Green Dreams

I suppose I ought to go into some sort of personal decisions I've made, so some of my actions will make more sense.

I am a "green" person at heart. There are things I am doing every day to make myself feel better about how I am living. I am a vegetarian, and though I started being a veg because of health reasons, I don't see me going back to my old ways anytime soon after learning so much. I now know too much about the meat industry to feel that it's personally okay for me to eat meat. That is a personal decision and I have nothing wrong with people eating meat in front of me or in general, I just do not.

Recycling is an important issue for me, and I have slacked greatly on it since I have been living in this particular apartment. This will change dramatically when I move this month. I am starting a recycling program at our store and have everything set-up, I just need to finish my follow-through and get it going and get people involved with it. It will be clean and organized, so people won't be offended or disgusted by throwing a bag of recyclables into their personal vehicle and running it up to the recycling place up the road.

A co-worker asked me the other day if I knew of any shampoos that did not test on animals, and I did not so I looked it up! Once I found what I was looking for, I couldn't help myself and had to keep reading and learning more about companies that do test on animals. It is ridiculous how many companies test on animals, and so many of the mainstream ones. Like organic foods, and anything else that's good for you and everyone/thing else, it is often more expensive to purchase these cruelty-free products. As a personal decision, it means more to me to now purchase these products and spend more money on them than to go on purchasing the ones that continually do harm.

A similar, fairly infrequent purchase of mine would be milk and eggs. I only buy organic and free-range/cage-free eggs. I know too much about what happens to those animals to buy any other way, and not to mention it's better for me to not ingest all of those hormones, antibiotics and chemicals that these products are often consumed by. I am also working on eventually buying all organic foods, but unfortunately my budget doesn't cover my complete green dreams. Perhaps one day. Right now I will focus on my personal products and cleaners, and the big ones like eggs and milk that are consumed so widely.