As I mentioned in a previous post, my major New Year’s goal is to limit some of the excess food packaging that comes into my house.

My foolproof super hopeful plan!

As noted, I’ve failed to reach my goal for four years or so. I’m pretty sure that I’ve been aiming too high, which is exactly the opposite of what I always tell other people to do. For example, I want to eliminate ALL unnecessary food packaging. Yet, obviously I’m not nearly reaching that goal. I always tell you, my readers, to take small steps towards a greener lifestyle, so this year, I’m taking my own advice.

In 2012, my household will be concentrating on some smaller, hopefully more achievable steps towards an overall less package-laden lifestyle. Here’s what I’ve come up with.

Baby steps for my goal this year!

Who will be involved:

Since I live with four other people for the time being, a true elimination of household packaging would require the entire household’s cooperation. That spells potential trouble and extra stress I don’t need. That said, I’m limiting my goal to what I can control – meaning packaging concerning my son Cedar and myself.

The basic plan:

1) I sat down and thought about all the foods we buy prepackaged.

2) First I eliminated impossible items from my list. For example, I’m not buying an organic cow, milking it and churning flipping butter and ice cream. I’m also not raising chickens. Meaning, we’ll keep buying items such as organic milk, eggs and butter prepackaged.

3) Then I thought about the stuff I could manage easily because I’ve already got the skills – i.e. I can bake cookies and muffins vs. buying packaging. I can also buy rice and beans in bulk and cook them vs. purchasing cans or boxes.

4) Then, because a goal should be at least a little bit challenging, I considered something harder. For us, the food items with the biggest package impact would likely be soup. We eat soup for most lunches and often for dinner too. We eat organic veggie, chicken noodle, veggie chili, tomato and more. I have almost zero soup making skills. I’ve tried to make soup before. At best I’ve had curious results and at worst really terrible results. If I can learn to make decent soup, it would be a BIG deal, save on lots of cans and a great accomplishment.

My chosen small steps:

• Quit buying rice and beans in cans, bags or boxes. Both are easy to get organic in bulk, but take more time to cook.

• Don’t buy potatoes or carrots in bags anymore. Can you believe I sometimes do this! Anyhow, I can cut up bulk carrots myself and lately I’ve located bulk organic potatoes not in bags.

• Bake cookies and muffins from scratch from now on, using bulk ingredients. Easy because I’m a good baker and since I work at home, baking is something I do have time for – i.e. it’s easy to walk away from the oven, so long as you set a timer.

• Learn to make soup. This will be the hardest part for me. One reader suggested a crock-pot, which I’ll be looking into, and I’m going to gather up some organic soup recipes.

How is 2012 going so far?

Well, not great, but luckily it’s only the 8th. I bought bulk carrots and potatoes this week, plus didn’t buy any muffin mixes or prepackaged cookies.

I’ve utterly failed to research soup making yet and I bought two boxes of rice and two cans of soup. Blah. So, it’s going about half good. Stay tuned, because hopefully I’ll manage to look up some soup recipes and share them here.

Image by Johnkarun via sxc.

Instead of general New Year’s goals, I’m concentrating on discussing the childhood obesity epidemic. That said I do still have two general goals for myself, or I should say my household. One of my goals is to get this household more active, since we’ve been slacking, but we’ll discuss that later. First, let’s look at my big goal of the year.

The ongoing food packaging goal

For over four years, my New Year’s goal has been to eliminate food packaging that comes into my house. I’ve done a horrid job too. Seriously, I’ve been terrible, not really limiting much food packaging at all. Each year I think, this is the year I do better and each year –  zero results.

For example, if you look in my cupboards and fridge, here are some typical items we buy that come in packages of some sort:  ketchup, crackers, soup, bread, frozen veggies, milk, refried beans, eggs, granola bars, butter, baking goods (I often, but don’t always buy bulk), sometimes cookies, tortillas, spaghetti sauce, cheese, bagels, rice and so on and so on. We do buy 90% of our food in organic form. However, for a green family, I feel like we have way too much overly packaged stuff.

