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

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.

Can Your Friends Make You Green?

This post is part of October’s APLS Blog Carnival. Check out what others have to say about October’s topic of proselytizing green at Greenhab on October 19 or join the conversation yourself!

This month’s topic immediately made me think about a headline I saw recently that read “Are Your Friends Making You Fat?” The article, which discusses how two social scientists, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, used data collected as part of the Framingham Heart Study to measure the impact people had on others in their life, included this quote:

By analyzing the Framingham data, Christakis and Fowler say, they have for the first time found some solid basis for a potentially powerful theory in epidemiology: that good behaviors — like quitting smoking or staying slender or being happy — pass from friend to friend almost as if they were contagious viruses. The Framingham participants, the data suggested, influenced one another’s health just by socializing. And the same was true of bad behaviors — clusters of friends appeared to “infect” each other with obesity, unhappiness and smoking. Staying healthy isn’t just a matter of your genes and your diet, it seems. Good health is also a product, in part, of your sheer proximity to other healthy people.

Friends also help people go green, I wondered?

When we first started making changes to green our life, we often felt alone. That feeling of isolation was, in and of itself, a barrier. On Tuesday mornings, it was tempting to sleep in a bit and let the recycling truck pass us by since we were then the only family on our block who would drag a recycling bin to the curb. I could feel the influence of our neighbors’ actions even though they hadn’t said a word.

On the flip side, a number of the changes we have made were spurred by everyday interactions with others. A helpful parent stopped me in the school parking lot to let me know one of our tires was a bit flat; as a result we started regular air pressure checks. We saw a lady at the grocery store using pretty reusable produce bags and asked her about them; now we have eliminated that source of plastic into our home.

And I can see times when we have had an impact on others as well. A dinner party turned into a discussion about our CSA after folks saw information posted on our refrigerator, with one of the families then joining the CSA themselves. A birthday party shifted to a conversation about reuse after a mom commented on our sand/water table and I told her we bought it for $5 at Goodwill. And, thankfully, we are no longer the only family on our block recycling!

I want to influence others positively so will continue making green choices and looking for others who can teach me how to live a greener life. I believe strongly that actions speak louder than words so am more likely to proselytize the green life through my behavior but have seen again and again behaviors leading to conversations. And I am always up for a chat about greening families!

As I was wrapping this up I came across an article on the need for sociologists to study conversations around climate change on Nature.com. It is an interesting read so check it out!

Benefits of Going Green – 7 and Counting

As we have been preparing for the new school year, we’ve been looking backwards as well as forward and reviewing our progress over the year to date. We have our green goals and have been tracking our progress on them but it struck me that the benefits of going green have gone far beyond meeting those goals. Here are the main benefits of going green we have experienced: Read more

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

Go Green and Save Money or Save Money and Go Green?

This post is part of August’s APLS Blog Carnival. Learn how to go green and save money by visiting Going Green Mama on August 19 to read all the submissions.

I appreciated the opportunity to write about this month’s APLS topic “Green on the Cheap,” in large part because it has given me the opportunity to make a public confession. I didn’t begin my green journey because I was troubled about the plight of polar bears or was appalled at the size of my carbon footprint. Nope, my initial reasons for going green had nothing to do with living an eco-friendly life. I simply wanted to get out of debt. Read more

Reflecting on 2008 and Looking Ahead to 2009

There has been a lot of discussion in our house about the new year. Many of the conversations involved things we changed during 2008 that made us happier. As we talked about those changes, it soon became clear almost all of them also made our lives greener. It was nice to see the two characteristics line up so nicely so I thought I would share!

First is an overview of the greening steps we made during 2008. Since I love hearing about other people’s resolutions, this is followed by the resolutions we have currently made for 2009. Read more

Shopping at Thrift Stores – Good for the World, Good for the Wallet

I posted earlier about our back-to-school shopping trip but wanted to go into more detail about the benefits of thrift store shopping. When we initially considered shopping at thrift stores, my first thought was, “Ick!” In case that is also your reaction, here are some reasons to consider it.  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