Living Green by Reusing Rather than Recycling, Making My Own Products & Growing My Own Foods

Green lifestyles have exploded in popularity in the last few years, every other company coming out with new "green" products and services. There can be more to living green than just buying green though. In fact, I'd say that unusual ways of living green are the most effective and bring about the most change for good. Consider three of the most popular ways to live green; recycling, buying green products, and buying organic foods. The alternatives to these are some of the most unusual ways that I'm living green; reusing, making my own products, and growing my own foods.

Reuse Instead of Recycle

Recycle is one of the most basic and standard ways of living green, but a slightly more unusual way to live green is reusing waste. Reuse makes strong positive change in a number of ways. It will keep waste from landfills. It will save the considerable energy needed for transport and recycling. Reusing things will also allows me to avoid spending on newly produced products, saving the transportation energy and production energy and resources of those products. If you visit my AC author page, you'll find a whole series of articles that I've been writing offering ideas for many ways of reusing things, from food scraps to peanut butter jars, to old sheets.

Make Instead of Buy

Learn to make your own products, instead of buying them. I am referring to anything from homemade foods to homemade cleaners. Consider the fact that even the greenest cleaning product (providing the "green" on the label isn't just a marketing ploy) that truly uses safe, natural, sustainable resources, has still been produced on a large scale, is shipped to the store on fossil fuel reliant trucks, and is packaged in disposable packaging. By making my own cleaning products, air fresheners, clothes, candles, laundry detergent etc, I am assured that the ingredients are safe, that I can reuse my own glass bottles, etc time and again, and that I've sourced my supplies from as locally as possible.

Many times, making things instead of buying them also allows me the opportunity to reuse discarded items as well. When I can make pajamas out of sheets from the thrift store, or I remake clothes from a resale situation, I'm saving resources from being wasted, and I'm not supporting unfair or dangerous working conditions that can often be present in the textile industry. Buying a brand new fair trade organic cotton t-shirt may be a conventional way of living green, but to my way of thinking, reusing a discarded t-shirt to save it from being wasted in a landfill, dyeing it myself with safe dyes, perhaps even natural dyes grown in the garden, and doing the sewing myself to give it new life is a more effective, unusual way to live green.

Grow Your Own

Gardening is becoming more mainstream, but it can still be an unusual way to live green. I enjoy gardening, not just vegetables, but herbs as well. Growing my own herbs has been a great way to make supplies for my homemade cleaning products. Lavender and mint are antiseptic and when made into tinctures can be used to scent surface cleaners and room sprays. I also like to spray them around the trash cans to deter ants.

Another green thing that I really enjoy is raising my own hens. I really like knowing that the eggs that I eat and use in baked goods come from chickens that are well cared for and get plenty of exercise, grass to forage, and sunshine. This is better for the environment because their waste is an asset instead of a pollutant when they are not overcrowded.

In the end, I find the unusual ways that I live green to be fulfilling and enriching. I find great enjoyment and satisfaction in these activities, and would encourage you to go beyond buying green products and recycling to trying some new skills that will also benefit the environment.