going a little bit green

My introduction to recycling came in the fall of 2000, when I moved to Portland, Maine. They encouraged us to use our recycling bins by requiring us to buy their special blue trash bags that cost about 5x what the other bags cost. Naturally, I tried to recycle as much as possible to keep from filling up my trash bag too often.

Having gotten into the habit of recycling and continuing to do so here in Mass, J and I started looking at small changes we could make to eliminate waste. We started by putting reusable grocery bags in our cars for the trips to the store. It feels good not to throw away all those plastic bags that used to fill our trash bin each week.

Earlier this year, I discovered a reusable sandwich bag on Amazon called the Wrap-N-Mat. I picked up a few for our household. Since J takes sandwiches to work and we make them for picnic lunches, we've gotten a lot of use out of them. They wipe clean and are machine washable. An added bonus is that they make a nice placemat too.

Then, a couple of months ago I was on Etsy, and I found that there's quite a number of people selling reusable snack bags, lunch bags even produce bags there among other reusable items. I picked up a few snack bags (large and small) and we took them out with us this past weekend:














These bags are da bomb. Like the sandwich wraps, they wipe down easily and are machine washable. They have a generous strip of velcro to keep things like our trail mix contained. And they come in lots of fun and interesting patterns too. We have a baseball one, a sushi one and one with a cute bug pattern.

So out of our whole picnic lunch, the only things we threw away were the fruit bar wrappers. While we may not be able to complete rid ourselves of plastic bags, we're using them a lot less now.

It really is easy being green!

Shelby