Buy Green

Once you realize that the Earth is in trouble because of what man has done to it, you realize there are tons of things you can do to start to reduce our impact, or carbon footprint. They can be things as small as cutting your shower a little shorter each day, to as large and putting solar panels on your roof. One area where we can all do a lot more is to start shopping green.



Environmentally Products

 Yes, you should plan your shopping trips so that they are close to your house and get everything you need while you are there so you can cut down on burning gas driving to and from the store. But when when i say being more green in shopping I am really talking about the products that you choose to buy. If you buy green products it means that those products are better for the environment in some way then competing products for sale. This can be because the technology of the product is better and the energy you consume while using the product will be less. This can also mean that the environmental impact of the manufacturing process to create that product was less then it's competitors. Ideally you'd like to find products that do both.

Like anything in life, buyer beware! Keep in mind that just because a product you are looking at has "green products company", "environmental products", or some other phrase talking about how much better it is for the environment, this just means they spend to get that printed on the label. You would hope that if a company decides to call it an eco product, that it would indeed be "green". The trick is that green is in the eye of the beholder. There isn't really any low dealing with calling something green, the way there is about calling a food item "low fat". Basically as long as the company can make an argument (true or not) that their product is green then it's OK to label it as such. Obviously companies know they can charge more for a green product so there is a large incentive to call their items green, irregardless of what it is doing to the environment. To really know for sure you really have to do the research.

Of course it would be impossible to background check companies on every little product you buy in your life. But on big purchases it would be do-able. And for that matter most of the items you buy in a grocery store are all made by just a handful of companies. You might not be able to research all the individual products but you could look up the track record of the major corporations that make most of the items you are buying. That way you would know just because something claims to be one of the new green products, it may or may not really be truly green!

PS - I'll be putting together a post in the future to talk about what actually makes products environmental, so keep an eye out!