What’s stupid, is that half this stuff I can make from scratch, using bulk goods brought home in reusable bulk bags or containers (which I already own). I’m a good bread and cookie baker. I can make crackers and granola. I’m decent at making sauces and there’s no question that I can get organic veggies fresh in reusable bags vs. frozen.

Why we fail year-after-year

Being that I make this flipping goal every year, I needed to figure out how come my household keeps failing to meet it.

We’re busy: I feel like we’re pressed for time constantly. We’ve got three kids with three different school and activity schedules. My boyfriend works an oddball shift full-time at his day job and performs frequently with his band (second job). I work full-time+ writing and I’m on the board at my son’s school. Like we’ve got time to bake and cook from scratch every night. It’s REALLY easy to open cans of soup.

I’m ill-equipped: I’m a decent cook, but not a genius cook. Stuff like homemade soup is a stretch for me. In fact, I’d say that soup is our biggest failure. We get canned soup often. Even though we buy organic, it’s still packaged and the cans are known to harbor BPA (lame).

My partner is ill-equipped: I’m not the only adult in the house with issues. My boyfriend doesn’t seem super keen to cook from scratch either and his cooking abilities are also limited.

Picky kids: My boyfriend’s kids want processed foods often (turkey dogs, bagels, mac n cheese, etc) and my son, Cedar, is so picky that once we find something he’ll eat, we tend to stick to it, rather than try anything new. For example, Cedar just recently decided mac n cheese is okay to eat, but says, “I like the Annie’s white shells and not other mac n cheese.” Thus, whipping together a homemade dish of mac n cheese could mean a picky kid food revolt.

Benefits of eliminating some packaging

If we manage this goal this year, there are some major benefit though. For example:

• Lower grocery costs. There was a time, years ago, when I used to buy more food in bulk and cook from scratch more often, and I did spend less on groceries. Packaging and convenience does cost you, especially if you buy mostly organic.

• We’ll learn some new skills, like how to make soup.

• We can teach one, two or maybe all three of the kids to cook too.

• We’ll avoid pesky BPA in cans.

• We’ll avoid cluttering up the landfills with trash – not all packaging is easily recycled. Plus, although we do recycle like champs, recycling takes energy, so why not avoid the packaging in the first place.

• We’ll be more self-sufficient and less dependent on food companies. For example, I get cranky when my favorite organic vegetable soup is out of stock. It would be better to learn to make it myself.

• We can feel better about our footprint. It’s not just all the packaging to recycle that bugs me. It takes energy and other resources to make food packaging. Plus, we’re not a family that buys a bunch of useless junk (most of us are not excess stuff fans) so the fact that we buy too much packaging just feels icky to me.

Since I haven’t reached this goal in previous years, I decided to lay out a much better plan this year. That plan is coming up soon. For now, tell me if you have any green New Year’s goals for 2012.

Image by raja4u via sxc.

To end out December 2010 I posted 5 insanely easy green New Year’s goals for families who are newer to green living. Plus, we started looking at some harder green challenges for more experienced eco-families – a list that I’ll finish up this week at some point. However, I didn’t post my own New Year’s goals yet.

I don’t normally set official goals for the new year, because I tend to have ongoing goals. Still, I do have some green living issues I’ll be trying to work on this year. Most of my goals are actually left over from last year because I’ve been a bad slacker – meaning I didn’t technically accomplish everything I wanted to this year. Yeah, all green families have set-backs. Hopefully I can be better this year…

Buy less packaging related to kitchen stuff. I’ll still buy stuff like bread in packaging and soup in cans. Sometimes I buy granola bars in boxes and even Spanish rice in a box. Not cool. Especially when you consider that I can make all this stuff from scratch. Right now, just like last year, we have way too many packaged items in our pantry. I’ve cut back, but not enough. I’m really going to buckle down this year.

Getting out in nature more. Again, this is a left-over goal. We kind of did better this year, but not great. Two years ago Cedar, my son, and I used to go on a nature hikes all the time plus took daily walks around the neighborhood no matter what our schedules looked like. 2010 was hyper busy work-wise and my son was really involved at school, so we were both tired when he’d come home and we slacked big time. Even on the weekends we slacked. Partially because of our own lack of initiative and partially because my boyfriend’s daughters are way anti-exercise and anti-nature, but we like hanging out with them. Sadly, that means hanging out at home.

