Tips on Using Less Plastic and Growing Green!
How much garbage to you produce a day? Do you recycle? Have you decided to go green? These questions should be asked in every household. Recycling and deciding to go green is beneficial to our planet and can even save you a lot of money in the long run. The below tips are great ideas to introduce to your daily life while teaching your family ways on using less plastic everyday.
Ways on Using Less Plastic!
- Grocery shopping is a part of every household. Checking out at a grocery store requires multiple bags each visit, especially when items are double bagged. You may not take notice in the amount of bags you go through in a year, but an average household can run through 1500 bags in just a year! Today, major grocery stores provide reusable bags thatcost next to nothing and can be used at any store you purchase goods at. Some stores even provide small discounts to people who bring their own bags with them. These plastic bags fill landfills around the country when in reality you use these bags for less than an hour. So next time you are grocery shopping and you see these reusable bags for purchase, pick up a couple so you can get on track with green shopping.
Using Less Plastic
– If you forget your reusable bags one day, take those plastic bags and reuse them in your home. Animal waste pickup, lunch bags and small garbage bags are all ideas for these plastic carriers.
- Find extra durable garbage bags. Flex bags are made to hold larger amounts of garbage so you are taking the trash out less often and saving the amount of plastic bags you are throwing in landfills.
- Everyone uses the cleaners at some point in their life, some people visit them once a week. Large plastic bags are used to cover cleaned clothes to protect them. Try bringing garment bags that you would use for traveling. You only need your clothes wrapped for the car ride home, so why not bring your clothes home in a nice garment bag?
- Don’t use plastic water bottles. Enough said.
- If you bring a lunch to work everyday, use a reusable lunch bag. These bags often keep your food even fresher than a plastic or paper bag that ends up in the garbage.
– Within you lunch make sure to use tupperware! Yes I know these are made of plastic, but they are dishwasher safe and can be used as many times as you need.
– Reuse those ziplock bags too. If you are packing dry food, there’s no reason why you couldn’t reuse those bags as well. This will also save you money if you’re not continuously buying disposable plastic bags.
- Recycle! There is very few things today that can’t be recycled. Paper, plastic, tin foil and glass are all things that can be sent to recycling centers to be made into new things. Our landfills are filling up at a rapid pace, so why not help our planet and recycle?
- Cloth napkins are not just for special occasions. Every dinner the average family will run through a handful of disposable napkins, but why not use those cloth napkins that sit in a drawer all year long? Purchase a decent amount of these napkins that can be washed each week to save thousands of paper napkins each year. You’ll save money, go green and look fancy doing it!
- Now, this may be extreme, but more and more families today are using cloth diapers. I admit it takes a commitment to going green to take this step, but you’d be thoroughly surprised how much money you will save, especially if you have multiple children, in a year.
– Teach your family! Using less plastic can be very easy once you get used to it. Teach your children that recycling is very important today and that it takes minimal effort to do so. Create colorful bins to help your children learn what can and cannot be recycled, this will keep them engaged and create a great habit. This can even be fun for you!
