generally referring to is the growing or raising of food with no or restricted use of pesticides and growth hormones. The best thing to do for green living is not just to look for the word organic, but to read the package and/or research the company online to make sure they're not poisoning our environment. Make your food choices wisely, for your family and for green living.
