Green Clean

This week’s tip: Reduce your use of packaging materials.

• Limit your use of bottled water. Research shows that the quality is not necessarily better than tap water. Furthermore, America’s use of plastic water bottles requires the use of more than 1.5 million barrels of oil annually, enough to fuel approximately 100,000 US cars for a year.

• Buy bulk products. It saves CO2 and money that would be wasted in the packaging process. If everyone bought 15% of their groceries in bulk, it would be equivalent to taking more than 850,000 cars off the road for a year.

• Buy concentrated products – they require less packaging and less energy to transport.

• When it’s time for gifts, consider a gift of an activity, class, or service. There’s no packaging involved at all!