Today's a mixed bag!

No big topic today, but a few snippets:

SHAMPOO: I tried some new shampoo! You may remember from a few posts back that I wanted to change to a more earth-friendly (and health friendly) shampoo. So I tried Kiss My Face Green Tea and Lime Everyday shampoo. Overall, I liked it. It cleaned my hair well and doesn't make it feel limp or heavy. It even lathered, which I thought it wouldn't since it leaves out the ingredient SLS. The only drawbacks: the price ($6-8) and I wasn't that into the smell. It wasn't bad, just not my kind of smell, but not so bad that I wouldn't use it.

SPICES: I was reading about buying in bulk and how that not only can save money but also lessen the packing waste in your household. I'm a little wary of bulk purchases because if it's not used in time, it can go to waste. So before I buy something in bulk that may go bad, I need to be sure I'd use it. Spices are one thing I know we use A LOT of...so I did a quick search on bulk spices and came up with something that looks really good: The Monterey Bay Spice Company. Now I haven't ordered from them yet, but they are certified organic and sell spices, herbs, teas, essential oils and more. There prices look fairly reasonable. I'll let you know if/when I order from them.

Searching for a natural shampoo

I mentioned a few posts back that I was excited to get some "organic" and "natural" shampoo. I didn't read the ingredient list because the brand name was Nature's Gate Organics. Surprise! Small print reads: made with certified organic botanticals. Well, that's true, but besides the organic ingredients there were some other things including methylparaben and propylparaben. While there are reports that say parabens are ok , there are also some that question their safety. My take on it is that if I can avoid them, I might as well. Better safe than sorry.

The lesson I learned is that a company can put organic on the bottle if it has just a couple organic ingredients and who knows what the rest is. So from now on I'll be reading the labels much more closely.

So I'm looking for some gentle, natural shampoos. Even something seemingly friendly as Suave has Methylisothiazolinone in it which seems pretty yucky- NIH (National Institute of Health) uses the words toxic more than once in their evaluation of it on the National Library of Medicine's Toxnet site.

Has anyone has any luck with shampoos that are nice and natural? I want to find something that isn't so chemical. Please post if you have any suggestions!

8 Ways to Green your Bathroom

Over the past few months, I've posted little things here and there that I've done to be cheap and green. So I thought I'd put all of those hints in one list. Most of these things cost little or nothing.

1. SOAP
Using plain old bar soap over liquid soap has a couple benefits. Bars are cheaper than the liquid soap, it lasts longer than liquid does and it reduces waste (no plastic bottles to recycle). I'll be honest, this was a little bit of a difficult transition for me...the liquid pump bottles are just so easy, but after a month or so I've grown used to it and so has my family.

2. SHAMPOO
My husband uses shampoo more quickly than anyone I know. He can easily polish off a whole bottle in a week. My solution to save money? Pour the shampoo in one of the old liquid soap bottles! Instead of squeezing a big handful of shampoo out, we pump the dispenser twice. That seems to be enough to get a good lather and uses less shampoo. That saves money AND reduces the number of shampoo bottles we need to buy. Eventually, I'd like to move on to bar shampoo, but I've yet to find one that I like.


3. SOAP IN THE SHOWER
You know how your soap ends up as tiny shards and chunks? I bought this little soap bag on ebay that you put those soap bits into. They lather up even better than soap alone and the bag is like a loofah. The husband loves this!





4. ELECTRIC RAZOR
This took me a little while to transition to but I got used to it. My razor is rechargeable and can be used in or out of the shower. No more disposable razor waste and saves a lot of money- the electric razor cost me $20...much less than the cost of a year's worth of disposables.

5. SHOWERHEAD
We installed a low flow showerhead (1.5 gallons per minute). I'm really happy with it. I expected it to be "wimpy" and not have the water pressure I was used to, but this is great. Since installing this and 1.5 gpm sink faucet aerators, and watching our water consumption, we are using 30 gallons per day LESS than this time last year. That saves us money as well.

