Maintaining Green Motivation in the Workplace

This post is my submission to February’s APLS Blog Carnival. This month’s topic is how to stay motivated about green living. Check Going Green Mama on February 24 for the carnival round-up and lots of great ideas to keep your motivation levels high.

Recently I posted about the changes to our family’s life, which led to some changes for Greening Families. With the launch of my husband’s business, we have made the switch to complete self-employment, something we have been working toward for years. We are already reaping benefits in terms of flexible schedules (we both attended our daughters’ Valentine’s Day parties at school with zero guilt – amazing!) but the change has also meant longer-than-normal hours for me over the last few months as Rich’s business – and income – got off the ground.

When I am racing a deadline, I sometimes have a hard time maintaining my motivation for green habits, especially the ones that take a little extra time. Since I know many others are starting or growing their own businesses these days, I wanted to share some tips to maintaining green motivation in the workplace. (I also wanted to encourage myself to keep following the green path so this article itself is a form of self-motivation!) Here are my top twelve tips for greening your home office: Read more

Family Friendly Ways to Save Energy

Image by hortongrou

Like many people, we’ve been reviewing all our bills and looking for ways to reduce our spending wherever possible. Since we’re also trying to reduce our use of nonrenewable resources, finding ways to save energy are bonus items. The Koala Sisters (aka our daughters) got into the act so we bring you four family friendly ways to save energy. Read more

Our Journey to Green

This post is a submission to December’s APLS Blog Carnival. Read about the journeys others have taken and are currently taking at The Conscious Shopper, one of my favorite green blogs, on December 18.

We’re deep into goal setting for 2010 around here so the topic for December’s APLS Carnival fit into our ongoing discussions perfectly. Below is an overview of the main vehicles that led us to begin making changes to live a greener life. I’ll be reviewing our progress towards our 2009 goals and laying out our goals for 2010 in a future post.

Our journey began more than ten years ago with finances as the impetus. As I wrote on our sister site, Family Profits, when we met both Rich and I were carrying significant student loan and credit card debt. The total when we finally added it up (it took us a couple of years to work up the nerve) was more than $180,000 worth of debt. That’s right, we were $180,000 in the hole even after making payments for several years. Not a good place to be.

We knew we wanted to pay off all our debt. Since we worked mainly in nonprofit organizations, we weren’t bringing home the Big Bucks so had to learn how to be super frugal. One of the unanticipated benefits of living frugally was that it was also a green lifestyle. We didn’t buy much of anything and the few things we did buy were often used. We were all over Reduce and Reuse because those actions saved us tons of money but we began to love the difference it made to our impact on the environment as well.

The next leg of our journey was spurred by medical issues. A week before our wedding, a driver ran a red light and T-boned my car, narrowly missing a direct hit to the driver’s side door. My car was totaled and I was injured pretty badly. My recovery took more than a year and led us to explore complementary and alternative medicine. Rich gave it a try as well and soon discovered that his back pain, for which surgery had been recommended, completely disappeared when MSG was removed from his diet.

We began to pay close attention to the food we consumed and as a result made many changes to our diet. We switched first to less processed foods, then to whole foods, then to locally grown organic options. Our spending on food remained fairly constant during these switches, in large part because we traded “convenience” for healthier options. A host of green living topics were revealed to us through these changes and we’re now huge proponents of organic farming, local food options such as CSAs, and the Slow Food movement.

The decision to become parents sparked the next shift. There is nothing like being completely responsible for the health and welfare of another living creature to get one’s attention! The more we learned about fetal and child development, the more concerned we became about items that had alwasy seemed innocuous. From baby lotion to sippy cups, there were serious matters to consider at every turn. While scientists argued about potential long-term effects and “safe” levels of exposure to various chemicals and compounds, it was clear to us that our first job as parents was to protect our children and so evoked the Precautionary Principle whenever we weren’t sure what to do.

New changes, like storing food in glass containers and making our own cleaning supplies, were implemented. And it became clear that the journey to a greener life was one that could last our whole lives.

Now that our daughters are a little older, the lives lived by other families is becoming the driver of change for us. We want all children, human and animal, to have the chance to grow up healthy and strong. We’re talking a lot this month about what we can do to help make that a reality but I can already see that more alterations will be coming to our lives soon. And I can’t wait.

Want a Green School? Check Out “Cool the Earth”

Can you tell I’m deep in preparations for the start of school? I’ve been wrestling with how to extend our efforts to green our family to helping create a green school environment. And I want to do this in a way that really is helpful to the school.

Our eldest began kindergarten last fall so I don’t have a lot of experience dealing with schools as a parent. We tried several schools before we found the right fit, which didn’t occur until the end of February, so I have even less experience with our current school. We love, love, love the school’s approach to teaching, the teachers, and the other families but are still learning how the business of the school is structured.

We received our student supply lists and my initial reactions fell into four categories. For items like pencils and notebook paper, I immediately started thinking about products that would be more eco-friendly, like pencils made from recycled wood and recycled paper. Other items came with very precise descriptions, leaving me to wonder if Fiskar scissors were really needed or if the non-Fiskar scissors we already have would suffice. A quick conversation with the teacher will resolve these issues and, since the school has encouraged folks to use items already on hand, I think I know how it will go.

Then came the items that I would prefer not to purchase but will because I understand why they are helpful in a group of small children – things like tissues are included here since I just don’t see 10 kids with hankies working out well during the winter. The last category is where I am struggling. The supply lists for both of my kids included plastic zip lock bags – one box for the youngest and two for the eldest. That means 10 boxes of plastic bags will be used one classroom and 20 boxes in another for a total of 600 plastic bags just for their classes! The very thought of that makes me feel ill. Read more

Five Money (and Environment) Savers

Many folks think that living a green lifestyle is simply a luxury they cannot afford. I was surprised to find that we were able to make many green choices on our limited budget. How, you ask? Here are the five biggest money savers we’ve found. Read more