new resolution...

upon my return to phx (it's only 104 degrees today -phuey!) from my vacation/ work trip in the beautiful adirondack moutains in upstate new york ... i've decided to dive head first into this thing thats been hanging on my conscience. the earth. and what i can do to help it. whether you believe in global warming or not we should do everything possible to keep it healthy. right?

so for the past few years, -but aggressively the past few months i've been researching what i can do without durastically changing my lifestyle or my check book. here are a few that i've done so far:

have lots of plants inside & outside your house to help offset carbon dioxide. they're working hard to keep us breathing healthier air, so collect lots of these puppies!

change your light bulbs to energy efficient led light bulbs... they last a lot longer and use way less energy. definately worth a few extra bucks upfront since you'll be saving monthly bill-wise & repurchasing new bulbs less often.

this is astounding:

it is estimated that 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide each year. 1 million bags used per minute. PER MINUTE! the epa says 380 billion of those are discarded here in the us. less than 1 % are actually recycled (as much as horrible plastic can be). i know i have a whole cabinet full of these things. so i recently purchased these awesome granite gear bags. you can find them here at rei. they are a little expensive & i have purchased others & even cloth bags for far less, but again worth it. this is something we do a lot- bryan & i probably collected 30 bags a month for grocery shopping for the 2 of us... that's a ton of bags.

another crazy statistic:

in 2005 americans used & discarded 14.4 billion disposable paper cups for hot beverages. if you put those cups together end-to-end, they would circle the earth 55 times. and with our continued growth of coffee-to-go consumption, that could increase to 23 billion cups a year by 2010. thats enough to circle the world 88 times. so, use a thermos- take it with you to starbucks, even buy their plastic reusable coffee cups- whatever it takes to make your 'morning pick me up' safe for the environment. also, instead of buying a new plastic water bottle or gatorade everytime your thirsty - buy a nalgene for $8. this also saves us a ton of money- water is now free instead of $2 a pop.

i just signed up for a sapling membership at greendimes.com for $36 a year they will work to stop the junk mail that fills my mailbox & ultimately my garbage can. plus they'll plant a tree for each membership every month! at our house we get several copies for past residences, so i added their names to our account as well. here's a quote from their website:
"We researched dozens of direct mailers and literally thousands of catalog publishers. We contact them on your behalf and make sure that you STAY off of their mailing lists. This will stop most of the credit card offers,(bc who needs more of those?) catalogs, and other solicitations that you don't want." How great is this?

so there's my tips for the week. my goal is to continue researching how to be a better human being & post them here. i think it's really easy to be respsonsible it's just so overwhelming... hopefully this will help!

i'll post mike & lisa's wedding hopefully tomorrow, plus some pictures from the vacation- it was busy, but an awesome way to spend almost 3 weeks!