Posts Tagged ‘home’

Make Your Own Cleaning Products

Breastcancer.org is proud to present content from The Family Dinner: Great Ways to Connect with Your Kids, One Meal at a Time by Laurie David and Kirstin Uhrenholdt. Laurie is a very special friend and champion of Breastcancer.org. The Family Dinner features ideas for meal planning as well as eco-conscious choices you can make every day. We’re pleased to share the following contribution to the …

Greener Ways to Keep Bugs at Bay

Here in the Northeast United States, we’re in the thick of summer, which means all sorts of creepy, crawly, flying things are lurking outside our house waiting to bite me. Or they’re trying to get inside the house so they can crawl on me or bite me. Either way, I know I’m the intended target. While other people are leisurely sipping ice tea at backyard …

Ditching Disposable Dishes for Good

Summer, for me, means picnics on the beach, barbecues poolside, lunch on a hike, and late dinners on my back porch. Anything to get outside and enjoy the warmth and fresh air. The only downside — besides sometimes the mosquitoes — is that this often means giving up metal silverware, ceramic plates, and real glasses for their disposable substitutes: plastic utensils and cups, as well …

Keeping Medicine Out of the Water

Researchers have found traces of medicines, from both people and animals, in surface water and drinking water supplies.

The medicines can get in the water supply in many ways. Old medicine is often flushed down toilets (for years we were told to do this; now we know it’s not a good idea). A second source is our own bodies: People who take medicines end up …

Back to the Tap (Water)

Many doctors recommend drinking 8 glasses of fluids a day to keep your systems flowing and going. Water is a much healthier zero-calorie beverage than soda, juice, or energy drinks. Clean drinking water straight from the tap was a great technological advance, and bottled water is an important backup for emergencies. In the last two decades though, bottled water sales skyrocketed as people turned away …

Plastics: Choose What to Use

Plastic containers are incredibly convenient and nearly impossible to give up entirely. But  the chemicals in plastics can get into our food and drinks and affect our health and our environment. So, it makes sense to think about how to cut back on using plastic and find other kinds of containers. It also makes sense to think about the types of plastic you use, especially …

Let Your Light Shine, Except at Night

We’ve become a 24-hour culture. It used to be that the only place to find a restaurant or hardware store open at 3 a.m. was New York City. Today, even the smallest communities have a 24-hour convenience store or burger joint. Our mobile phones buzz and blink with new emails and texts at all hours. Televisions and computer screens light up our rooms most of …