Early spring cleaning/Clothing donations

I know, I've been gone awhile. Finishing up Christmas, then doing what is becoming a tradition for me - closet cleaning. My kids end up getting a lot of clothes for Christmas, so after the holidays I go through each closet and pull out the old/outgrown/never worn stuff to either hand down or give to friends or family, and then give what's left to charity.

If you're interested in going green by recycling your unused clothing, look up local charities or use the following links to locate a place for your donations.

Find a Goodwill location
Donate Shoes to Soles4Souls

Toasting the New Year

These days there is a green alternative for practically everything. You can even find an organic champagne to bring in the New Year. There are actually several eco-friendly champagne and wine choices.

• Organic Champagne offers a wide variety of wines, beer, liqueurs, and, of course, champagne. You can narrow your search further by choosing vegetarian, vegan, fair trade, and biodynamic.


• The Organic Wine Company sells eco-friendly products from certified organically grown wine grapes, including vegan and biodynamic.


• K & L Wine Merchants includes a selection of earth friendly champagnes. Use their search to look up biodynamic or vegetarian.

Raise your glasses to the new year in full green style!

Green Web Hosting

Yes, I skipped a day again. Christmas is a bad time to try to post daily, so many things to do and think about. I actually saw this ad on Facebook and followed the link, and was pretty impressed overall.

Sustainable Websites offers green web hosting at an affordable price, with a number of extra features. The site states that they offset 100% of their energy usage with certified wind power. Highlights of the $10/month Basic package include:

• 1 GB disk space


• 10 GB bandwidth per month


• Unlimited email accounts, subdomains/parked/addon domains, and MySQL databases


• Content management and advanced shopping cart software

And other useful things like search engine submit, chatrooms, and discussion boards. The Small Business and Professional packages are similar, just with larger disk space and bandwidth. If I ever get around to having a website ready to host, I'll definitely keep this company in mind.

Green Your Gift-Wrapping

Get creative with your gift wrapping this year to help save money and the planet. If you already save gift boxes and bags to reuse, that's great. Someday I'll be that organized. So, for the rest of us, here are some alternatives to buying more wrapping paper.

• Newspaper - Grab one (or more) Sunday newspapers and start wrapping. Try matching different sections to either the present or the person


• Any old boxes, and I mean any. Empty cereal boxes, checkbook boxes, juice pack boxes (like Capri Sun, Hawaiian Punch), baking soda, computer part boxes (sound/video cards, etc), whatever you have on hand


• T-shirts - especially cute for the inevitable socks and underwear gifts

Or anything else that occurs to you. Depending on how creative your wrapping gets, the packaging may end up being talked about more that the gift itself. But since the whole idea behind Christmas is exchanging gifts and spending time with loved ones, that's all right.

How Green is Your Computer?

If you're looking to upgrade or replace your computer and want to make sure to get an environmentally conscious one, or you're just curious about how your current pc rates on the green scale, take a look at GreenPeace's report on the 18 top producers of computers, mobile phones, TVs, and game consoles. Currently Nokia is on top due to their voluntary take-back program, and Nintendo is at the bottom. Greenpeace ranks the companies based on their policies regarding toxic chemicals, recycling, and climate change. Specifically, the group looks at how each company is working to eliminate hazardous substances in their products, taking back and recycling their products once they become obsolete, and reducing the climate impacts of their operations and products. The rankings are updated every 3 months, with the latest version published in late November.

Building Green - Modern Green Living Home Directory

All right, this post isn't exactly about saving money. Actually, for me it was more dreaming about the future. But I found so much interesting stuff I just had to share.

Moderngreenliving.com provides resources for designing, building, finding, remodeling, and furnishing a green home. You can search for green architects, contractors, realtors, and more. Or find a green apartment or condominium all over the US and Canada.

Or you can just do what I did for about an hour, browse the furnishings. There is so much cool stuff out there, and each product lists how they're green, like using recycled materials or responsibly harvested wood.

Sigh. This site just shows how beautiful green living can be.

Use Your Beauty Routine to Go Green

Oops! I didn't get a chance to post yesterday! This is the first chance I've had to be at my computer, so I'll double up today. My first post (technically yesterday's) has to do with saving money/going green with your daily bathroom routine by getting rid products you don't necessarily need to use. This means you won't need to buy them anymore, therefore eliminating packaging that would probably end up in landfills and, obviously, saving you money.

Try using your sunscreen as your moisturizer too. For normal skin, it should be sufficient. Combination skin may need a little moisturizer, but at least you won't be going through it as fast.

Unless your skin is very, very oily, you don't need astringent or toner. Cleansing and rinsing well is enough. If you feel you must use an astringent, pick up some cheap Witch Hazel and put a little on a cotton ball to wipe across your face.

Explore some other ideas too, like makeup that can be used on eyes and cheeks, and making your own scrubs.