Plato did it too!

For the next few days we are going to look at the 3 R's. They are Reduce, Reuse & Recycle. This practice seems new to some but it can be traced back to 400 B.C.E (before common era) and many people such as Plato were going green.

During this time, food, water and supplies were scarce. There wasn't anything that would be thrown away that couldn't have been turned into something else. Left over metals were melted down into knifes or used to make chain vest for war. The water taken from the city wells were used to drink and bathe in and often the same bath was reused by family members then given to the livestock. Food was only given in small amounts and nothing was wasted making it. All the left over vegetable (if there were any) were given to the animals. So how did we go from being green ages ago?

Industrialization of the world. Companies need products made and made as fast as possible. No one gave an after thought as to what would happen to the product if it was thrown away. With more people in the world our cities grew out not up and used more land. The milk industry would use glass bottles to carry the milk, once your milk was gone you left it outside and a pick-up service would collect it for reuse then the milk industry wanted something lightweight and created the cartons we see today. Not only did this eliminate jobs for the delivery service but opened the door to Pandora's box with creating items for "easier use". Appliances like the fridge helped the world and decreased the cases of food-borne illness but also created the term.....leftovers. TV dinners created more waste. Anyone who had a party started to use the famous red party cup. We thought we could do whatever we want. Dump anti-freeze into a body of water, light a tire on fire? Who cares!

But then in the 1980's when the landfills began to overfill with items that take ages to break down we were slapped in the face with a problem. How do we REDUCE our waste. And viola! Reduce, Reuse and Recycle came back into the world. Just by Recycling we remove 60 million tons of waste in a landfill a year. [Source: EPA] Just by simply recycling (you just sort the stuff into bins, not rocket science!) we made an impact. What do you think we can do if we ALL reduced, reused and recycled?

Want to go green but not sure how?

All to often I hear "I want to be green but I don't know how". Going green isn't rocket science and you don't need all the crazy gadgets like solar panels to go green. In this blog I will share tips on going green and I will also embark on this journey with you! Tomorrow will be day of 1 of 365 days on this going green project.