6. SHOWER LENGTH
I know I have posted about this before. I love the long, hot shower, but I've been saving that as a treat on days I really need it. Most days, I jump in the shower after setting my timer to 5 minutes. My goal is to make it out before the buzzer. Pretty soon I am getting my long hair cut and the shampoo/rinse will be a shorter time. My son likes to use the timer too, which is great, because taking a shower is way less water than his taking a bath. Now, we need to work on the husband who takes LOOOOOONG showers....

7. SAVE A GALLON WITH EVERY FLUSH
I'm currently pricing low flow toilets, but in the meantime, we have our toilet floaty thing (sorry for the lack of technical terms!) set so the water level is lower and we filled a gallon jug full of water and set it in the tank. This saves us one gallon of water every time the toilet is flushed. Not a pretty picture- but no one will see inside the toilet tank.

8. SHOWER CURTAINS
With recent studies showing the smell from new shower curtains comes from all kinds of nasty chemicals, the best way to go is a fabric shower curtain. I was hesitant this would work as well as the plastic/vinyl, but it works just as well and can go in the washer when needed. Bonus: they look prettier.

Most of these things were pretty cheap to do- switching to bar soap (cheaper than liquid), buying an inexpensive soap bag, sink aerators ($2), low flow showerheads ($8-25) and even the razor ($20) show immediate savings or will pay for themselves in a matter of months.

There are many more ways to be cheap and green in the bathroom, including using recycled paper products and environmentally friendly cleaners. How do you save money while being eco-friendly in your bathroom?

Cheap Green Fun Today

We just got back from a great little activity. My mom, son and I went on a little hike on the Ma & Pa Trail. This is a walking/running/biking trail that runs along where the original Ma & Pa Railroad ran. It's a really nice trail. It's paved and nice and cool under all those trees. We had a great cheap and green morning walking the trail for about an hour.

My son Jack found interesting leaves and plants to write about in the nature journal he's keeping this summer. I'm glad we checked out the trail. It's just another thing located so close to us that is fun and free.


After the trail, we went over to the Goodwill store to see what kinds of things they have this week. Shopping at thrift stores like this is one of my favorite ways to "re-use" and the money spent is used to help others. My mom found an Eddie Bauer horseshoe set and Jack found a pitcher for his lemonade stand this weekend at our yard sale. Bonus- today was senior citizen discount day so Mom and Jack got their stuff 15% off.


We went to a local restaurant and had lunch then one more stop- TJ Maxx...ironic since I just wrote about avoiding recreational shopping! But I did find a pair of Naturalizer shoes for $20 that can be my "school shoes" in the fall and 2 bottles of organic shampoo for $3 each. I haven't tried any organic/natural shampoo yet...I'm still using up my reserves from the V05 49c sale.


We had a really nice day and I think we'll make our trail walk a weekly thing as we explore the different branches of the trail.

"Reduce", recycle's less popular friend

We hear "reduce, re-use and recycle" a lot. By far, the most popular of these three guys is recycle. Why? I'm guessing that it's because it's the easiest.

Re-using takes some creativity...what am I going to do with the stack of 32oz yogurt containers that are coded #5... so far I can't find ANYONE to recycle these guys.

In my region, only plastics numbered 1, 2 and 3's can be recycled. I guess they could be used for some kind of storage if I was into beading or something...and they're too small for my son's Legos...

So while I haven't found out what to do with the stack of yogurt containers I have, I did figure out a way to stop accumulating them...REDUCE!!! So no more buying those containers of yogurt. Instead, I bought a yogurt maker. If that works out, it'll be 2 less containers a week (wow...that's over 100 a year...just for my family!) And the bonus...it's cheaper!

And while we're reducing our use of products using non or hard to recycle containers, we're going to ditch the tub butter (also the #5 packaging). Instead, back to stick margarine.

And even recyclable stuff...well it takes energy to recycle. We're going to switch over to shampoo in bar format...no more bottles to recycle after we finish our "pumpable shampoo"! I'll let you know how the bar shampoo works out.

Having all those yogurt containers piled up definitely made me realize recycling isn't the real solution...reducing my purchasing of this kind of packaging.

How do you REDUCE?