Planetmyheart | A Family’s Journey Begins

Join us on our journey as we go green one step at a time. When you purchase items through our site, you will not only help your family go green, but you will also help the Monterey Bay Aquarium in sustaining our oceans because 20% of the proceeds will be donated to the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

A Family’s Journey Begins

Written by Lori

My son became a member of the Student Oceanography Club at the Monterey Bay Aquarium back in September of 2008. I have to say, prior to my son joining the club, our family was not at all concerned about the environment and recycling. Sure, we recycled some. We bought bottled water and recycled the plastic bottles. We also recycled our soda cans and some boxes. That was pretty much it. We were too busy with our daily routine to be bothered by such concerns.

As soon as he started attending the club meetings, he received some projects to do at home that focus on your eco-footprint. Basically, you choose an area of your eco-footprint that you wish to work on improving. There are 4 main areas: energy, gas, food and trash (reducing trash). The projects have sure been an eye opener for me and my son since we as a family didn’t really do anything prior to this other than minimally recycling.

The areas we chose to improve in are food and producing less trash. The first set of changes we made were:

  1. Make trashless lunches for school. My son started doing this on his own. I didn’t really have any storage containers, so I had to run down to the dollar store and buy some.
  2. We try to not buy items that are pre-portioned. I used to buy my son Gushers and Gogurts all the time for his lunch. No more. I buy yogurt out of the large container and my son pours that into a storage container.
  3. No more ziploc baggies. We have now gone through all our ziploc baggies and have not purchased any new ones. This has been a little bit of a discomfort but we’re learning to do without them.
  4. No more napkins. We are now using cloth napkins. I do miss having napkins around sometimes. But so far we haven’t bought any. They’re expensive too!
  5. We also started buying our produce at the Farmers Market rather than the grocery store.
  6. I try to look at the ingredients now and if there are too many items on the ingredients list, then I don’t buy the item. The more items listed means the more processing time it takes to make the item. As a result, we’re eating healthier too.

Please tell me which areas you are working on and what you’ve done so far on your journey of going green.

You can check out our blog that outlines our progress. This site is really meant to create a community of people all over the world who are sharing our journey.

Thanks for visiting, I hope you enjoy your stay.

You can also contact me by the means listed in the About page.