Happy Earth Day!

I hope everyone enjoyed Earth Day 2010! It was a mostly lovely day here in the Boston area, with some late day scattered spring thunderstorms - kind of neat to hear the sound of thunder after a long winter.

In honor of Earth Day, I tried to put on my best green behavior! Much of what I did is now part of my normal routine, including traveling with my trusty reusable shopping bags. I did 3 errands today and only ended up with 1 plastic bag, which will be reused - I couldn't catch the cashier before he bagged my items, and then I decided to let it slide as we do use them routinely for pet clean up. I also took my homemade iced coffee 'to go' in a travel mug - I can proudly say my coffee cup consumption is almost down to nothing in the past few years. And I try not to leave home without 'straight from the tap' bottled water in my aluminum water bottle.

In addition to my usual habits, I tried to be a little more vigilant about power usage at home. We even dined by candlelight tonight! I also attempted to streamline my errands and jobs to minimize unnecessary driving, which is just plain good time management in general. And last but not least, I took time to look at and enjoy the beautiful world around me, including the brand new leaves - it seems they decided to make their appearance today - how fitting!

How did you celebrate Earth Day 2010?

Give a Little Greener

As invitations for spring parties - showers, birthday and graduation parties, weddings - start coming in the mail, it's a good time to think about how you can give a little greener this year. While gifts are always well-intentioned, the reality is that sometimes we give and get items that end up being unwanted...which instantly turns them into clutter in your home...and ultimately might land them in the trash. Nobody likes to be the giver or the receiver of such a gift - not to mention that it's not very green to purchase and accumulate unwanted things. It got me thinking about ways to avoid this the next time you give a gift. Here are some simple ideas...

1. Give a gift card to a retailer you know the recipient likes. Or if you are unsure, you can always give cash or something like a Visa gift card.
2. Buy from the gift registry. While some of the best and most memorable gifts for life's events are often off-registry, unless you have a special idea, it is safest to stick to the registry for events like showers and weddings. The gift recipients have already decided these are items they want! Just be sure to make sure your purchase is noted on the registry and always get gift receipts so items can be exchanged if need be.
3. Give consumable or usable items. This only works well if you know enough about the tastes of the recipient. Ideas for consumables might be a favorite bottle of wine or basket of fruit. Usable items could be anything from fun office supplies to a membership to a museum or tickets to an event.
4. Give gifts that help recipients go green, such as cute reusable shopping totes (http://www.envirosax.com/), an aluminum water bottle (http://mysigg.com/), or even a subscription to a junk mail reduction service (http://precycle.tonic.com/).
5. Make a donation to a meaningful charity on behalf of the recipient. This has become a popular replacement to traditional wedding favor trinkets.

Let us know if you've used these or other green gift giving strategies!

Recycling CDs and Other Technotrash

I recently decided to downsize my CD collection since it had been sitting untouched under my desk in one of those old giant CD 'binders' for years - the contents of this wooden CD crate are all that remain. But I was left wondering what to do with all my unwanted CDs. It turns out that there are a number of options for recycling your old CD/DVDs. I used a favorite green site, www.earth911.com, and discovered that my local Best Buy has recycling bins at the front of the store for CDs, batteries and cell phones - who knew?! On another note, I also recently brought an old desk top computer that was simply collecting dust to the Geek Squad desk at Best Buy where they happily took it all (I removed the hard drive first) off my hands to recycle. They charged a $10 fee for the monitor, but gave me a $10 gift card in return.

Back to the CDs, here are some other 'technotrash' recycling options I have recently seen recommended by other professional organizers.

http://cdrecyclingforfree.com/

http://www.greendisk.com/

I love GreenDisk's slogan: "because good planets are hard to find"

Here are some interesting CD/DVD tidbits from cdrecyclingforfree.com:

CD/DVD Recycling Facts

• A cd/dvd is considered a class 7 recyclable plastic
• To manufacture a pound of plastic (30 CDs per pound), it requires 300 cubic feet of natural gas, 2 cups of crude oil and 24 gallons of water
• It is estimated that AOL alone has distributed more than 2 billion CDs. That is the natural gas equivalent of heating 200,000 homes for 1 year
• It is estimated that it will take over 1 million years for a CD to completely decompose in a landfill

Think about what technotrash you have cluttering your home and office, check out the resources above and do something about it! And by all means, let us know if you have other recycling resources to share.