Greeny not Grinchy

This year, don’t be Grinchy towards the environment with your holiday giving. The holidays can be famously excessive. All the traveling, shopping and eating not only expand your waistline, but they also impact the environment. As we enter the holiday season, we decided to devote a few weeks to the ways that we can all easily adjust our typical wasteful holiday habits.

One of the major culprits of the holiday season are the ungodly amounts of trash we produce during it. Wrapping paper, Christmas cards, bags, packaging all massively contribute to the holiday season being the worst time of the year for the environment…so THIS WEEK, we’re talking about ways to trim the trimmings and reduce our waste (not waist…sorry).

First, the scary facts: Americans throw away an additional 5 million tons of trash (25% more than usual) between Thanksgiving and New Year's Eve . It just sounds disgusting. But when you realize that it takes 6 mature trees to make just 1 ton of paper and 4 MILLION tons of our holiday excess waste is from shopping bags, boxes and gift wrapping , you start feeling disgusting, too. That’s 24 MILLION TREES Americans will waste this year alone on paper goods for the holidays (we are not including Christmas trees…we’ll get to that later this month). And if you don’t remember how important trees are to us all, check out all the stats from our November 12 posting below.

Here’s our ideas for greening up your gift-giving:

Use “Smart” Wrapping Paper
If everyone in the U.S. wrapped 3 gifts in reused paper this holiday season, it would save enough paper to cover 45,000 football fields . That’s 2,592,000,000 square feet of paper we could save. Wrap your presents this year in old newspapers, brown grocery store bags or tissue you have accumulated from shopping for gifts. Or don’t wrap and draw or paint a little something directly on the box for pizzazz. Use an old ribbon from a previous gift, you get the idea. Try not to buy anything new this year to wrap presents in, use what you have. (But if your joy in life comes from wrapping paper, at least look for recycled paper.)

Even better than being smart about wrapping your own presents? Getting other people to be smart about it too! Tell your mom, sig other, grandparents and Aunt Susie that you really appreciate their holiday gifts, but that you are PERFECTLY HAPPY if it is not in shiny paper. We don’t want to take the fun out of opening a present that you really, really want (like a Cartier love bracelet, hint hint) but you’re not 8. The love bracelet will look just as good on you not wrapped.

And if your family can’t part with its ribbons, bows and Santa paper, then PLEASE reuse or recycle it all! Save the pretty bows, boxes and bags for you to reuse for the next time you have to give a gift. Recycle everything else. Even if your family doesn’t usually do that, just make it your personal goal to collect it all and set it aside to be picked up (or if they don’t have those fab blue trash cans, go ahead, don’t be lazy and drop it off at a recycling center).

Holiday Cards
Remember when you were little and your mom used to tell you that the card was more important than the gift itself? We beg to differ…Over 2.65 BILLION holiday cards are sold each year in the U.S. The amount of cards could fill a football field 10 stories high (we know, we know, what’s with all the football field analogies?) . If we each sent one card less, we'd save 50,000 square tons of paper . Obviously we’re not suggesting that you ditch out on letting you loved ones know how you feel this holiday season, so here are our suggestions:
• Send e-greetings to family, friends and business associates who are on-line (http://www.bluemountain.com/.)
• Buy recycled-content cards and envelopes.
• Write it on the gift itself (or, if you wrapped your gift in a reused brown paper bag, you can write it on that in a pretty colored pen)
Holiday Shipping and Packaging

For your local friends: Buy Local, Give Local:
Support local bookstores, coffee shops and clothing stores by buying your gifts from them and giving them to people by hand. It helps the little guys and cuts down on shipping and packaging. Also, ask the sales associates to give you size appropriate bags.

For the Out of Towners:
Give e-gift cards instead of sending gifts--trust me people really want to pick out there own cds, cloths, music and toys. Email or snail mail a gift certificate from a favorite store (like Amazon.com, where they donate a small portion of the sale to us if you use our link!) and they can pick out their own gifts. If someone ships you a present, recycle the waste. And if you really want to be a saint save packing "peanuts" and bring them to a mailing company such as Mail Box Etc. for them to be reused.

If you have any ideas about reusing and reducing holiday waste this season, feel free to post below! Also, please check out our next few weeks of holiday eco-tips, including great ideas and links for eco-chic gift ideas and clothing.

