GREEN TUESDAY

For the past year or so, I have decided that I want to join the 'go green' bandwagon. When I first began, I tried to do everything 'green'. I started collecting cans, newspaper, and plastics to recycle. I stopped using my air conditioning in my car and because running the water while brushing your teeth isn't environmentally friendly, I started not brushing my teeth. Needless to say, my "attempts" at being a radical environmentalist ended very shortly. In fact, at one point I even burnt my collected plastics and newspapers in the barrel in my back yard... which by the way is actually worse for the environment than throwing them away.

I have decided that I MAY start to dedicate Tuesday's blog as Green Tuesday. You may not give a rip about the environment and thus stop reading my blog forever now because it is our world to do what we want with it, and I don't have the time to mess with it OR you may say that Going Green is interesting but "I will one day start doing that stuff" OR you may think "WOW... what an awesome, cool way to take care of a great thing that God has given us, Brian you are probably one of the smartest people I have ever met, I think this is the greatest thing I have ever read!"

If you are like me... you probably would agree that 'going green' is something you wish you could do to some extent, but you really don't have the time to worry about it, nor is it at the top of the list of concerns you have about the world. That is how I feel. But I still do feel that it is important to take care of our world because we are supposed to, and I really do want to cut out $ that I am WASTING, when I could be using that to open up my financial resources toward some other direction. In saying that here is my first "tip" and maybe only post on GREEN TUESDAY...

So more recently I have tried a different approach than the cold turkey approach. I have now tried to start small. One thing that has worked pretty well for me have been the following:

1. Because we don't really trust our well water for drinking daily at our house, we were using individual store bought bottled water.

FACT: it takes 1.5 million barrels of oil to make the bottles of American's bottled water. If this oil were turned to gasoline, the amount of oil would fuel 500,000 station wagons for coast-to-coast road trips (the green book: the Everyday Guide to Saving the Planet One Simple Step at a Time, Rogers and Kostigen 2007).

We now have a water dispenser, for our drinking water, that uses 5 gallon recycleable water jugs. Not only has this eliminated our use of plastic water bottles, but we have saved money as well. Buying plastic water bottles, by the double dozen can get expensive... what a waste of my financial resources...If I don't want to waste my life, I surely don't want to waste my resources.