Renée Loux was kind enough to be a part of the Green Swap q+a last week. I wanted to share a little peek into her book as well. Renée's Easy Green Living is an honest, thorough book that makes green feel contagious — and something you want to catch. I've seen a lot of green books come my way, and this is a favorite. Renée spells out what terms mean that you hear floated around, she charts out what to avoid and what are green alternatives. I love the way she simply breaks it down, especially when you hear so much greenwashing + green marketing nowadays. Here are just a few things I took away from Renée Loux's guide to eco living.
cage free eggs: This term sounds so good, right? I had visions of chickens happily roaming + clucking around a wide open space of freedom. But it's a misleading label and all it really means is that the chickens aren't restrained in battery cages. Egg-laying hens can be "cage free" and still be crowded inside a structure their entire lives, with their wings, feet, and beaks clipped. The label to look for is Certified Humane Raised and Handled eggs. That label ensures that the chickens were treated humanely, and the strict standards are set by Humane Farm Animal Care. (Check out this eye-opening set of photos to see what battery cages really look like.)
And this video shares more on why this certification — and what we put on the table to eat — means so much.
free range beef, lamb, or pork: This label doesn't mean much because there is no regulation by the USDA as to the size or quality of the "range" for animals, so it's up to the producers to support their claims. Like Ben Jervey said in his q + a, it's best to talk to the producer to find out the truth of where your meat comes from. And the best way to do that is by buying local + through farmer's markets.
The biggest contributor to the solid waste we create is paper products! Paper products account for 33.9 percent of municipal solid waste. I've worked in a couple big corporate publishing offices, and I have to say that I've been guilty of wasteful printing myself. While we can all be more conscience of how we use and reuse our paper at home, I think there's a lot more that corporations can do to support reducing the paper waste, and it needs to start with management changing processes of how we work. At my last job, everything was done on paper: stories were edited on paper, products were chosen by printing out images for meetings, emails were printed and routed as memos, and weekly schedules were printed out for everyone. Look at just one process, multiply it by the number of staffers in an office, and multiply that by the number of weeks in a year, and you have a ton of paper used.
{photograph by bookgrl}
Thanks again to Renée Loux! Be sure to check out Easy Green Living for more simple green tips.
{green swap photograph by charlotte jenks lewis}
what's green swap? find out more here