Finally, give GREEN IS THE NEW PINK the best holiday gift of all—new subscribers. Forward our email to all your friends and encourage them to subscribe, too. The more subscribers we get, the more people doing the tips, the more we will all change the world this year!

Turkey, Sweet Potatoes and Gore

You know when you had those mean teachers in junior high that would assign you homework over Thanksgiving and instead of getting to curl up and watch the parade with your cousins, you had to solve algebraic equations using the Pythagorean Theorem? (this is only if you went to private middle school like Jessica—-Lydia was still struggling with fraction multiplication Thanksgiving weekend of 8th grade, and still is to this day.) We’re not down with that. We know it’s easy to slip into a food coma during Turkey Week, so we figured out a simple, yet SUPER effective tip for the nice long weekend that you can do sitting down….

Al Gore’s fabulously reviewed documentary about global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, comes out on DVD today (November 21). For those of you who haven’t seen it, it’s a great, entertaining and comprehensive look at the causes and effects of global warming—definitely a MUST-SEE. Don’t let politics be an excuse. Even if you don’t care for Gore, this movie is a presentation of scientific facts that members of BOTH parties have acknowledged as the scary truth. And even if you have seen it, you’re not off the hook. Here’s what you all can do:

· Buy the DVD. Why buy it and not just have your little brother bootleg you a copy off the Internet? Because a portion of the proceeds of the DVD sales benefit The Alliance for Climate protection (a BIPARTISAN organization) and because the DVD is packaged to make the smallest environmental footprint possible. No plastics, 100% recycled paper. Nice. So buy it, watch it (there’s new special features) and loan it out to friends...the more people who are aware, the better. You can find the DVD at Blockbuster and on Amazon (right now it's only $15 on Amazon).

· Rent/Buy the DVD and watch it with your family THIS WEEK. After you’ve eaten all the turkey (or tofurkey…) you can, after you’ve sustained minor injuries battling crowds at Bloomingdales and after you’ve exhausted all possible family convo topics, sit down, relax, pop in the DVD and help your family learn about global warming. We promise you they won’t think it’s boring. You can rent the DVD from Blockbuster (or most other video stores) or through Netflix.

· Buy the DVD’s as holiday gifts. Okay, it won’t work for everyone...but if all else fails, it’s a great idea for your office Secret Santa exchange. It’s better than that Bart Simpson Chia Pet you got last year.

So, don’t get too lazy this weekend...all we’re asking you to do is watch a movie. You can have popcorn and soda and all the pumpkin pie with Vanilla Bean Whipped cream that you want while you watch it. It’s not like we are sending you to Iraq. Or making you use the Pythagorean Theorem. Go do it!

For more info about an Inconvenient Truth go to www.climatecrisis.net or check out the preview below!

Getting More Bag for your Buck

Being eco-chic involves getting creative about how to re-use everyday items. This week, we’re talking about re-using kitchen bags—easy and effective, but also easily overlooked.

For instance: We all know that plastic baggies aren’t the best for the environment, but that doesn’t mean that we can live without them. Feel good and make a difference by RE-USING your plastic baggies. Okay, we know it might sound gross, and look, if you had something disgusting or moldy in the baggie, by all means THROW IT OUT…but otherwise, after you finish your carrot sticks, take one second, rinse out the bag in the sink and set it to dry. Then it’s ready for the parmesan rind you are saving for your soups (or for your weed...kidding).

Another idea: What happens every time you go to the grocery store? They ask you whether you want paper or plastic. If you’re like us, you’re always a little unsure of which is worse for the environment. For the record, even though you CAN recycle plastic bags, the paper bags are way better. Okay, after you’ve chosen the paper bags, you come home, unload your groceries and then wonder what to do with the bags…Again, if you’re like us, you feel bad throwing away all these perfectly good bags, so you stick them under your sink where your bag collection grows and grows until it’s taken over your entire kitchen and then, overwhelmed and on a cleaning frenzy, you eventually toss all of them anyway. We know we’re not alone with this.

So…next time, after you unload your groceries, put the paper bags back IN YOUR TRUNK right away. Otherwise you’ll forget. Next time you are at the store you can bring them in to be re-loaded. Lydia always forgets them until she gets to the check out line and then runs to her car to bring them into be loaded (BTW, they will wait for you). Plus, that way everyone in the check out line at Trader Joes can see you being green chic and fabulous! If every household in the U.S. reused one paper bag for one shopping trip, about 60,000 trees would be saved[1].

