Shopping Green For Christmas

Christmas 022

Will you be shopping "green" for Christmas? Let´s take a close look at this and see if we can all do our part. By doing so we can help our community and help our environment.

One aspect of shopping green that often gets overlooked is buying local. Buying local has several different meanings, all of which will have a positive effect on your community.

Farmers markets are a good example of buying local, where most of the produce is grown locally. Consider how much of your holiday cooking can be done with locally grown food and then find places that sell them. Small local markets will usually sell a lot of locally grown products. Some major chain stores have a locally grown section. Locally grown will usually mean fresher, and possibly even organic, but anyway you look at it keeping the money at home is better than sending off to other parts of the country.

Buying local also means shopping at stores where the owners are your neighbors. If a store is over 50% owned by people living in your community there is a very good chance your money will stay at home, helping to improve the quality of life for your family and friends.

Another qualification for a local shop is where their products come from. When a store buys it´s raw materials locally, again, your money is staying at home. An example of this is a restaurant that buys the majority of it´s food from local farms and ranches.

Consider also shopping for homemade, or second hand, items from local mom and pop shops. You may be amazed at the wonderful gift ideas available in these little local stores. A Christmas gift does not have to come from Wal-Mart or Sears to be treasured and enjoyed by someone you care about.

When leaving the local shopping scene for the bigger chain stores be on the lookout for excessive packaging. A good example of excessive packaging would be the boxes used to hold music CD´s when they first came out. The music industry "got it" and did away with all the waist. Now, consider the CD when making your other purchases. If they product could be presented with a fraction of the packaging maybe you could leave them on the shelf and buy something else.

When the shopping is done, and Christmas is over, please continue on in your green ways. Recycle all of that plastic, paper and cardboard. If you have a recycle container, great. If not maybe you could look into community recycle bins, hopefully your community has a few of them. If you normally burn your trash, consider your local air quality, and decide if this is really the right thing to do. In a big city the answer would probably be no.

Christmas cooking creates a lot of great compost material. If you don´t compost this may be the perfect time to start. Or it might be the perfect time to get to know your neighbors a little better. Find someone that does compost and add your scrap to their pile. That´s a win-win for your neighbor and the environment. And you might get rewarded with a basket of fresh fruit next summer.

Enjoy the holidays and remember to keep it green.

Dennis Gourley owns Save Money With Alternative Energy and is just another person concerned about the planet we are leaving for our kids.