2/8/11

Who knew? The Plastic Bag Recycling program at your local supermarket can take more than just plastic grocery store bags. You can also deposit clean sandwich bags (like the ZipLoc brand), newspaper bags, dry cleaning bags, bread and produce bags, plastic wrappers that cover toilet paper and paper towels and even plastic shipping envelopes. All of these plastics get collected by the plastics industry and made into new products like recycled plastic lumber.

2/7/11

When you have a choice between a tub of plastic or a foil-wrapped option at the supermarket, always go with the foil. Grocery staples like butter and cream cheese often come in two options, a plastic tub (that is not easily recyclable) or one minimally wrapped. Go with the foil-wrapped one to cut back on plastic use and, more often than not, save money, too.

2/6/11

When repainting a room inside your home, don't opt for paints that claim to be "low VOC" (short for volatile organic compounds) when many zero-VOC paints now exist in the marketplace. If you can buy odorless paint at the home improvement store without any additional markup in price, why not do it? While low-VOC paints may contain (BEGIN ITALS)some(END ITALS) odor, you don't know how little or how much. So go zero-VOC whenever you can.