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Do you have a large collection of “collectibles”?  I sure do, several different collections in fact.  Things just seem to accumulate over time. 

As part of cleaning out my house the past few months, I’ve decided to give up my doll collection.  When I was only 3 or 4 years old my great aunt left me her entire doll collection and over the years it was added to.  Now that I’m 28, and don’t appreciate it as much, I decided that it was time to get rid of all the dolls that I don’t truly love.  I went through all of them and pulled out the ones I truly love, less than 10 of the probably 60-100 dolls that I had.

Then I started pondering, what do I do with all those dolls that I don’t want.  I picked up the phone and called my brother to see if my niece would like to have them.  After all, it has family history and is only right that if someone in the family would like it, it should stay in the family. So I just boxed up the dolls to ship to my niece. 

What does any of this have to do with being green?  Well, the basic gist here is that just because you don’t want something, doesn’t mean no one wants it.  In this case, I took a collection of items (this could be anything you collect) that needed thinned out and see if there is someone else that you know that would like them.  People love to collect things, landfills don’t.

If you are doing some thorough spring cleaning like I am, really consider how you are getting rid of items.

I just finished paying the bills for the month and guess what!  There was no paper involved.  I do all online banking, so all my bills are emailed to me and I logon to a few websites to see my bank statements and authorize some transactions.  While I’ve been paying my bills online for awhile, I’ve recently gone through each bill I receive and make sure that I request to no longer receive paper bills but rather they are emailed to me.

There are tons of benefits of online banking but I’ll only focus on the environmental impacts here. The bills aren’t being printed out, shipped to me through the mail, no paper checks, forget driving to the post office, buying stamps, and no transportation of the all that paper back to the company I’m paying.  So it’s not just eliminating the paper but also the environmental impacts of transportation.

Do you receive and pay your bills online?

Today happens to be Earth Day, which is a great way to bring environmental concerns to the front of everyone’s minds.  So what special thing did I do for Earth Day?  Nothing.  At least not really.  I did greet most everyone by saying “Happy Earth Day”, much like you would for new years.  That probably made more people aware that wouldn’t normally.

The reason I didn’t do anything “special” was because I’m making a lot of little changes over a period of time and not one huge thing just today.  The earth needs a lot of help, and what I do in one day won’t make much of a difference, but what I do over the rest of my life will.  So today I used my own mug when I went to Caribou, I drove my hybrid to work, I went running outside (not on a treadmill), recycled my Gatorade bottle, and list goes on and on.  I’m going to continue to adopt new ways of helping our earth out (and blogging about).  Join in with me to make some more little changes to have a big impact.

There are tons of resources out there, especially today, about sustainability, resource consumption and the like, but I really wanted to point out a fantastic video called “The Story of Stuff“.  My attention was drawn to it by another blog, Presentation Zen, to point out how this person’s passion comes across in their presentation style (regardless of message).  While her message is very strong, she highlights how awful our resource consumption really is, especially in the United States.  I don’t necessarily agree with all of her arguments, but most are truly convincing and informative.  I’ll be thinking twice about going shopping just to go shopping.  Take 20 minutes, I highly recommend you watch this video. 

A funny side note, last night when I told my husband today was Earth Day, he said he would ride his bike to work.  No, he doesn’t have a bike since I donated the old bikes. The reason this is funny is because he works from home and doesn’t have a commute.

Do you put quotes in your email signatures?  I’ve never really been one to put anything other than my contact information in my signature, but I realize that it is only because there hasn’t been anything screams “you should send this to everyone you would ever send an email to”.  I’ve finally seen something that I truly want everyone to see when they receive an email from me.

Please consider the environment before printing this email.

Now I’m not sure if the person that originally sent the email (a friend of a friend), added this line herself or if it is part of a corporate signature.  Regardless, I’m stealing the idea and adding it to my signature. 

So much about making changes is more about education and being aware and not much at all to do with making huge sacrifices.  This definitely fits in with trying to help people be more aware about what they are doing.

Take a look at emails you receive from me in the future, it’ll be there!

A friend of the family, Bryan, emailed me the other day with a link to a blog post over at The Coffee House.  If you ever need inspiration or motivation on why you should be trying to manage the amount of waste you simply throw away, you definitely need to check out this post!  It really highlights how plastic waste really affects marine life, and most of that only exists as packaging of products.   And it isn’t just packaging, but also the plastic bags so many of us get at the grocery store to bring home the products we buy.  You could think of it as packaging of packaging of the products we buy.

The video talks about turning in those bags so they can be used in other products.  However, you could go another step further and use reusable bags.  I did a post about reusable bags before, but I don’t think we can say enough about it.  I said it before, if there is one thing you do to attempt green, this should be it.  The one thing that has helped me on my little trips and remembering to bring the bags into the store has been a small bag I bought at Target.  This bag zips up to be about the same size as a female’s wallet, easily fitting into a purse so I always have it with me.

Go watch the video that the Coffee House has posted, and any time you think that it just doesn’t matter, watch it again.  I’ve added it to my favorites and will likely be watching it a few more times.