In my opinion, a major part of living green is getting the kids outside and active often, so I want to work on this much more in 2011. I think Cedar and I simply need to get to bed earlier on weekends, so that we get up and go out on weekend days, plus we need to make a list of cool places we’d like to go. Also, I think that while we will encourage the girls to go, if they resist, we’ll just have to be like, whatever, and go without them. If they want to sit around Cedar and I can’t use them as an excuse this year.

Cook more. I decided to go back to being a vegetarian this year. I didn’t eat meat for 15 years or so, and not eating meat isn’t a big deal to us, but cooking is time consuming, so we have issues. Often we stick to super easy stuff – rice, plain veggies, soup, etc. We need to cook more stir-fry, pasta and so on. Get creative, you know? Also, cooking more allows you to buy less packaging – which of course helps with my #1 goal above. I’ll post more ideas about this goal later.

So, these are my goals. All of them leftovers, which frankly gives me a little more ammunition to actually get on them this year. I can’t have another year of slacking.

What are your green goals for 2011?

In the last post I listed 5 insanely easy New Year’s goals for families who are newer to green living. However, I know plenty of you are not new to green living. If you’ve got some eco-experience, as a family, then you’re ready for some harder challenges during the upcoming year.

Now to make these challenges harder, but still fair, I’ve only listed goals that my family has actually accomplished. This way, I can offer tips, time-lines and so on to help you meet these goals. If you’re curious, I’ll be posting my own NOT yet accomplished green goals later on, but these below, my family has gotten pretty good at. Also, I only picked goals that I think will make the most positive impact on the planet, but that are still doable.

Following are five green challenges you can take on as a family in the new year. Oh, and because I don’t want this post to get exorbitantly long, later I’ll link some tips to each, but for now I’m just going to post the goals and some basics about them.

GOAL 1 – Don’t bring home one plastic or paper bag all year.

If you’ve completed this goal already, consider trying to convert another family member or friend to reusables. The average person uses about 500 plastic bags per year, which uses lots of oil and creates tons of pollution. Plus almost none of these bags get recycled and many end up as garbage in the oceans or other public spaces. As for paper, in 1999, 14 million trees were cut to produce the 10 billion paper grocery bags used by Americans that year alone according to Reuseit. Also, it takes more than four times as much energy to manufacture a paper bag as it does to manufacture a plastic bag. If you can convince just one person to make the switch to reusable bags, you’ve helped save a ton of resources.

GOAL 2 – Quit using paper towels & paper napkins.

If this is a goal you’ve already completed, consider attempting to switch to 100% recycled toilet paper or try to drop another disposable product you use, such as plastic baggies or foil.

GOAL 3 -Skip the bottled water all year long.

If you’ve completed this goal already, consider trying to cut out other plastic bottles in your life. For example juice bottles or soda. Buy in glass, make homemade juice or look for companies using recycled containers AND other ethical green practices to bottle their beverages.

GOAL 4 -Quit eating meat OR only buy sustainable meat.

If you’ve completed this goal work on other areas of your meals. For example, make all your bread this year from scratch, thus cutting out preservatives and packaging. Quit buying canned soup and jarred sauces and make your own. Or grow a garden and eat at least some of your own fresh organic produce vs. always having to buy it.

GOAL 5 – Go at least 50% organic with your groceries.

If you’ve completed this goal up the stakes and go 80% or even 100% organic. Many families do this, and while it’s hard it’s not impossible.

Coming up, tips that can help you complete each and every one of the goals above.

If you’re looking to go green this year, without a ton of fuss, you can! Many green goals take time, skill and willpower. However, there are also plenty of green New Year’s goals you can make that seriously take almost no effort, few funds and use up very little time.

Following are some of the easiest green New Year’s goals you can make for 2011. Commit to one or all of them. These are so easy, I promise, anyone can manage them, and although easy, these goals will still make a positive difference for your family and the earth.