What exactly does saving 60,000 trees mean? You can either trust us that it’s really important and start re-using your paper bags right now, or you can keep on reading below:

Trees clean the air[2]: Trees take in carbon dioxide and produce oxygen. Tree foliage are a natural air filter of pollutants such as ozone, nitrogen oxides, ammonia and sulfur dioxides. Along with the cooling effect of trees, these processes have a HUGE impact on reducing smog and overall air pollution.

Trees improve water quality[3]: Tree canopies and root systems slow down and reduce storm water runoff, flooding and erosion. Trees also help filter water runoff reducing water pollution in our rivers.

Trees save energy[4]: Trees cool the air naturally in two ways--through water evaporating from the leaves and direct shade. Homes shaded by trees need less energy for cooling which means lower monthly utility bills.

And if you’re one pf those types who like numbers and stats, we got some of those for you, too…here are the cold hard facts of what YOU are actually doing by reusing your paper bags:

• 40 trees remove 80 pounds of air pollutants annually[5]. (So according to our fact that reusing 1 bag per U.S. Household for just 1 shopping trip saves 60,000 trees, if we all simply reused one grocery bag, we’d save 120,000 POUNDS of AIR POLLUTANTS!)
• 400 trees capture 140,000 gallons of rainwater annually[6].
• One acre of forest absorbs six tons of carbon dioxide and puts out four tons of oxygen. This is enough to meet the annual needs of 18 people.[7]
• A tree can grow to manufacture five pounds of pure oxygen per day, consume carbon dioxide to fight the "greenhouse effect" that threatens our survival, and provide the cooling equivalent of ten room-size air conditioning units[8].

And some more fun facts you can pull out when you talk to people who claim that saving the environment costs too much money (we all know one of them):

• Four million trees can save $20 million in air pollution clean up[9].
• Four million trees save $14 million dollars in annual storm water runoff costs[10].
• One million trees save $10 million a year in energy costs[11].
• A tree, over a 50-year period, will generate $31,250 worth of oxygen, provide $62,000 worth of air pollution control, and recycle $37,500 worth of water[12].
  
  So take the extra 10 seconds to put your bags in your trunk. Or better yet…ditch out on the paper bags all together, buy some canvas totes and keep them in your trunk for grocery store, Rite Aid and the ever-essential Target shopping trips.

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[1] http://www.oroloma.org/resources/kidscorner/earthday/2005/recyclingFacts.html

[2] Info from: http://www.rubbersidewalks.com/WhySaveTrees.asp

[3] Info from: http://www.rubbersidewalks.com/WhySaveTrees.asp

[4] Info from: http://www.rubbersidewalks.com/WhySaveTrees.asp

[5] www.sactree.com

[6] www.sactree.com

[7] U.S. Department of Agriculture

[8] From: http://www.arborday.org/trees/benefits.cfm

[9] www.sactree.com

[10] www.sactree.com

[11] From: www.sactree.com

[12] From: http://www.arborday.org/trees/benefits.cfm

Welcome to Green is the New Pink L.A.: Making the environment hot as we cool it down...

Our mission: To take out the legwork that gets in the way of us all doing things to help the environment. Even for those of us with the best intentions, our jobs, our hectic bar hopping schedules and keeping up with our favorite reality TV shows can really get in the way of all those things we said we wanted to do to help the environment. We all want to save the earth, but most of us don’t know how to start (or don’t know how, period). A lot of us are so overwhelmed that when we hear the scary facts we feel like there’s nothing we can do. A lot of us want to get low energy lightbulbs, but simply don’t have the time to figure out where to get them, how much they cost or how much they’re really helping our environment. That’s where we step in…

How we’re going to save the world: We do the research on easy and effective ways we can all help the environment in our everyday life and then send out WEEKLY EMAILS/BLOG POSTS to our subscribers with a simple task of what they can do that particular week to help reduce their personal carbon imprint on the planet (to help reverse the effects of global warming). We’ll also include stats about exactly how these tasks (such as eating vegetarian once a week or switching to Green Energy at your house or apartment) actually positively impact our environment to inspire us to really do them.