You know how there are some things that you just can’t imagine living without? Maybe it’s an appliance, or your phone, or a favorite food? I was thinking about a few of these things today and I thought it would be fun to list some of my favorites – in no particular order. I would love to have you join in and provide your favorites – but since my blog gets way too much spam if I open it up for comments, I think I’m going to suggest that you add your favorites on Facebook (www.facebook.com/GardenGirlSkinCare). If you aren’t already a fan (or whatever they call it now) – please do click on the “like” button so you can be a part of the community.

Anyway -  here is my random mix of favorite things. Clearly it is not comprehensive or exhaustive, but it was fun to create!

• My family (I know that’s obvious but this list wouldn’t be complete without it)
• My friends (see above)
• Garden Girl products (of course!), my personal “must have’s”: You’re Fresh, Even Stephen, Break Free, Nature Nurture, Super Hero serum, Eye Can’t Believe It, Chill Out lotion, Alive body wash,  Simmer Down bath salts, Hand it to You hand cream and Zippity Do Dah peppermint foot cream
• My new VitaMix!
• Our SodaStream soda/seltzer machine
• White vinegar (for cleaning and laundry)
• My tumble composter from Costco (so easy!)
• My husband’s old (2003) Prius – such a great car
• My BlackBerry
• My laptop
• Facebook
• Mineral makeup
• Greek yogurt
• Chocolate
• Banana Bread
• Smoothies
• Gooey brownies
• Hot fudge
• Ice cream (Brigham’s Mocha Chip or Chocolate Chip are 2 all-time favorites)
• Broccoli (seriously)
• Spinach (again, seriously)
• Juicy tomatoes in the summer – especially with fresh mozzarella and basil! (and crusty bread)
• speaking of bread….CARBS (but I try to squeeze in whole grains whenever possible) – especially chewy, crusty bread and pasta
• A big salad with tons of stuff in there – especially if someone else did all the chopping
• Shortcut dinners like all natural frozen potstickers from Costco, Mama Rosie’s spinach ravioli, Bell & Evan’s chicken, Trader Joe’s mandarin orange chicken, Trader Joe’s frozen brown rice, quesadillas, omelettes
• My rice cooker
• My Kitchen Aid mixer
• My favorite cookbooks: America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook, Gourmet cookbook, and King Arthur Flour Cookie Book
• Cooking Light magazine
• Epicurious.com and other online recipe databases
• Food Network
• Any good workout I can find that’s 20 minutes or less and that I can do at home
• Our Weber Grill
• My latex mattress
• Central air conditioning (i know – VERY un-eco-friendly but we do keep it on the warm side)
• Caribbean Sol sunblock
• Caribbean Sol all natural self tanner (nice!)
• Trader Joe’s Powerberries (DO NOT BUY these if you are not already addicted – they are so yummy that they are pure evil…)
• Our pizza stone
• Pizza dough from Russo’s
• Actually – Russo’s in general, along with Trader Joe’s (can’t imagine life without it), Costco, and Whole Foods
• Reusable grocery bags (just seems like an obviously good idea, doesn’t it? and now I have finally gotten the hang of always having them in the car…)

I could do an entire list of my favorite food from Trader Joe’s – actually I think I have in the past? And I know I’ve done a “favorite finds at Costco” Facebook posting. Those are always fun!

Anyway – that’s my random list, for better or for worse. It makes me laugh that it is mostly food – apparently I have a one-track mind…

I’m looking forward to hearing what some of your favorites are!

It’s back-to-school time and EWG came out with their list of eco-friendly tips for buying products for your kids – including:

1) Look for pencils made from sustainable wood or recycled newspaper, without any paint or coatings

2) Look for hand soap and hand sanitizers without triclosan, triclocarbon or fragrance

3) Avoid buying polymer clay (the kind that stays soft at room temperature and hardens in the oven because it is made from PVC and has phthalates.

Check out the full list on the EWG and happy back to school!!

As I posted recently, I have been checking out The Green Book by Elizabeth Rogers and Thomas Kostigen. It’s a very handy paperback book filled with helpful and (most importantly) EASY tips to save energy, reduce waste, and generally act more responsibly.