GOAL 1 – Commit to a couple of organic food items: In my opinion you should buy as much organic food as possible vs. conventional, but I know that’s not a reality for every family. That said, it’s perfectly easy to purchase just two organic items. For example, this year choose to buy milk and apples in organic form – ALL the time. With this goal, it’s best to choose two food items your family eats often, over stuff you rarely eat. Maybe you’ll add more organics throughout the year, maybe not, but in any case, this is a good lesson about where to find organics when you need them. Plus this goal allows you to learn to budget for specific organics without too much pressure.

GOAL 2 – Wash your hands green: In truth, this is a four-part goal, but I swear, still REALLY easy. Washing your hand in an eco-friendly manner consists of…

1. Using plain old soap, not antibacterial soap.
2. Installing a simple (and totally inexpensive) aerator in your bathroom sink.
3. Use cloth towels, not paper towels to dry your hands.
4. Use bar soap or refill a reusable soap dispenser.

This is seriously a 100% simple goal that anyone can manage but simple as it is, it makes a large difference for the environment over a year. You ban chemicals, ban plastic dispensers (made with oil), save water and save trees. Learn all about washing your hands green and clean.

GOAL 3 – BAN store-bought ice pops! Small as they may be, store-bought ice pops add up to a whole lot of environmental problems. You’ve got boxes, wrappers and a mountain of sticks. Not to mention that most conventional ice pops contain gross high fructose corn syrup, nasty fake colors and of course, non-organic ingredients.

It’s not expensive or time intensive at all to get started with homemade ice pops at home. You need some safe molds (about $15 for two decent sets). If you have a blender great, but if not you can easily mix up ice pop flavors in a pot or other container. In the end you’ll even save money, because store-bought ice pop costs add up quickly. To get started with this goal, read the following…

• Benefits of Homemade Popsicles
• Non-Toxic Popsicle Molds for Homemade Popsicles
• 50 Amazing Homemade Popsicle Recipes & Ideas

GOAL 4 – Switch to a greener toilet cleaner: It’d be nice if you switched to all green cleaners this year, but sometimes that’s too much, so start small if you need to. Choose one toxic cleaner in your home, and quit using it. I suggest toilet cleaner. Most families I know clean their toilets more than other areas of their home. Plus conventional toilet cleaners are super gross and toxic. You have two choices here…

1. Use a sprinkle of baking soda and a dash of lemon juice plus a brush to clean your toilets.
2. Buy a green toilet cleaner. So far as store-bought toilet cleaners go, I like Seventh Generation Toilet Bowl Cleaner best.

GOAL 5 – Pick one or two stupid things you normally buy and quit buying them – forever:  People pay good money for all sorts of insanely useless items that cannot be reused or in many cases, even recycled. For example boxes of plastic drinking straws, for use at home (why!?). Or how about those tiny boxes of conventional single serve cereal for kids. Think about why you really need juice boxes or single serve medicine spoons, and if you don’t have a real reason, well, it’s not something you should be buying anymore.

Trust me, no one is perfect. I’ve bought organic granola bars in wrappers (in a box) and frozen organic veggies (in a bag) instead of fresh, but I’m working on cutting out this sort of disposable stuff. Pick just two bad products you buy and quit buying them. Later you can eliminate more, but two is a good goal to start with. If you need help figuring out what stuff to quit buying read…

• Ten incredibly lame disposable products to help trash your footprint.
• Learn to avoid commercialism.
• What if the store was out of paper towels?

If you’re looking for some more challenging goals, stay tuned. I’ll be back with some goals that are a bit harder for those of you who are up to it.

In My plan to cut out excess packaging, I discussed my plans for cutting out excess packaging this year. However, first I need to know which packaging I have that’s excessive and can be cut, so a small green home audit about said packaging is in order.

I went through my bathroom and found the following packaging – along side each I’ve made notes about which I can cut and which I’m not so sure about.

