Little Things To Make A Difference.

People often feel that what they do doesn't really matter, but it does. Each person does matter and what they do effects everyone around them. I think more and more people are realizing this, and things are changing for the better. Here are some things I do to make a difference for the environment: I don’t do anything radical, expensive or complicated and they end up saving me money:

Drink Tap Water: Having drinking water delivered to you isn't really cost effective, causes polution by having to use gas to deliver the water to the door. I don't like the idea of having water sitting around in plastic bottles and everyone knows how wasteful and expensive botteled water is. Osmosis is better because you don’t have to have a driver deliver water to you and the water is filtered right at your home, however we do not have one of these systems. We drink tap water filtered in a Brita Water Pitcher. I love this because the water is always cold and ready to drink and tastes great and this really saves us money. When my family takes water with us we use only stainless steel water bottles that last forever and are very easy to clean.

Use Real Silverware: I invested $10 on an inexpensive set of stainless steel silverware and tray for my office. They supply everyone with plastic ware in our kitchen, but I feel it is wasteful to use so much that will just be thrown away or break. I put the tray in our kitchen for everyone to use. I was somewhat surprised that some people complained that they would have to wash the silverware off, so therefore they wouldn't even consider using it? Wow, I thought that was incredibly lazy and a poor excuse to keep being wasteful. In fact, no one even said thank you, but when I see employees using the silverware, I am secretly happy, because I know that is one less plastic fork in the garbage.

Use real dishes: Our office also supplies the kitchen with paper plates and bowls. Again, this is very wasteful, so I brought in my own set of dishes that I wasn't using for just my co-worker's to use. There are 6 of us in this office. 3 use the dishes and 3 continue to use the paper dishes because they "don't want to wash any dishes." I was again shocked at the lazyness of this, but at least there are 3 of us who don't use the paper plates anymore.

Use real coffee mugs: The next thing I thought of was all the styrofome cups in our office. Why do people drink their coffe in those when they could just as easily use a mug from home? They also have plenty of mugs in the cubbords of the kitchen, so why not use one of those? I always use my coffe mug or stainless steel coffee cup for beverages at work.