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Posts filed under Green Living. Show all blog posts.
4 Steps to Greening Your School Routine
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It takes just two weeks to form a new habit (or break a bad one), so why not make a commitment to implement a greener routine that can save money, make a lasting impact on the environment and positively affect the health of your family.
So here’s my challenge to you—commit to making four small and simple changes which can be incorporated into your family’s daily routine that will make a lasting impact on the environment and the health of everyone involved. Greener doesn’t have to cost you more time or money, so get your family involved. Empower them to be a part of the change with these four easy steps and make sustainable living the new ‘normal’ in your home.
Step 1: The Litterless Lunch
As a mom, when I recognized the impact of prepared, packaged and processed foods on our bodies and the environment, I knew that I had to make a change. By swapping out disposable packaging for reusable lunch carriers and avoiding prepared foods, you’ll be saving money, the environment and improving the health of your child. Here’s how:
- Reusable lunch carrier – The SnackTAXI is a great option in place of the plastic or paper bags often used to carry lunches.
- Reusable containers – Stainless steel, glass or an alternative wrap like the Wrap-N-Mat can be used in place of plastic wrap or foil.
- Stainless steel or glass drink bottle – Opt for stainless steel, glass or my favourite—the Otterbottle—instead of single-use cans or juice boxes.
Step 2: Watch How You Wash
Keep in mind that while you are making an investment in a healthy and more sustainable lunch, it’s important to investigate what you are using to wash and keep your lunch containers clean. Many dish and laundry soaps contain petrochemicals (derived directly from oil). So wherever possible, look to wash your lunch bags and containers with plant-derived, non-toxic dish soap. I make sure the following on are my shopping list:
- A natural dish soap – Plant-derived dish soap like Free & Clear Natural Dish Liquid can effectively clean the grease, grime and dirt left in your child’s stainless steel and glass containers while making sure there’s no dangerous residue left to contaminate lunch.
- Natural all-purpose spray – I’m constantly cleaning my countertops of sticky fingerprints but want to make sure those same counters are safe to place food on, so I opt for a plant-based cleaner like Free & Clear All Purpose Kitchen Spray which lets me do both.
- A plant-based concentrated laundry detergent – At the end of the week when it comes time to wash lunch bags, cloth napkins and the kid’s clothes, I choose a highly concentrated detergent like Seventh Generation’s 4X formula which let’s me get more loads per bottle and is safe to use on my family.
Step 3: Choose a Fun, Fit and Sustainable Route to School
Getting to school has an enormous impact on our environment as well as our health. With an estimated 1.6 million children in Canada (26% per cent of children) considered overweight or obese, it’s a wonder more parents don’t look at making healthy transportation options a part of their daily lives. Here’s a few ways to work health, cost and environmentally-friendly options into your getting to school routine:
- Start a walking school bus with children or families in the area. Walking is the greenest way to travel and does the least damage to the environment. Find ways to either walk with or ensure your children join forces with other families who travel the same path to school.
- Make the investment in two and four wheeled methods of transportation such as a bike, new scooter or skateboard to make the trip to school fun and fit.
- Create a carpool. Find out which days work best for the drivers, and create a schedule and a system for notifying other members of the pool if someone isn’t riding on a particular day.
Step 4: Rebrand Responsibility
It’s important to engage your kids in the school preparation and planning process to help set them up for success. This means that kids must be involved in organizing their snacks and lunches for the week, they should help clean and select their clothing and should also be in charge of creating their weekly schedules (including chores, sports practices, music lessons, etc). Most importantly though, they need to understand why it is important that they choose environmentally-friendly products.
After having many conversations with my own children about the environment and what it means to do our part, I recognized that a big part of teaching stewardship is ingraining responsibility into the fabric of your household.
Overall, it’s never too late to set a new standard of what you and your family can do to help care for the environment.
More on this topic — Green Living,
More on this Age & Stage — School Age, Preschool,
The Corny Truth
You know by now that high fructose corn syrup is a key suspect in the obesity issue which is crushing our culture (26% of our kids are overweight or obese). You have probably even heard that corn, fed to cows, creates inflammatory fat in the animal thereby adding to our own inflammatory illnesses like heart disease, dementia and arthritis when consumed by humans. On top of it all, it may be that the very growing of so much corn is also the #1 suspect in bee decimating and the puzzling conundrum of ‘colony collapse disorder.’
Here is why you should care…without bees, there is no pollination. Without pollination, the very plants that are grown for food as well as trees and shrubs to keep our planet cool are at risk. Your kids deserve to grow up healthy and on an inhabitable planet with a variety of fresh fruits and vegetables that can be grown in the soil naturally pollinated by bees. No bees, no green. No green, no food.
This issue could be that big (which is too scary to even think about). New evidence points to the neonicotinoid pesticide used to soak conventionally raised corn seeds may be the very thing that is wiping out our bee population. About 90% of corn grown today is treated this way, and it appears to cause the bees to become disoriented when they leave the hive. If enough can’t find their way back, the colony dies. The sad news it that unless you are carefully reading labels and only buying organic products, you are affected.
But you only eat a few cobs of corn each summer, right? How could that be doing harm? The truth is you are eating truckfuls of corn each year and you may not know it. Corn is used to feed cattle and chickens. It is also grown as a sweetener that is super cheap and sweeter than sugar so it is used in junk food. Junk food’s contribution to our obesity issue is one thing and a multifaceted battle that is and will impact our health care system. If the very growth and use of corn is impacting our eco system, now we have an even bigger issue. So the question is…what to do about it? The answer is simple, the implementation of it not so much.
Stop eating corn. The treasure hunt that those three little words sets up is lifelong and virtually impossible. The good news is that the shifts involved are the very same ones that protect your health in a multitude of other ways. It starts with…
- Buy as little as possible of the food that has the ingredient glucose-fructose (that likely comes from corn). The good thing is that this rules out mostly junk anyway.
- Stop drinking soda pop and sweetened fruit drinks containing glucose-fructose.
- Avoid the ingredient maltodextrin. This is a corn derived material used in packaging and some foods like instant coffee, soup mixes etc. to keep them from clumping.
- Upgrade corn oil or ‘vegetable oil’ (which is likely corn oil) to grape seed, extra virgin olive or other oil.
- If you choose to eat red meat make it organic or grass fed (at least the corn will be organic and devoid of the pesticide in question).
- Chickens eat less corn than cows but it’s a good idea to go organic here as well as often as possible.
- Opt for meatless meals whenever you can which will reduce our dependency on corn feed.
- Use bee attracting plants in your garden to keep the population alive.
I am not a fatalist but I do think that waiting for definitive proof that this pesticide is harming the bees may come too late. Things are not likely to change from the top down since pesticide makers and lucrative corn crop growers have a vested interested in preventing change. That said, we may have a collective chance from the ground up with these few simple shifts. Have at it.
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