5/4/14

Hot summer weather also means one more thing: mosquitoes. Instead of using chemical sprays to keep pesky bugs away, reach for something in your medicine cabinet instead. Natural mouthwashes from the supermarket or natural foods store are usually made with food-grade alcohol and eucalyptus oil to freshen breath. By transferring this same mixture into a spray bottle, you can keep mosquitoes at bay. Spray your skin, the table and anything else around with natural mouthwash. The alcohol will dry out mosquitoes and the eucalyptus oil is powerful enough to act as a deterrent. Plus, it all smells nice!

5/3/14

The greenest way to enjoy a soda pop? Using a reusable cup and a soda fountain. While plastic, glass and aluminum containers are all recyclable, they all have their pros and cons when choosing the fizzy stuff. Oil is used to make plastic bottles, and the resins are not infinitely recyclable. While glass is infinitely recyclable, it's heavier, so the carbon footprint to ship glass bottles is higher than plastic; plus, only 25 percent of glass bottles are actually recycled. And aluminum? While 50 percent of the can is recycled, the other half is virgin aluminum that comes from destructive mining practices. So using a reusable glass at a restaurant's soda fountain is the lightest and least destructive way to go.

5/2/14

Over 18,000 tons of plastic shampoo and conditioner bottles end up in landfills every single year. And it's a shame: The plastics used to make these bottles are easily and commonly recyclable, and most community recycling programs accept them. And with new recycling technology, even the caps (which are made from a different grade of plastic) can be kept on without being sorted first. To make recycling easy for you and your family, just designate a small recycling bin for empty plastic packaging. When it's full, transfer to the recycling bin.