Great Green Idea: Green Products: 10 Ways to be Friendlier to Mother Earth

10 Ways to be Friendlier to Mother Earth

Be nice to your mother, and the earth she inhabits. Here are 10 suggestions that will help get our planet as healthy as we can. A lot of them have the added benefit of saving money and eliminating waste.

1. Don't litter: No one likes to look at old McDonald's containers on the side of the road. Come on! There are trash bins everywhere. Wait until you find one to chuck your trash.

2. Don't waste water. You may think there's more water than we could possibly use, but that is no longer true. Sloppy agricultural and manufacturing practices have squandered this precious resource. Polluting it was easy. Cleaning it up will take years. At this rate, there simply won't be enough to go around.

3. Use cloth instead of paper. You can use cloth towels, diapers and rags over and over again. They can be washed and recycled for years before they wear out and wind up in a landfill.

4. Use cloth bags. The initial outlay may cost a little, but think of the savings in clean air, petroleum, and other resources if the store doesn't have to use as many of the disposable kind.

5. Paper plates, cups and napkins don't make your food taste better, and they certainly aren't any more attractive then the reusable kind. However, to make them does take trees, water, bleach and dyes that don't do the earth any favors. They take a lot of energy to produce as well. When they are used just once, they end up in the garbage dump with those equally wasteful plastic forks and spoons.

6. Don't pitch containers. You don't need to hoard them, but you may be able to recycle some of them yourself. Glass bottles and tin cans do have potential as storage containers. Even if you don't need them, ask your community government about recycling programs. If they have one, please participate.

7. Don't throw out your leftover food. Compost it and use it to nourish next year's garden. That's recycling at a very basic level.

8. Don't dump your used oil down that handy drain in your garage floor. It goes right into the sewer system, and then we all have to drink it. Yuck. Do you really want to water your tomatoes with last year's Quaker State?

9. Don't burn your trash. It stinks to high heaven, and the smoke it causes is not good for you or anyone else to breathe.

10. Those grass clippings and fallen leaves are great mulch. They'll do your garden a lot better than they will the landfill. Besides, they're a lot cheaper then the stuff you buy at the store.