It's Pretty Easy Being Green

Since we've moved to the UK we've noticed that their is a pretty strong push to conserve energy and to follow the three R's - reduce, reuse and recycle. So we have decided to take on some new habits that hopefully we can have a good influence on our kids.

Reuse - All the grocery stores offer their own reusable bags and often give you credit for bringing in your own bags. I picked up the Small Green Bag from Tesco the other day. I now keep a few other plastic bags inside and bring them along now when I go grocery shopping. To tell you the truth it's a lot easier using used bags to pack your own groceries than mess with trying to open up new bags...especially when you've got a 15 month old trying to climb out of the trolley these days.

Recycle - Also we do a lot of recycling...half of our rubbish actually gets thrown in our recycle bin. We have three large bins out back...one for garbage, one for recycling and one for yard waste. We had to start putting the recycling bin up off the ground once Addie started walking because she would play with the pop cans...I have horrible fears of her cutting her fingers. You've also heard me talk about some of our trips to the local waste facility...there are tons of huge containers that are marked for separating out your junk so that it can be recycled accordingly. You park your car and start chucking things in the right bin...pretty cool, but watch out for bees...ask Addie!

Reduce - Most recently we've decided to help reduce the amount of rubbish we see around us. We've started taking a grocery sack with us as we go on family walks and pick up rubbish along the side of the road. Yesterday we picked up a whole sack full. It's seems like there are some places in the UK that there isn't much concern over littering so we thought we'd at least clean up our little part of the world. We met a new neighbor while doing this and he actually thanked us. We felt pretty good about representing some values we picked up in the US.

Also we're trying to reduce the amount of fuel we use...when we came to the UK we bought diesel vehicles because of the fuel economy. The price of diesel these days in the UK is now 1.18 GBP per liter (used to be 96 pence when we moved here). There are 3.85 liters to a US gallon so that equates to about $8.90US/gallon of fuel....so all of you in the US complaining about $4.15 diesel...stop it!!! We both get about 35 miles/US gallon and with Kevin being so much closer to work he only fills his tank once every three weeks...lots better than filling that monster 4 door pickup truck we used to own.