Packaging in my bathroom:

• Organic Body wash – this was an unnecessary impulse buy and one I don’t need it and two I can cut it by using unwrapped bar soap, homemade body wash, or fill a reusable container with body wash at the natural food store.
• Organic Shampoo – I rarely use shampoo and don’t need a special kind so I can get a refillable bottle instead.
• Conditioner – I have naturally curly hair (blah) and use a super charged, really good organic conditioner. Since I can’t find a decent conditioner in bulk, I don’t know if I can cut this. One option is to make my own conditioner. I make hair masques, but I’ll have to look into conditioner.
• Organic face wash – I should make my own like I used to, but not sure if I want to. I like my current face wash.
• All natural facial grains – I LOVE these facial grains, but I can make my own in a reusable container, they’re not as good IMO, but close.
• Organic shaving cream – well, I could quit shaving, or figure out how to make my own. This is a bath product I haven’t ever tried to make though, so I’m not sure. We’ll call this a maybe.
• Razors – I use recycled razors from Preserve. Right now I like shaving, so I suppose I’ll keep them, but I don’t love how the Preserve razors work. My goal is to find an eco-razor I like better.
• Bath scrubby – I usually have a washable bath scrubby in the tub, most of the time made of natural hemp – right now though for the last year I’ve been using one made with organic cotton fibers. Since I use them to death and rewash, I’m not concerned.
• Lip gloss – OMG I have so much lip gloss that it’s embarrassing. I LOVE lip gloss, especially my Tarte lip gloss. I think though what I’ll do is just commit to buying new Tarte and one take along organic lip gloss when I run out, then recycle the packaging. Another option is to make my own lip gloss more often.
• Deodorant – This is one of the biggest baddies in my bathroom. I don’t buy organic or natural because I’ve never found one I like that works. Trust me, I’ve tried a ton too.  The perfect goal would be to find a healthier one that works in less packaging, but I’m not holding my breath.
• Cosmetics – I actually own very few cosmetics. I don’t really wear make-up much due to the excess packaging and time involved. I have maybe 4-5 organic products, but they were all sent to me by companies for reviews and all have recyclable packaging. However, it’s not like I’m out there buying cosmetics.
• Body lotions – I actually have two bottles of lotion right now, (impulse buys) which is not cool. I used to buy only bulk lotion. However, I think what I’ll do here is switch over to just using my organic soy lotion bars. I LOVE these bars and the packaging is not only reusable but recyclable.
• Face lotion – I hate my current face lotion, and frankly don’t use it much. It’s an organic brand that turned out to be lame. I would like a good face lotion, but I think I’ll stick with making my own unless I can find a brand I actually like that comes in recyclable packaging.
• Q-tips – not organic, and come in lame packaging. I’ve never seen them in bulk though, but I bet could find them in organic cotton. They’d still have the packaging though, but I use them for various things, so I’m not sure I’d give them up.
• Nail polish remover and nail polish – this along with the deodorant above is a big bad, but I like cute nail colors. Darn it. I need to switch over to just using more natural brands of both. Goal – better brands and just a couple of colors.
• Female products – I actually have various sorts; reusable pads, organic tampons, and organic pads. I should cut out all non-reusable pads, which I never used to use ever (not sure why I half switched? Lazy maybe). There are lots of options that are not disposable, so being lazy is a bad excuse.
• Hand soap – I always buy bulk soap and refill my refillable container, so I’m doing good here.
• Toothbrush and toothpaste – I only buy recycled toothbrushes from Preserve and I recycle them when I’m done. I’m not sure what to do about the toothpaste situation. I currently use Tom’s of Maine cinnamon clove paste with fluoride. I know the debates about fluoride, but I’m on the side of it’s better. I’m not sure if I could make my own. I’ll look into it, because it would cut out the packaging. However, one good thing is that the tubes are recyclable so maybe this is some packaging I could keep.
• Floss – my dental floss comes in plastic packaging and while I do toss it in the recycling bin, I’m not 100% sure it’s recyclable. I need to cute out floss packaging, but since I don’t know anything about it, I’ll need to look into it.
• Oils – I don’t use perfume, but I do use essential oils. The packaging is recyclable though, and I use them to make homemade beauty products, so I won’t be cutting them. Note, I rarely buy them.
• Hair ties and clips – I use little plastic bands and plastic hair clips right now if I want to wear my hair pulled back. I could quit that and just use a piece of cut hemp like I used to.
• Comb – I have a plastic comb, which will probably last many more years. I should buy a more sustainable, non-plastic version the next time I need one though.