This week I thought I’d share some of my favorites from their Travel chapter. They have all kinds of suggestions for planning your trip, getting there, staying at a hotel, sightseeing and eating out. There are a bunch of things in there that I hadn’t really thought much about, and some which are just worth repeating. Here are my top 5 from this chapter:

1. Linens. Use the same linens and towels in your hotel room throughout your stay.  The average hotel room consumers more than 200 gallons of water per DAY, or as much as your entire household typically uses in a day. Trimming the amount of water used by washing sheets and towels can save up to 40 percent of a hotel’s water use.
2. Suitcases. Pack lightly – every additional ten pounds per traveler requires and additional 350 million (!!) gallons of jet fuel per year, which is enough to keep a 747 flying continuously for ten years. As a serial over-packer – that one hit home for me!
3. Guidebooks. Research your travel online and print out only the pages you’ll need to reference. You’ll save time, money and paper waste. More than 800,000 travel books go to waste every year!
4. Toiletries. Pack your own shampoo, soap and toothpaste instead of relying on the ones provided by most hotels (and of course then you can pack your favorite Garden Girl products!). You’ll get the product you want and you’ll creaste less plastic waste. A single 300 room hotel in Las Vegas uses more than 150,000 plastic bottles of shampoo per year.
5. Water bottles. Use and refill as single (preferable stainless steel or BPA-free plastic) water bottle when you travel. The average person in the United States drinks 8 oz. of bottled water per day (how did that ever happen??). It takes 1.5 million barrels of oil to annually satisfy America’s demand for bottled water (the bottles for which are derived from petroleum). If that oil were converted to gasoline, the total could fuel 500,000 station wagons to take their families on coast-to-coast road trips. Considering the ongoing and unspeakable tragedy in the Gulf, we need to do whatever we can to reduce this country’s insatiable appetite for petroleum. And drinking from a reusable bottle is an easy way to start.

Let me know if you have any favorite eco-friendly travel tips – I’d love to hear them! Happy trails!

When I was at Kohl’s of all places, I grabbed the book called “The Green Book”. I know – how did they POSSIBLY come up with such a clever title?? Anyway – I figured it would be a fun and helpful book to have around. It’s listed as “the everyday guide to saving the planet one simple step at a time.”

So I started reading it bits at a time. It’s an easy book to just pick up and read for a few minutes – check out a few tips. And while I’ll say I don’t think all of the tips are necessarily 100% thought through (don’t consider the total environmental impact) and they are certainly simplified, it is still overall a pretty good and handy and thorough list of tips and tricks. It’s broken down by subject, and even some of the more “obvious” tips still offer a tidbit of something new/interesting (see the Farmer’s Market tip below).

The other thing that I like about the book is it has a very extensive reference list at the end of the book. The sources are well-known, recognizable and credible.

I thought I’d share a few tips and then continue to periodically post others that I find interesting. For now, I’ll focus on food shopping tips:

“Farmer’s Market vs. Supermarket

Try doing some of your shopping at a local farmer’s market. And if you can, walk or bike there. Of the total energy used in the United States per year, 4 percent is used to produce food, and between 10 and 13 percent is used to transport it. On average, U.S. supermarket food travels 1,500 to 2,500 miles before it reaches the family table. Buying local food can reduce the amount of petroleum consumed to transport your dinner by as much as 95 percent.

Meat

If you have the option, choose your meat at the butcher counter and purchase only as much as you know you’ll use. You’ll reduce food waste, save money, and conserve resources. The average person wastes over twenty-two pounds of edible store-bought meat each year. Given that it takes five pounds of grain and 2,500 gallons of water to make one pound of beef, that’s more than one hundred pounds of wasted grain and 55,000 gallons of wasted water per person! If all households decreased their beef purchases by just one pound per year, 250 billion gallons of water would be saved. It would take five days for this amount of water to pour over Niagara Falls.

Organic

You can lower your exposure to pesticides by 90 percent just by choosing organic varieties of certain fruits and vegetables. If just 1 percent of the nation’s farmlands converted to organic (non-chemical) agricultural systems, it would remove twenty-six million pounds of pesticides per year from the food we eat and from the environment. If you buy organic, you’ll encourage this type of farming.”

As I said, some of the tips – like the ones I highlighted here – are ones you have probably heard before. But they are able to add a new twist to make you think even more about making the change. And most are fairly simple changes. I will offer more of their green ideas in a future post, so stay tuned! And if you are interested in getting your own copy, just click on the book picture above and it will take you to the Amazon.com page.

A few posts back, I mentioned that I had used the website www.alice.com and among the products I had ordered, was something called the BathroomStone. Well I have been using this for a few weeks now, and it is definitely a pretty cool tool.  And earth friendly, too!

