Save 100,000,000 Trees this Year

I bet you hate junk mail as much as I do. All of those 'checks' for $10,000, the credit card offers, the unbelievable offers from some direct marketer somewhere. Really, when was the last time you took that piece of junk mail, read it, and then purchased whatever was on it?



Unwanted Credit Card Offers: www.OptOutPrescreen.com

Opt out of the Direct Marketing Assoc: www.DMAchoice.org/mps

Unwanted Catalogs: www.CatalogChoice.org


If you decide to sign up for one of these services, you will save paper which saves trees! By some estimates more then One Hundred Million trees are turned into paper every year just to send us junk mail.

Co-op Gains Favor

Today my family joined the East End Co-op in Pittsburgh, PA. My wife, kids and I were out exploring the city this morning and came across the Co-op. The store does not require that you be a member (which we weren't), but as we were walking around we noticed to our surprise that the prices for the organic food was very comparable to the pricing at the normal stores for non-organic food.

The membership is $100 which actually buys you 1 share of the Co-op. So we are co-owners with the other members which entitles us voting rights. Maybe more importantly, we get a 2% discount on purchases made in the store every day....but today happened to be a Member Appreciation Day and we received 10% off of our purchases. These Member Appreciation Days appear to happen two times a month on Sundays. What luck, so today we saved over $10 our first day of being a member!

Additionally, if we decide we no longer want to be members or move out of the area the membership price is fully refundable!

Some other cool points of membership:

• 2% discount on all daily purchases
• 10% discount on Member Appreciation Day purchases
• 20% discount on uncut case purchases
• Check writing privileges for up to $20 over purchase amount
• Access to EEFC Federal Credit Union
• Voting privileges in Co-op elections
• The opportunity to run for the EEFC Board of Directors
• The opportunity to serve on board committees
• The Co-operator, EEFC's newsletter, mailed monthly to your home
• Reduced advertising rates in The Co-operator
• The opportunity to volunteer and earn an additional discount

So, our first day eating organic...what did we buy? Here is our list:

• Organic Garlic
• Organic White Corn Chips, no salt
• Smooshed Fruit - Organic Raspberry
• Artichoke Fettuccine - 8oz
• Organic Grape Tomato's - 1 pint
• Red Drason (cheese)
• Organic Avocados (3)
• Parsley Leaf Flakes
• Bucheron
• Organic Blue Corn Chips
• Organic Roma Tomato's
• Bread (very, very, very good!)
• Organic Pears
• More Bread
• Apple Cider
• Creme Vanilla Soda
• Tea While Vanilla Apricot
• Organic Cucumbers
• Tea Bottle Organic Lemon

How much do you think the total bill was for all of this food? $92.03 BEFORE our discount. We ended up saving $9.21 for a grand total of $83.13. Let's see you go to your local market and get the same amount for less.

We are really looking forward to making it down to the Co-op at least 2x's per month on Customer Appreciation Days. The store is a solid 30 minutes from our house, so it is not exactly close to where we live, but it is well worth the trip.

Going 'Clean and Green'

My wife found a wonderful law in Pennsylvania (Green and Clean Act) which allows anyone with 10 contiguous acres to receive a tax break if the land owner promises not to develop the land. The idea is to have individual land owners volunteer their land for preservation and be rewarded by receiving a tax break with the ultimate goal of slowing urban sprawl.

There are various designations you can apply for, but we have chosen to apply for the Agricultural Reserve.

Definition of Agricultural reserve:
Land that is in agricultural reserve is eligible for preferential assessment under the act if the land is comprised of 10 or more contiguous acres (including any farmstead land and any woodlot).

We just recently completed and sent in our application to the County. It appears our next step is a new county assessment after which we will find out our new (hopefully lower) tax rate which will take affect in 2008.

As long as you do not develop the land, it appears this is a wonderful deal. Since seeing into the future can be very hard the government does allow you to break the contract...but with a penalty. Essentially, if in 5 years you decide to split the land into various smaller segments, you will loose the tax incentive (because you are now developing the land) and have to pay any tax savings for the past 6 years along with a 6% simple interest fee. So unless you plan on keeping the land as is for more then 10 years, you really do not make out on this deal because of the interest penalty.

If you have gone Clean and Green or had considered it, your feedback would be very welcome. I want to make sure I have not missed some sort of 'gotcha' before officially going Clean and Green.

More updates once we know more!

Save the Honey Bee - Save the Ice Cream!

Save the Honey Bee - Save the Ice Cream!

Ok...just a little play on a TV show I got into a year or two ago called Heros. Their tag line was "Save the cheerleader, Save the world".

