Green is groovy these days.  If you’re green you’re cool, so cool you’re hot.  The more green the better, and the more people who know how green you are, all the better still.
Green is good, waste is bad, waste is out, passé, so nineties, so eighties.  Green is now, with a little peace and love thrown in too boot.

So what about all the natural resources being used in the production of the promotional ‘I’m green’ items for sale, using untold quantities of inks and dyes, energy in production, packaging, and shipping?  What about that?  Is that green?  The bags that say, ‘I’m recyclable,’ or the other more forward ones that exclaiming ‘I’d like you more if you recycled?’  If green is trendy, and it is, what happens when the trendy aspect fades away, as trendy things always do?

On occasion, my girls make noise about how green I am, or how green I’m not.  I am, and I’m not, and I’m okay with that.  How am I green?  In a low key way I’d say.  I carry a big purse.  Mostly, if I’m buying something from somewhere, this gives me a chance to decline the bag from the store, thus my small step for the planet, and maybe the future even! 

How else?  Well, I’m always in a conundrum at the grocery store.  Paper or plastic?  How am I supposed to know?  Depending on who you talk to, either is bad, or better than the other.  So how do I make my green choice there?  Well, I’ve taken to asking for paper please, which I then give to my parents, who have long been using them for trash bags.  They don’t go out and buy plastic trash bags, those brown paper grocery bags have always worked fine for them, which comes under the green banner, as far as I’m concerned.

Thinking here.  Drumming fingers.  How else am I green?  Okay, here’s one.  I buy much less plastic water bottles than I used to,  that I then consumed multiple times a day.  I’ve purchased several quality, old school, though now trendy sigg bottles, that I can use into oblivion.  Green?  Check. 

Hand me downs are green.  Way green.  My girls wear their older sisters coats, hats and gloves, once they no longer fit older, bigger sis.  Check that off the green list.  And once those items no longer fit our youngest, well, there’s always younger nieces who love stuff from their big girl cousins, especially shoes and boots.  Wow.  I’m greener than I realized!

I go to estate sales regularly. Passionately.  I buy quality vintage, authentic vintage, not the faux, though well done kind, a la anthropologie style vintage, that new, though ‘vintage inspired’ housewares.  I’m talking the real deal old aprons, the heavy weighted juice glasses, the lovely and worn hooked throw rugs.  That’s green, and no one can tell me it’s not.

I have a library card, and I use it.  That’s pretty old school, but way on the cutting edge of green I say.  It’s reducing. And Re- using.  I don’t have the shirts, or bumper stickers, or bags, but thinking about it, I’m way more cutting edge than I realized, and I’m sure you are too!