I am a SAHM. I do not go to work, I do not go to school, and my son stays home with me and my insane cat. When I read this over at Metro Mama, I was compelled to join in the eco-fun. I am pretty conscious of my eco-footprint, and in the spirit of the BlogHer’s Act September Challenge, here is how I am going to minimize my footprint this month:
- I will use a thermos-mug whenever I buy myself a coffee or other hot beverages. I know that some places will even give you a marginal discount if you provide your own cup. I buy myself a drink about twice a week, so this will save about 8 disposable paper cups this month. If I can convince my DH to do the same, we would save an additional 20 or 30 cups.
- I will use the cloth/reusable grocery bags whenever I go shopping. I have 2 large bags that I bought from A&P (which are made from 100% post consumer materials) and 2 smaller cloth bags from Loblaws. Interestingly, these 4 bags can hold as many groceries as approximately 20 plastic bags, based on the highly inefficient bagging skills of most grocery store employees. Yes, you CAN put cereal and eggs in the same bag! The eggs won’t break! Since I buy roughly 2-3 plastic bags of groceries a day, this will keep about 60-90 plastic bags out of our landfill.
- I will use my cloth diapers for Sacha whenever we are out in public instead of buying the disposable ones for those occasions.
We currently use cloth diapers during the day and he uses one disposable diaper at night. However, I usually use disposable diapers in public for ease of packing. However, if I just keep a couple of cloth diapers ready to go in the car, this shouldn’t be an issue. This will probably save about 5 diapers a week. This isn’t huge, but it’s better than nothing. Plus, I HATE buying damn disposable diapers more than I have to!
There are many other suggestions on the BlogHer’s Act Canada page. Many of these we already do, so I didn’t bother mentioning them here. But check it out for yourself and decrease your eco-footprint!
