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Recycle Those Birthday Cards

My daughters recently turned 1 and 3 and only 2 weeks apart!  I had a birthday party for both of them on the same day and invited family and friends to our home.  The girls received many great birthday cards and gifts.  After the party I was looking through the birthday cards and noticed that they were just to cute to just throw out.  I decided to cut the fronts of the cards off and set them aside to use as recycled birthday cards.

If you want to do this too… All you need to do is cut down the fold of the card and save the front half.  Throw out the back half.  When you are ready to reuse the card just write your message on the back of the card front.  Viola, a FREE and recycled birthday card!  You can do this with Holiday cards and greeting cards too.

You can also cut out specific images from a card, punch a small hole and use as tags for gifts.  My mother in law has been reusing cards as tags for many years, especially on her Christmas gifts.

By reusing greeting cards you can save $2.00 – $5.00 per card and more!  Let the savings begin.

Other great ideas for reusing greeting cards and birthday cards:

1. Cut out images from a card that you like and attach to a gift as a decoration.

2. Cut a card into strips, laminate and use as bookmarks.  Great as gifts too!

3. Cut cards into various shapes and use in a scrapbook or in a photo album.

4. Turn your cards into postcards….View how here.

5. Cut a section from a greeting card and write a note to your child and place in their lunchbox.

6. Use card cutouts as name tags at a holiday dinner table.

Some neat faq’s about greeting cards:

Americans buy almost 7 billion greeting cards annually, representing close to $7.5 billion in retail sales. Like most forms of paper, greeting cards impact the environment adversely during their disposal and production alike, initially consuming virgin resources (trees, water, fuel) before ending up in landfills as part of the approximately 85 million tons of paper waste generated by Americans in 2006.

Recycling greeting cards, which can be done in communities that accept mixed paper in their recycling programs, is one way to keep greeting cards out of the waste stream. Reusing greeting cards is another, creative way to keep them out of landfills. The fewer greeting cards purchased to begin with the less their environmental impact. If all Americans trimmed their card list by only one card, the savings would amount to 50,000 cubic yards of paper.


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Paperless Paper Towels….Save the trees

I know what you are thinking, “stop using paper towels…are you crazy!”.  Really, it is not that crazy at all.  You may be addicted to the convenience of the paper towels you have hanging in your kitchen, but really, do you know how many tree’s were cut down just so you can have the convenience of wiping up some spilled juice off the counter?  The reality is that about 90% of households use paper towels on a daily basis and that produces 3,000 tons of waste each day in paper towels alone.  That is 3.4 million cubic feet of landfill space and 864,000 trees per year.

If you could replace your paper towels with a paperless solution such as cloth wipes, cloth hand towels or even just a kitchen sponge you would be helping to save the planet and the tree’s as well as saving some money.  The average cost of a roll of paper towels is $1.50 and if a household uses approximately 2 to 3 rolls per month that is on average $3.75 plus tax per month, not to mention all of the tree’s that were cut down and all of the waste you are sending to the landfill.  That is $45 per year in paper towels. Now, if you purchase cloth towels such as the Twist paper-less towels here they will cost only $4.50 plus tax and will last for many years to come, not to mention they also look pretty cool and they can absorb 10 times their weight in any liquid. Each day I use 1 cloth kitchen towel to dry my hands after a wash or to dry a dish.  At the end of the day that towel goes into the hamper.  I really only need 10 towels on hand for cleaning up messes and spills and for drying my hands.  When I do the laundry the towel goes right in with it, easy as that.

There are many options for paper-less towel solutions such as:

Organic Cotton Kitchen Hand Towels

Organic Cotton Kitchen Wipes/Swiffer Pads

Modern Kitchen Towels

Really, any kitchen towel, cloth wipe, handmade towel or rag that you have will work to replace a paper towel.  You can have custom kitchen towels made to match your home decor or you can buy pre-made towels at local stores such as The Christmas Tree Shops.  I just bought 2 sets of hand towels from the Christmas Tree Shops for $4.oo per set (5 Towels) and they have great designs on them and work great.

Try the Paper Towel Challenge and see if you can lower your paper towel usage today.

Some interesting articles about using less paper towels:

Blisstree.com
eHow.com
One Drop of Rain Campaign
Little Green Blog


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