We as a family have made a choice to try to reduce our carbon footprint.  We want to start making a difference today so that our kids and grandkids can enjoy this earth for a long, long time!  I know that we are not the only ones going down this road, there is a large demand for eco-friendly products out there. 

So much demand that it can become overwhelming!!  Not to mention expensive.  We are a family of 7 and have a modest, middle of the line income.  At first, when we were thinking of ways that our family could contribute to the eco movement, it all seemed so expensive.  Then we got creative!!

Here is a list of things we have done (or plan to implement soon) to do our part.

• One of the first things we changed was our laundry soap.  Being a large family we found that we were going through so much of it.  At $3.00 a jug, that lasted no more then 10 days, we were spending quite a bit on a product that we couldn't pronounce most ingredients of...so now we make homemade laundry soap.  It is awesome and I can't picture us going back, ever!!  There are so many different choices out there, and you have to just experiment to find out what works best for your family.  This is close to what we make: Homemade Laundry Soap
• Another thing that we have changed, as I think a lot of people have done, is switch from plastic bags to cloth bags.  Usually you buy the cloth/reusable bags for about a dollar each, to save that money we watch for them when they are being offered for free from different companies.  They get to advertise and I get a free bag!!  It works for us.  We use them for everything from groceries to library books.  Another way that we have gotten around buying plastic bags is, my son delivers our local flyers.  They always come in garbage pail size bags that we were just throwing out.  Instead we are reusing them as our garbage bags and in the process saving money!!
• Something we have talked about changing are our toilets.  We think it would be beneficial, to our water bill and to our earth, if we were to switch to the low flow toilets.  I believe that our region has a program where they will refund up to $80 of our purchase if we buy the type of toilet that is included in their program.  We are still looking into this.  In the meantime, we have put a full water bottle with some sand in it, in our toilet tanks, this way we are using less water, since the bottle displaces the amount that goes in.  You can read about this idea and find out some more info on it here 
• We have 5 kids at home right now.  4 of them are in school and the last one will be there soon enough.  I had homeschooled for 6 years and we never had to pack lunches or worry about field trip money.  The kids started school 3 years ago and boy was it eye opening!!  We have gone through so many plastic baggies.  You know, you send them with the kids to school with sandwiches, but they also work great for field trip money and forms, pizza money, milk money and just about anything else that you don't want the kids to lose.  They are not cheap, even when you buy them at the dollar store, especially when you go through them as fast as we were.  There is a mom who had a brilliant idea and she is approaching schools to do their part by using her organic green totes to transport all these things to and from the school.  They sell for such an affordable price, I am going to be approaching our school about implementing this idea.  You can see what they are like over at Green School.
• One final thing that we we do religiously here, seeing as my husband is a "sanitation engineer" (garbage man), is we recycle and use our organic bins, a lot!!  We try to keep our actual garbage to a minimum and we do a really good job of it.  I guess that our recycler doesn't enjoy doing our house, since we always have at least 6 blue boxes out there.  Every little bit counts though.

These are just a few ways that we are implementing in our family.  We know that we, as individuals, can't change the whole world, but we can definitely make a difference in our little corner of it.