Going Green Doesn't Mean Spending More Green

It's a given that when I'm not posting my own blogs, tweets and shares on Facebook, I'm reading others posts.  One of the recurring themes in the responses that are left by readers are that they wish it was easier to be green, not so expensive.  Well, I'm here to show you that you can actually save money whilst going green.  Let's start with my current pet peeve - over packaging.

So much of today's over packaging is in the name of convenience, single serve packages so you can grab-n-go.  I get it, I have a more-than-full-time job in addition to blogging, designing new products for my Etsy shop, tweeting and sharing to Facebook daily.  Never mind the house full of geriatric animals needing daily attention.  When it comes to errands and chores, I just want to get in and get it done.  So how tempting is something like these individual packs of carrots?

Yummy, healthy snacks in ready to go packaging!  Instead of focusing on the added waste that all of that individual packaging makes, I thought I'd might appeal to your wallets.  We all know how important it is to pinch pennies in today's economy.  So I'd like to challenge these packaged-for-convenience carrots with this:

The 4-pack of single serving size contains 12oz.of carrots and I paid $1.89 for them, $0.16/ounce.  The larger 16oz bag was only $1.69, a cost of only $0.11 /ounce.  Okay so it's only pennies, but consider all the other convenience foods that you purchase (sliced apples, chopped greens, etc.) and you can see pennies turn into dollars very quickly.

So what about the convenience part?  You know my cabinets are filled with plastic containers that used to have other food items in them!  When I come home from the grocery store I pull them out and start loading them up...before I put the groceries away.  After filling up my FIVE single serve containers I can even use a dry erase marker to label these leftover butter tubs.  Then stack 'em up in the fridge and viola, grab-n-go healthy snacks.

You can do the same with those pre-sliced apples.  Chop 'em up, coat with a small bit of lemon juice to keep them from turning brown and toss 'em into containers.  You can even put them into containers with some peanut butter (I saw this done somewhere with celery in large plastic peanut butter jars but for the life of me, I can't find the reference now!)

And greens, too, wash, chop and store before they hit the fridge.  How do you save money while going green?

My Current Pet Peeve: Over Packaging

If you've ever visited my Etsy shop, you can surely see that I use a wide variety of packaging material to make my paper beads.  But lately I've become increasingly frustrated by the absurdly wasteful packaging that plagues society.  Here is the proverbial straw that broke the camels back:

Do you see it...the actual item that I purchased?  Here's a closer look (not including the dime of course):

Holy cow!  And did you see the size of that receipt?  It looks like I bought the store out when, in fact, this micro disk is all that I purchased!  The ironic part of this story is that I went back to the store to purchase this disk when I realized it wasn't included with the hand scanner that I had just bought.  My intention behind the scanner purchase was to reduce waste.  Ha, joke's on me!

While I'm not for New Year's resolutions (they are only made to be broken after all), I have made it my goal to reduce the impact of overpackaging in my life this year!  You can bet I'll be writing a bit about it this year - I hope you'll join me in this adventure.