Reducing My Footprint

Thanks for all of your encouragement and positive comments yesterday about exposing myself. It was a lot of work, but you are right it feels so much better to have it all done. For those of you who are participating, keep going! It feels overwhelming when you are in the middle of the mess but it will get better.

With all of this talk about our carbon footprint, I thought I should dive right in. I’ve been taking small steps to help the environment. I bring my own green shopping bags when I grocery shop. I’ve even started doing this at non-grocery stores which is a stretch because they do want you carrying around their name brand bags but whatever. I’m saving the planet here. Duh. Work with me here people. We recycle and I’ve even started precycling. Precycling means simply buying less so you aren’t taking as much away from the planet. I’ve been hooked on the new channel Planet Green. I believe it used to be Discovery Home. There is a show called Wasted, which is pretty repetitive each episode but they get the point across. I’ve stopped buying plastic water bottles. Tap water here is just fine. We don’t live in a third world country. The main reason for this is the amount of oil and resources it takes to manufacture these bottles. By simply thinking about the resources that are used in the production of many products it has made me stop and question if I really NEED the product after all. I did a post about sustainable living here a while back.

Most of you know, my kids have had their fair share of illness this past year. Keegan has respiratory issues that has been diagnosed as asthma. Although I beg to differ. Since I’ve taken him off of milk, things have improved 100%. He still gets wheezy when allergens in the air increase so anything I can do to help him out inside our home I will do. He’s been under the weather for a couple of days now. Wheezing. I cut out all dairy, no cheese or ice cream either and today he’s feeling better. Keeping the house clean and not spraying toxic chemicals all over the place has helped as well.

After seeing Stefani’s post about making her own cleaning products I jumped right on that bandwagon. And the more I have learned about the harmful effects of cleaning products, I went right out and bought all of the supplies. First of all let me tell you that it is cheap, cheap, cheap to make your own cleaning products. It is one first initial investment of about $10 and that will last you a very long time. It will make several bottles of cleaning products. And with a little help from Stefani as to where in Austin to buy some of these products I was well on my way.

I ended up making glass cleaner, scrubby stuff (that’s an official name by the way) and all-purpose cleaner. I found recipes for the products here. I used tea tree oil for the glass cleaner and lavender oil for the all-purpose cleaner. I even added the tea tree oil to the scrubby stuff because the smell reminds me of a spa. Talk about being still. A spa.

Saving the planet, one footprint at a time.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 8:28 am and is filed under home sweet home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.