You’re probably wondering what exactly it is.  The packaging probably says it best:

” BathroomStone is the most powerful scouring product available. It easily cleans even the toughest hard water, soap scum and mildew on porcelain or tile and grout. It will not absorb odor causing bacteria.”

The thing that is so different about this is that it’s made from recycled glass! It’s wild. The company’s founder, Andrew Ungerleider, was determined to stop the destruction of New Mexico’s Jemez Mountains from the mining of pumice stone. So instead, he developed a technology that creates a glass “foam” from recycled beverage bottles. According to the site “The waste stream of crushed bottles that would end up in the landfill is converted into products with green qualities that have desirable physical properties and cost benefits.” Pretty clever!

I have to say, it’s something that you have to use very carefully. It clearly could scratch the heck out of surfaces that are not “safe” so it should only be used on porcelain or tile and grout. I used it in the shower and in the toilet bowls to get rid of hard water stains. It worked amazingly (and relatively effortlessly) well on the hard water stains that I couldn’t get to budge before. You need to use it either under water or with water, and scrub in a circular motion to make sure it doesn’t do any damage.

The company also produces similar products for use on porcelain-coated pots/pans in the kitchen, on the grill (definitely want to check that out), and in outdoor pools. They can be purchased online or in stores like Home Depot and Lowe’s.

Sometimes you come across a company that have such a heartfelt story that it really makes you want to think of a reason to buy something from them. That’s the way I felt when I found out about Carebox.com. Carebox was started by Christine Curavo. This is what she says:

“After the recent loss of both parents to lung cancer, I founded CAREBOX™, which is a series of beautiful gift packages meant for somebody going through a life changing event. I donate a portion of my profits towards an early detection test for cancer.

Because I was able to be with, and take care of my parents during the last months of their lives, I came to know what helped them feel more comfortable or what brought a smile—and I designed a CAREBOX™ for those situations.”

So her first products at Carebox were really focused on uplifting gifts for people going through a life struggle or a serious illness. She has the Lemons to Lemonade box for when “life gives you lemons”, the Lavender Ladies box to help ease insomnia or nausea, the Club Pink box to send to someone who is fighting breast cancer, and (the one I think that’s the most creative) the Nausea Not box filled with natural remedies to fight nausea.

But as her business started to grow, she got requests for more types of boxes and gifts. So she now offers the Welcome to the World box to celebrate the birth of a child, as well as a Build a Box option so you can create your own gift – there’s a HUGE list of goodies you can put in the box. Plus she has one that’s just filled with Hershey’s Kisses. YUMMY and simple – and sure to bring a smile to someone’s face.

Christine was kind enough to send me a sample of one of the Lemons to Lemonade box. And wow- is it gorgeous! And the reason that I’m also especially excited about her products is that she makes a serious effort to be eco-friendly. The beautiful boxes are made from recycled paper, the products are natural and she sources them from the US whenever possible.

The brown and silvery green box arrived with a lovely bow and gift card. Inside, there was a very pretty cloth sack with natural lemonade mix, a box of 3 lemon shaped and scented soaps (they look just like a real lemon!) from Bronnley Soaps with Sicilian lemon oil, and a tin of natural Lemon Cookies (made in the US – and happily without hydrogenated oils, however not nut safe for those who need to know). The package is presented so nicely, I would imagine anyone – whether life IS giving them lemons or not – would be very happy to receive it.

So next time someone you know is struggling with an illness – big or small – and you aren’t sure just what to say, think about sending a gift from Carebox.com. They are a beautiful and thoughtful gift that will say just the right thing.

The people at GetYubo.com sent me a very cool Yubo lunchbox to check out. I was intrigued by the lunchbox when I read about it online. It can be customized with different faceplates (you can even have your child’s drawing or photo used for a faceplate). Plus, it is made of recyclable plastic (very nice!) that’s anti-microbial and it’s BPA free. Even more handy, is that it comes with its own food containers that are BPA-free, and a perfectly-shaped-for-the-lunchbox, flat (yea!) ice pack. And not only that, they are giving a lunchbox away for FREE in celebration of Earth Day. (see Yubo Giveaway posting for details)

When I received the lunchbox, I immediately loved it. It’s adorable, bright and is incredibly easy to clean up. I find that the “soft” cooler-bag type lunchboxes get kinda stinky and icky after awhile and they are so hard to get clean. This lunchbox comes completely apart and you can wash each section (personally, even though it’s BPA-free and they say it’s dishwasher safe, I would still wash it by hand).

