A Deeper Green

For those of you who know me, you probably know about my love for cheap clothes. My favorite places to find said cheap clothes are resale/thrift stores. The Find was one of my favorites in Orland Park! Sadly it is going out of business

Sooooo, in honor of the closing of my favorite thrift store I am writing an entry in hopes to help you find your own “The Find” and to help me find a new one too!

But first, the benefits of reused clothes.

- You share your clothing footprint with another person. Half the cotton, half the pesticides and maybe a third of the CO2.

- Most resale shops benefit a charity. The Find gave proceeds to a battered women and children’s shelter.

- If you are a shopper going to the thrift store is a crazy fun time, if not…well, maybe not so cool…

http://www.salvationarmyusa.org/usn/www_usn.nsf

- go to find a center on the left and type in the zipcode of your choice

http://www.goodwill.org/page/guest/about

- One the lower left under Find Your Local Goodwill

And if that fails you can always try http://www.thethriftshopper.com/ a fairly comprehensive directory of charity driven thrift stores all over the place.

I haven’t found a new favorite thrift store, but at goodwill last week I bought 6 shirts for $19. If that isn’t enough motivation for you I don’t know what is. I think I will find a new awesome resale shop shortly and so will you! Happy shopping kids!

And let me know if you need a browsing buddy:-)

but in the meantime look at this nifty site.

www.breathingearth.net

A friend fowarded this to me. A good collection of recycling information for those less known but still easily recyclable items you have lying about.

http://www.coopamerica.org/pubs/caq/articles/21Things.cfm

Another important thing I would like to note is that those of us who are recyclers should also make sure that we are buying recycled products and closing the loop!

and you should be too!!

My Pretty Blue Lunchbox!

I only show this to you because I know that taking lots of different reusable containers with when you’re on the go can suck. For $11 tupperware basically solves that problem.

I love mine, and if your looking for something to keep your lunches in and keep lunch garbage out of a landfill I think this is the way to go.

So today I get home from work and come home and find a literal mountain(!) of mail waiting for me on my kitchen chair. A quick look through the pile confirms to me that most of the mail is pesky pre-approved credit offers and other mail that I don’t want or care about. The rest of the mail is paper bills (booo). And all of it together amounts to a small forest of paper! While I recycle all of that paper, it still takes energy to process that paper and then recycle it. Cutting that out can only be a good thing!

In order to reduce the amount of paper waste I receive in the mail every day. I have taken the following steps, which hopefully will reduce my “paper to be recycled pile” by quite a bit.

First, I called Verizon and asked them to stop sending me a paper bill. It took a little bit of bouncing around from person to person, but they were very helpful and told me that now I will only receive my e-mail and text message bills from now on. And they keep records on-line of that anyways, so I will still have a record of my bills paid.

I am also hoping to call on all of my credit cards tomorrow. Since the only bill I currently receive from my cards is paper it may take longer to get things going with those guys. But hopefully the credit card people will be as helpful as Verizon. I’ll report back on this.

Also, try the following things!

To stop those pesky pre-approved credit offers, visit:

www.optoutprescreen.com

- There are two options on this website. You can opt-out for five years, or permanently. I personally chose only 5-years. We’ll see what happens at the end of the years.

- You do have to provide some sensitive information including your social security number. But I checked out the site, and I believe your information should be safe. The website has been featured on MSNBC and other new sources as the way to go to stop getting credit offers.

- Very quick and easy to fill out. Hopefully I will see a reduction soon, although I guess it can take a few months.

These pre-approved credit offers make up the bulk of my junk-mail.

For those of you who receive more than that I would offer you the following websites:

www.dmaconsumers.org/cgi/offmailing

- for general pesky mail

www.advo.com/consumersupport.html

- to get rid of unwanted catalogs

And lastly, if you receive random offers from your existing credit cards make sure to ask for those to stop when you call and get an electronic bill.