Smart Shopping Tips for a Greener Lifestyle

When it comes to green lifestyles, it’s true that the little efforts add up. While buying an electric car or carbon offsets for your vacation are admirable actions, there are also a million, tinier tasks you can easily add to your existing schedule – and budget – that will make a difference. Below, we’ve provided a checklist for you to serve as a remind during your next shopping trip!

• Buy Fresh, Organic and Close to Home: Not only are fresh fruits and vegetables better for you, you eliminate the manufacturing, packaging and shipping, all of which strains the environment.  By seeking out fresh, organic, local produce you are doing both your body and local economy a favor.
• Shop in Season:  If you are choosing an exotic fruit or vegetable in the dead of winter you know it comes at a high cost.  Think about the environmental price tag to fly that food to your doorstep and choose fruits and vegetables in season instead.
• Eliminate Bottled Water:  According to the New York Times, Americans consume 30 billion single-serving containers of bottled water each year – plastic containers that will never biodegrade.
• Shop Online – Instead of expending fuel and energy driving all around town take advantage of online sites that allow you to make multiple purchases and combine shipping costs.
• Buy in Bulk:  Buying in bulk is smart on multiple levels.  You save money, time, energy and packaging. What could be smarter than that?
• Go Vintage:  Rather than rushing out and buying the latest fads consider going vintage. Vintage boutiques are springing up all across the country. Not only can you be fashionable but environmentally conscious as well.
• Ditch those Plastic Bags:  Opt for recyclable shopping bags whenever possible. Many stores now offer special discounts when you use recyclable bags for your purchases. According to recent estimates, 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags are used each year. Again, plastic will never biodegrade.
• Reduce, Reuse, Recycle:  This mantra should be ingrained in every consumer's head.  If every American would recycle just one out of every ten #2 plastic bottles we could keep 200 million pounds of plastic out of our nation's landfills each year.

Source: MXEnergy. For more green shopping tips, visit Earth Tones.

Comments

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The simplest thing which we can easily do and minimize pollution is to stop using plastic bottles because they are non biodegradable and as a result makes our earth polluted.