Being Green can be really easy sometimes....

The average person uses over 700 pounds of paper each year and over 90% of the paper is made from virgin tree fiber. It takes between 2 – 3.5 tons of trees (17 mature trees) to make 1 ton of writing or printing paper and uses more natural resources than producing recycled paper. So, use recycled paper when ever you can and try this with your printed paper.

1. Only print things you absolutely need to print. Save documents on your hard drive or a disk versus printing on paper.

2. Once you have printed something and are done with it DON’T THROW IT AWAY. Turn it over, put it on a clipboard or secure with an alligator clip and use it for scratch paper or note pads. We have been doing this for almost a year now and have not purchased any lined note pads for over a year.
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If you are like me you probably have several pairs of old athletic shoes, running shoes, cross trainers or just plain old athletic shoes lying around the house or in your closet. I usually rotate these shoes from current running shoes to yard work shoes to the trash and then repeat the pattern. That was until I found out about a cool program sponsored by Nike. Nike has a program called NIKEGO that helps promote healthier lifestyles for kids by encouraging physical activity. Part of the NIKEGO (www.nikego.com) is a program called Reuse-A-Shoe (www.nikereuseashoe.com) that recycles old athletic shoes and turns them into sports courts covered with a surface called Nike Grind. Nike Grind is a soft, safe sports court surface made from the remains of the old shoes they receive. Nike began this program in 1993 and has built over 170 sports courts in communities around the world. This benefits us in several ways the least of which is to provide safe surfaces for kids to play on and it keeps hundreds of thousands of old shoes out of our landfills. Now you can turn your smelly old shoes into something useful for kids and beneficial to the environment by participating in this program, so join with us and be part of the solution! You can also mail your old shoes to Nike Recycle Center, C/O Reuse a Shoe at 26755 SW 95th Ave, Wilsonville, OR 97070.

Contributed by Gary Hillery, owner of www.thegreenpathcompany.com
Thanks Gary, another great article!