Happy birthday, Earth Day!

Tomorrow we celebrate the 40th anniversary of Earth Day (not to mention the one-year anniversary of my first blog post)!

Over the last year, does it seem like more and more companies are going green? Just yesterday, I found an advertisement for Kellogg's cereal with the tagline "A balanced breakfast. A cleaner planet" and says Kellogg's cereal boxes are 100 percent recyclable. Well, sustainable packaging is great, right! But are they just jumping on the bandwagon to get my business? Not according to their website, in which the company claims they are one of the largest users of recycled paperboard in the United States, and have been using it since its founding in 1906. So maybe it's a longstanding practice, and that's good, but am I just now hearing about it because it's the "popular" thing to do?

I want to talk about a term you might not know about, called "greenwashing." Greenwashing is basically an attempt by an organization to spin their product to make it appear more environmentally friendly than it actually is.

The Seven Sins of Greenwashing website says the average number of ‘green’ products per store almost doubled between 2007 and 2008, and green advertising almost tripled between 2006 and 2008.

So yank the wool off your eyes and check out the Greenwashing Index and see if any of your favorite products have been greenwashed!

Finally ... Spring!

Middle Tennessee has been basking in the 70s and 80s during the last few weeks. Alex and I have been taking the opportunity to work outside.

Our mint and chives from last year are already coming back in our herb garden full force. In fact, our basil has come back with a vengence ... and basil is supposed to be an annual herb! Annual plants are supposed to only live one year while perennial plants come back year after year. So I don't know what the deal is with that, but I'm not complaining. I think our winter wasn't quite so severe that maybe they never completely went away.

We went back to our friendly Farmer's Co-op yesterday and bought three tomato plants, two hot banana pepper plants and some cilantro for our little garden. I'd also like to put out some oregano and cilantro, but they didn't have any. I'm hoping they'll get some in early this week.

Alex also bought me a compost bin for Christmas, so we've got that set up and I'm learning all I can about how to compost. With all our recycling and composting, our household trash is rapidly diminishing. I'm hoping this summer we can cancel our trash pick-up service, and what trash we do have, we can take in our truck to the dump.

Wish me luck! :)