10 Healthy Green Home Ideas

1. Choose only organic body care products for your bath.

2. Clean green - make your own cleaners from items in your pantry.

3. Choose soy candles instead of petroleum based ones.

4. Take your shoes off at the front door, to limit the toxins tracked throughout your house.

5. Choose organic bed linens for a better night's rest.

6. Improve the air quality in your home with houseplants.

7. Shop your local farmers market for fresh fruits & veggies.

8. Replace paper napkins with cloth napkins.

9. Unplug appliances and electronics when not in use to avoid phantom energy use.

10. Paint your walls with no-VOC paints to avoid your exposure to toxic chemicals.

10 Eye Opening Facts

1. If every American gave up one paper napkin a day we'd save a billion pounds of paper from going to landfills each year.

2. If you turn the water off while brushing your teeth, you’d save about 5 gallons each day, or 1825 gallons each year.

3. At beach cleanups, cigarette butts are the most common form of trash found, usually one in every five items collected is a cigarette butt.

4. If everyone in the US went vegetarian just for one day, the U.S. would save 100 billion gallons of water, 70 million gallons of gas and 3 million acres of land. We would also eliminate greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 1.2 million tons of CO2.

5. The US discards 60 million water bottles a day, most are not recycled.

6. One of the largest collections of garbage is in the Pacific Ocean - the Eastern Garbage Patch floats between Hawaii and California and scientists estimate its size as two times bigger than Texas.

7. Human development and expansion is causing species to become extinct at 1,000 times the natural rate.

8. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, 75 percent of the electric power consumed in the average home comes from appliances like VCRs, televisions, stereos, computers, and kitchen appliances when they are turned off but plugged into the wall.

9. Babies are born with more than 200 man-made industrial chemicals in their blood.

10. Currently our planet uses well over 500,000,000,000 (that's 500 billion) plastic bags annually, or almost 1 million per minute.

What to buy organic ...

The Environmental Working Group has composed 2 lists to help you decide which produce is worth the extra money to purchase organic - The Dirty Dozen - the 12 foods with the most pesticide residue & The Clean Fifteen - the 15 foods with the lowest levels of pesticide residue. If you can't afford to buy everything organic, be sure at least to purchase organics for the foods that appear on the Dirty Dozen List.

The Dirty Dozen:

1. peaches
2. apples
3. bell peppers
4. celery
5. nectarines
6. strawberries
7. cherries
8. kale
9. lettuce
10. imported grapes
11. carrots
12. pears

The Clean Fifteen:

1. onions
2. avocados
3. corn
4. pineapples
5. mangoes
6. asparagus
7. sweet peas
8. kiwi
9. cabbages
10. eggplants
11. papayas
12. watermelons
13. broccoli
14. tomatoes
15. sweet potatoes

Free Rice - Take 2

I first wrote about Free Rice 2 years ago, at that time the site had donated 14,165,837,150 grains of rice to the United Nations. Since then the site has grown dramatically and has now donated over 73 billion grains! The site has expanded its offerings beyond just vocabulary words to include famous paintings, foreign languages, grammar, math, world geography, and chemical symbols. For each correct answer the site donates 10 grains of rice through the United Nations World Food Program to help end world hunger. It's a win-win situation - you challenge yourself to improve your knowledge and food goes to those in need!