After reading this post, don’t forget to enter our contest – you could win a new dishwasher. Plus, do you have your own story to tell? Send it to greenchallenge@canadianliving.com (no more than 300 words, please), and you could win one of 30 daily prizes.
Today’s winner is Nena Erickson of Dalhousie, NB.
I work for a program in which I live in a house with 11 teenagers. These youth are so eco-conscious it’s amazing. When we go for groceries we take only cloth bags. At the grocery store we try to buy only local or Canadian made and items that don’t have a lot of packaging. If the choice is between frozen Canadian or fresh elsewhere we buy Canadian to reduce our carbon footprint. By buying local or as close to local as possible you are able to save the fuel and packaging and issues that deal with a long trip.
In the house we recycle everything New Brunswick allows us to recycle. We compost everything – I really mean everything. We have compost buckets in the bathrooms so that hair, fingernail clippings and tissues can all be composted. We also keep a recycling bin in there for the empty toilet paper rolls. While on the subject of the bathroom, to save water, we follow the saying, “If it’s yellow let it mellow, if it’s brown flush it down.”
When we buy cleaning products we buy only biodegradable and eco-friendly products. We even buy the eco-friendly toilet paper. Vinegar is our best friend when it comes to scrubbing the house. It can get rid of any smell and any grime. When it comes to cleaning our vehicle, we use only two buckets of water: one soapy and one for rinsing.
None of these are big issues. They are all small in their own right, but each little bit helps to lessen humans’ ecological footprint on this earth and I am proud to say that these teens have got it right!
Thanks to Nena for sending in her story – and don’t forget, if you still haven’t entered, there’s still time to send your own story to greenchallenge@canadianliving.com.
Nena wins a gift set of bath and beauty products worth $370, courtesy of Burt’s Bees, including the following:
• Natural Skin Care for Men Cologne
• Extra Energizing Citrus & Ginger Root Body Bar
• Radiance Exfoliating Body Bar with Royal Jelly
• Naturally Nourishing Milk & Shea Butter Body Bar
• Naturally Ageless Line Diminishing Day Lotion
• Naturally Ageless Intensive Repairing Serum
• Naturally Ageless Skin Firming Night Creme
• Naturally Ageless Line Smoothing Eye Creme
• Radiance Exfoliating Body Wash
• Baby Bee Tear Free Bubble Bath
• Naturally Nourishing Milk & Shea Butter Hand Soap
• Muscle Mend Sore Muscle Relief
• Thoroughly Therapeutic Honey & Grapeseed Oil Hand Crème
• Four Super Shiny Natural Lip Glosses
Today’s code word: teens
Read more:
• How to choose eco-friendly makeup
• How to conserve water in your kitchen
• Make your bathroom eco-friendly
Great story. The younger a person is when they start recycling, the better they get at it. Thank goodness my parents set a terrific example, composting, washing out plastic bags for reuse, “Don’t leave the water running, turn out the light!”. However, I’d like to remind you of the Marketplace program that showed us not all things (fresh or frozen) labelled “Canada” are in fact any more than a small percentage from Canada, or even from Canada at all. First example, frozen fish may be caught by Russians in the Bering Straight, picked up by Chinese packers & frozen, shipped across the Pacific, through the Panama canal to Boston, offloaded onto trucks, shipped to an Atlantic province, thawed, sauce added, packaged (in plastic) and refrozen and labelled “Product of Canada”. Don’t forget the power of the much-monied lobbyists to control our lives and what is printed may not be the “whole truth”. Also, you can find onions and tomatoes labeled Product of Canada - but they have stickers on them saying “Product of Mexico” (and they’re not even packaged) — that one I REALLY can’t get my head around -but I’m sure there’s a lobbyist’s hand steering that policy.
Comment by Lynda Neveroski — April 23, 2008 @ 12:11 pm