My tag line is much, much more real. Do you like Ice Cream? Well then, you better start thinking about how we are going to save the Honey Bee population.



I was searching things online and came across Help The Honey Bees website which was put together by the Haagen Dazs ice cream people. The website is a ton of fun and has a lot of various factoids about how important the Honey Bee is to the pollination process of fruit. (Which by the way is used in many flavors of ice cream!)

At any rate, I have bee-gun (man, there are so many plays on words with honey bees!) exploring ways I can help and have put together a little list for you to consider:

1. Stop using pesticides on your lawn - I know you hate dandelions and those little white clovers. Well, the fact of the matter is that honey bees need those flowers to live. Kill those flowers and you will kill the bees. Kill the bees and you ruin ice cream. Do you want to be an ice cream killer?
2. Get a Beehive - Do you know that even in the city you can have a beehive? There are beehives all through NYC, Paris, etc. They are everywhere. In fact, having a beehive in the city is a bit easier then if you had a spread of land in the sticks. In the city you do not have to worry about bears and the like getting into your stash. Plush honey makes a great gift. You will not get rich owing a beehive, but you will have a great gift to give you and you will be doing your part to save ice cream!
3. Don't Kill Them - OK, sounds like another pesticide thing, but here I am really talking about hiring an exterminator to get rid of a beehive near your house. There is a much better alternative! You can call the Back Yard Beekeeping Association and they can get one of their members to come out and get your bees. This is actually a win-win. You get rid of bees that you do not want and the beekeeper gets a new hive for free!
4. Educate Others - Most of us love ice cream...so tell someone you know how important honey bees are to this tasty treat.

Earth Hour - March 29th @ 8PM - Will you join me?

I am going to give this conservation thing a shot on by simply turning my lights off for 1 hour on March 29, 2008 @ 8PM. To take it to a new level, I will actually flip my breaker off to my entire house.

Of course, this doesn't do much without the help of 150,000+ others who have joined together across the world in what is being called Earth Hour.

Earth Hour started in 2007 with our friends Down Under. It seems to be a really big thing down there as over 2.2 million people turned off their lights for one hour. WOW! That is really impressive to me. (Of course, you never real know if they did it of their own good will...or did their government kill the switch on everyone?!!)

Either way it seems like a cool thing to do and is so easy. I mean...who couldn't live without lights for an hour? (I say that now...but we shall see what really happens that night!)

Some cool links:
Sign Up Here
Earth Hour main page
Very Cool Map of Support
FAQs


SIGN UP HERE - on my personal page so that I can track the impact of this blog! More importantly, when you sign up you will also be able to track your own impact.

Plastic Bags Everywhere

I am sure this is not the type of advertisement Walgreens was thinking of when it gave this plastic bag to a customer. I found this wonderful example at http://www.bagsintrees.com/ which chronicles these wonderful plastic pieces of 'art' in Baltimore, MD. One of my favorite things about their site is that they have integrated their find with Google Maps so that you can see where they found the bag. I love this type of humor. They should have an ongoing map that shows you all of the spots on one map.

Digging a little bit deeper, it is simply amazing the amount of plastic bags that are used and thrown away every year. Here are a few stats that were compiled by http://www.reusablebags.com/: (you can find more here.)

• According to The Wall Street Journal, the U.S. goes through 100 billion plastic shopping bags annually. (Estimated cost to retailers is $4 billion)
• Plastic bags don’t biodegrade, they photodegrade—breaking down into smaller and smaller toxic bits contaminating soil and waterways and entering the food web when animals accidentally ingest.
• In 2001, Ireland consumed 1.2 billion plastic bags, or 316 per person. An extremely successful plastic bag consumption tax, or PlasTax, introduced in 2002 reduced consumption by 90%. Approximately 4,755,060 of oil have been saved due to this reduced production. Governments around the world are considering implementing similar measures.

So what's the answer to the plastic bag problem? Ireland seems to have done pretty good. I just wonder if the consumption mentality of Americans would produce the same sort of result. My fear is that we would just pay the extra 15 cents thus taxing ourselves. Retailers are already counting the cost of those plastic bags into their cost of product. It is not like they are giving it to us for free.

I agree that if a change is going to be made, it needs to be consumer focused since the stores loose control of the bags once they leave the store. You need a reason for the consumer to want to change.

Personally I can't see myself carrying around a bunch of hemp or bamboo bags. But maybe I shouldn't slam it until I have tried it....

Anyone out there use bags like you can find on http://www.reusablebags.com/?