Whew. That’s a lot of bathroom stuff, and I’ve got a lot less than most people I know, which is scary. All in all my audit revealed the following…

• There’s some non-reusable packages I can cut. Shampoo, lip gloss, body wash, and facial grains. I’ll need to get some refillable containers that are non-toxic for these products or buy less (like with the lip gloss).
• I need to research floss and see what’s out there that’s eco-friendly.
• My bathroom is pretty non-toxic overall. I use mostly organic products, but I could find a better, more eco-friendly versions of deodorant, cotton swabs, and nail care products.
• I need to do away with non-reusable female care products and plastic hair clips and bands.
• I need to find out if it’s possible to make homemade organic shaving cream.

If I do all this, it’ll save on lots of packaging and result in a healthier bathroom overall. Coming up soon, I’ll run green home audits for packaging in the kid’s bathroom, kitchen, and pantry too.

Now, is there any excess packaging in your bathroom that you could cut?

When taking on a new eco-challenge, it’s smart to have a plan in place. I did it when I made major changes before like stopping all paper towel use and instigating reusable grocery bags. Since my next big challenge is to cut out more packaging, I’m in the process of planning which hopefully will increase my household’s chances for success.

My game-plan to cut out more packaging is pretty simple…

1. Locate areas in my house where we are buying too much packaging.
2. Decide what we could buy un-packaged (i.e. using reusable bulk bags or containers).
3. Get enough containers and reusable bulk bags (I don’t have enough on hand right now).
4. Talk to the rest of the household about packaged goods and what they’re willing to cut and not cut.
5. Start using those containers and bags more and buying packaged stuff less.

The whole reason to have a plan is one, so that I have some clear cut ideas to work with and two, so that the plan is in the back of my mind when I go shopping. Also, I have no idea how many reusable containers and bags I’ll need to pull this off. It seems like a lot.

The rooms I’m going to green audit for packaging include:

• My bathroom.
• The kids bathroom.
• The kitchen pantry.
• The cleaning cupboard.

If I can cut out at least 80% of the current packaging I have in these areas I’ll be pretty darn happy. I should have some success because I used to be much better about packaging. For years I bought only bulk soaps and baking goods as well as many other food items. Over the last couple of years I’ve gotten away from that. Next up, I’m going to make some lists of the packaged goods I have in these rooms noted above and post them so I can keep track of what changes I realistically can make.

Green audits are pretty darn easy to conduct. With any audit you simply investigate and assess a situation, person, organization, system, process, company or enterprise, product, or project. Whew, which sounds heavy duty, but it’s really not that tough.

The end result of a green audit is not change, but the tools to create change. For example you can do a green home trash audit, but all you’re doing is gathering information about your trash and recycling methods and habits. After the fact is what matters. You can take the information gained from an audit and ignore it or use the information to focus on areas where you could change or be more efficient.

While all families are different, and thus will have different audit results, there are still components of any typical green audits that will apply to everyone.

Benefits of a green audit

An audit clues you in to how you’re currently living, what sort of consumer you are, or gives you powerful information about a green company or product. It tells you how you, your home and your community, among other things stack up – i.e. are you a green champion or a green liability?

Using a green audit

• Once you conduct a green audit, you don’t necessarily have to change anything. If you’re perfectly content with the results, then good. In most cases though a green audit will reveal areas that could be changed for the better.
• If you’re not thrilled with your green audit results you can use the information to actively change how you’re living or change up the habits you’re used to.

To sum up a well conducted green audit can show you where your family is doing well and not so well with green living. It’ll allow you to gather the tools necessary to make positive green changes. Coming up soon we’ll be looking at some various green audits focused on your home, your child’s school, your consumer habits and more. Hopefully your family will be able to participate in some of these green audits. If so keep in mind that you don’t have to change the green scope of your home or life in a single day, week, month, or year. Green audits can really freak folks out, because they can seem overwhelming, but green changes that are gradual are still changes and still positive.

Stay tuned for some cool green audits for everyone in your family.