It really is a very clever design, and I’m impressed with the concept. As with so many cool products out there, this was designed by a mom and dad, Cyndi and Paul Pedrazzi, who were getting tired of the endless plastic baggies they used for their two daughter’s lunches each day. Not to mention the foul odors that accumulate in the typical lunch boxes. So they literally approached an award-winning design company, Whipsaw, in Silicon Valley (they also designed LeapFrog’s LeapPad). And they have gotten tons of press coverage – check out all of chatter on the Press page of their website.

I will say, there were a few things that I think could be improved:

• The design is really best for smaller children – maybe 5 and under? My 7 year old thought it was very cool but said he wouldn’t bring it to school. He does think it would be fun for bringing snacks on short trips.
• On the same note, the food containers are too small for bigger kids. My boys have to bring a snack and a lunch to school each day and these containers wouldn’t fit all the food they need. There also isn’t a place for a sports bottle or other reusable water bottle for drinks.
• The food containers are very cute and I love that  they are BPA free, but I did think that the tops seemed a little loose and they were a little leaky for liquidy foods (like yogurt). That said, I do appreciate the fact that the lids come off easily. My boys complain about some of the containers where the lids are so hard to pull off. So I’m on both sides of that one, I guess!

But definitely check this site out for your little ones. Perfect for “lunch bunch” at preschool or lunches for daycare. The kids will love picking out the faceplate. And who knows, maybe someday they’ll have a bigger version for bigger kids!

I was at Whole Foods a few weeks ago  (the new one in Dedham, for you local folks – LOVE it!), and there was a woman who was demonstrating a new line of locally produced eco-friendly cleaning products – Modern Mermaids. Although the All Purpose + Glass Cleaner is great (she gave me a sample – smells fresh like peppermint) – I decided to try the “Vitalizing Fruit & Veggie Wash”. I’m always happy to support a local business.

I know – there’s tons of veggie washes out there, but I have never bought one before. I have typically just used either castile soap or very hot water. But neither was really working that great for me. So I’m happy to say this has been great! It’s not cheap (the bottle is $5.29 at Whole Foods and $5.99 online), but it has lasted a long time. And I feel much better about the fruit and veggies we’re eating. Even organic produce has dirt and other stuff that it comes in contact with so this has been a great addition to our kitchen. Plus, with its big trigger spray it’s very convenient and easy to use.

So if you’re interested in supporting a small business and eating healthier, check out Modern Mermaids. They have a complete line of cleaning products, and based on my experience I’m guessing you can’t go wrong with any of them.

It sounds as though Americans are finally coming to their senses. Sales of bottled water are on the decline for the first time in 5 years. Looking back it seems like such a sign of the “go go go” years when the economy was humming along at such a nice pace, everything was all about convenience (without much thought about the overall impact left behind) and there were big efforts to reduce the amounts of soda consumed and go healthy by drinking more water. We thought we were doing the right thing – by drinking more water we and our kids will be better off. But in the meantime, only 10% of the bottles (yes TEN percent – yipes) were getting recycled (source: New York State Department of Environmental Conservation). That’s a lot of waste – especially considering the fact that the growth in sales of bottled water was skyrocketing – “Sales of bottled water swelled 59 percent to $5.1 billion between 2003 to 2008, making it one of the fastest growing beverages.” (Source: Washington Post article)

But now, it looks as though the tides have turned. The Washington Post reported recently that “sales of bottled water have fallen for the first time in at least five years, assailed by wrathful environmentalists and budget-conscious consumers, who have discovered that tap water is practically free.” Duh – really, what were we thinking? Is it that hard to get a reusable bottle and fill it up from the tap? Especially since we now start hearing that brands like Coke’s Dasani and Pepsi’s Aquafina are just tap water (Check out this CNN article). It really does make you realize how easily we can be swayed. And it does seem pretty silly, doesn’t it?

I, of course, say this all as someone who includes herself in the “duped” category. We would buy our cases of bottled water at Costco before we went on vacation or for parties or sometimes just to have around the house. And I’m not suggesting that there is no need for them at all – it’s just that we need to recognize that it is wasteful to use them and they should be saved for very specific uses – not “just to have.”

Our family just returned from a week in Disney (which was a blast, by the way). But we brought our refillable bottles wherever we went. Just threw them in the backpack – and then refilled them at water fountains throughout the parks. Easy, convenient and definitely eco-friendly. So why not? And as a side note, although Disney does not have many recycling bins around the parks, I have it on “insider information” that they DO recycle in their famous “underground” system – which makes me feel better because there is a lot of trash produced at those parks.