A Green Eyed View - green ideas and advice

10 Ways to Go Green and Enjoy the Holidays

Happy Holidays everyone. It doesn’t matter which holidays you celebrate, there are lots of ways to make your celebrations greener. Here are 10 ways to go green and enjoy the holidays:

1. Use Recyclable Gift Bags
   I wonder how many gifts get thrown out with the mountain-high pile of wrapping paper that fills up the living room during the gift swap. Save resources and safe guard your gifts by opting for recyclable gift bags or a use the same bag every year. You can also wrap gifts in old newspapers, using the funnies section for kids. All in all, no one will really care what the outside of the gift looks like, just what's inside.
2. Buy a Real Tree
   As hard as this is for me to say, buying a real Christmas tree is more eco-friendly than buying an artificial one made with plastic, lead and other processed materials. Only buy one from a tree farm where only purchased trees get cut, and recycle it (DO NOT throw it away) after the holidays are over. Better yet buy a live tree and replant the tree after the holidays.
3. Use LED Lights
   LED lights offer a more eco-friendly and energy efficient option to regular lights, because they use only four watts per strand, whereas regular lights use about 34 watts per strand. LED lights can also last about 20 years or 100,000 hours, which means you won't be buying new lights for a long time.
4. Limit Light Time
   Holiday lights can use a lot of extra energy and tend to stay on longer than necessary. Adjusting the use of Christmas lights from dusk till bed time and turning them off during the day and when you're not home will be much more efficient and save you money in the end. If you’re like me and tend to forget, get a timer.
5. Send Gift Cards
   If you are sending gifts, opt for gift cards instead of big packages. You'll save time, stress and money not driving around to find and send big gifts. Also, it takes less fossil fuel to send gift cards than transporting boxes that contain packing peanuts, plastic and other items that will usually end up in the trash.
6. Cook Organic Foods
   Go green this holiday season by cooking with organic and locally-grown foods to support local farmers. You'll feel better knowing you served your guests food that was free of pesticides and chemicals, and supported a more eco-friendly way of farming.
7. Send Ecards and Evites
   This year, skip the paper cards and invitations and go with the instant electronic versions. Ecards and Evites are just as decorative and meaningful to receive and, best of all, no fossil fuels are used to send them.
8. Keep it Local
   Celebrate the holidays at your place or close to home to save money on expensive trips and avoid using gasoline or burning fossil fuels to travel across the country. It's safer and more convenient to celebrate at home and you can avoid being a statistic on the news when thousands of people are stranded in airports because of bad weather.
9. Give Green Gifts
   Green presents are the gifts that keep giving all year round. They can be as simple as battery chargers and rechargeable batteries and homemade toys, or as high-tech as E-readers. Consider the longevity of the product and how green it actually is. Recycled and upcycled gifts are easy to find and a lot of them are incredibly unique one-of-a-kind items.
10. Reuse Old Decorations
    Holiday decorations are something you can repeat year after year, and they rarely need to be replaced. For example, ornaments are timeless, nostalgic pieces that deserve to be reused every holiday season. If you have the urge to get a new wreath or star for the top of the tree, be crafty and make your own.

I hope you all have a very happy holiday season this year and here’s to a rockin’ 2012.

How to Reduce Junk Mail Now

Every week I get a huge pile of junk flyers and coupons jammed into my mail box from businesses I don’t use and won’t use because of their junk mail. Every week as I pull this crap out of my mail box and drag it upstairs to my condo and throw it in the recycle bin, I get angry. The paper they use is slick and the whole pile mixes with my regular mail so I have to sort through it to make sure I don’t throw out a bill or some other piece of mail I actually want. Finally I took a minute after cursing the sender out, to see where this junk was coming from. Redplum is the offender. But to be fair, they do offer an opt-out feature that I could have used years ago and saved myself the frustration of dealing with this weekly mess. I’m embarrassed I was too stupid to figure this out long ago but I am very relieved to have found a solution.

So if you are tired of getting their crap, here’s the link to get removed from their mailing list:

Click the big blue button to go to Redplum's opt out page.

Now, if you want to get rid of unwanted catalogs and phone books and junk mail in general, check out Catalog Choice. They can help you reduce the mailbox clutter. Catalog Choice will work with you to get your junk mail under control. Here’s what they say about their operation – “We've expanded our service to help people control not only what arrives in their mailbox, but also to protect their privacy and personal information. Many companies work with us to make the opt-out process efficient and effective. Participating companies include catalog mailers, nonprofits, phone book publishers and other advertisers who use Catalog Choice to demonstrate best marketing practices and to honor consumer choice and privacy.”

Reduce the junk, help save environmental resources and eliminate the stress and frustration of dealing with all this unwanted clutter.