We’re so excited! Earth Day is coming up on April 22^nd. Around here, we simply aren’t capable of limiting our Earth celebration to just one day. So we’ve taken it upon ourselves to call April “Earth Month” and we’ll be sharing eco-tips and activities all month long on the blog. Once a week, we’ll feature a fun kid-oriented and earth-friendly project. First up is a compact herb garden planted in an aluminum can from your recycling bin (though you might want to give it a rinse first!). This is a fun way to get the kids (or your inner child) gardening and recycling all at once.

Herbs are a healthy and tasty way to add fresh flavor to your favorite dish, salad, marinade or even sorbet. Herbs also contain vitamins, minerals and antioxidants like all fruits and vegetables. And they’re simple and fun to grow with a quick payoff.

To ensure you’ve got everything you need to begin, gather your materials and then spread them out on your work area. This project can be done just about anywhere — at the kitchen table, on a deck or patio, or in the yard.

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As the holiday season comes to a close, we want to give thanks for all of the great feedback on our Tips for Greener Holidays series of blog posts. If everyone was taking the steps our readers are, we’d make a huge dent in that stat about North Americans producing 25% more waste during this time of year. It’s so wonderful to know, judging by your comments, that our customers are so environmentally conscious!

Now, we’ve talked about pre-cycling, party planning, holiday cards, holiday lights, Christmas trees and wrapping already. If you have implemented some of these tips, you may not have a giant mess to clean up!

Here are a few simple things you can do to green up your clean up:

• Compost your real tree and reuse your artificial tree.
• Recycle (or store for reuse) your holiday cards and gift-wrap.
• Use rechargeable batteries instead of regular ones. I know that they can be problematic at times – if you don’t charge them right before using them, they can slowly lose their charge and not work when you need them. Plan ahead!
• For regular batteries, please recycle them instead of letting them end up in the landfill. You can find info on how and where to recycle at earth911.com.
• Did you get a new computer or other electronic equipment? Donate your old stuff! Here in Central Texas, Goodwill has a great program where they take all electronic equipment and try to reuse it…and if they can’t, they recycle it. Who does this in your city? Computers With Causes looks like a really good resource.
• How many of you got new phones? If you’re ready to recycle your old phone, PDA, cell phone batteries, chargers, or other accessories  – the Environmental Protection Agency website has a special section all about recycling these items. Don’t forget to double check that your personal data is cleared from the phone before you recycle it!
• Did you get a gift card? After you use it, don’t throw it away. Bring it to any Whole Foods Market and we will recycle it for you! (Learn about our recycled gift cards).

Okay, I know you all have green ideas too. What other suggestions do you have to help us all clean up the after-holiday mess?

How are you doing with all of our green holiday tips so far? We’ve covered “Green Holidays” tips on party planning, holiday cards, holiday lights, precycling and Christmas trees. North Americans produce 25% more waste during the winter holidays – that’s 25 million extra tons of garbage going to the landfill. The Whole Foods Market Green Mission Team has gathered our favorite tips to feature on this blog throughout the holidays to help us all reduce our load. Our customers are some of the greenest folks around, so please share your tips with us too. Hopefully we’ll help each other discover new and creative ways to live lighter on the planet this holiday season.

Gift Wrap

If you’ve ever seen a typical living room on Christmas morning, you already know that gift wrap is a HUGE issue for greening our holidays. We’ve heard that if every family in America reused just two feet of holiday ribbon, we’d have 38,000 miles – enough to tie a bow around the planet. Wouldn’t that be a nice gift?

• Reuseable gift bags are perfect for eliminating waste.
• Better yet, use A Better Bag – it’s sturdy and can be reused over and over and over again. We have smaller ones for 79 cents and the large ones are 99 cents. A greatdeal for reusable gift wrap that doubles as a present!
• Decorate an unwrapped gift with reused ribbons and bows or dried grasses and flowers.
• Use a pretty dish towel, an old scarf, fabric scraps or a bed sheet to wrap gifts of all sizes.
• Use old calendar photos to wrap smaller gifts.
• If you do buy wrapping paper, make sure it’s made from post-consumer recycled paper and is non-metallic. Less ink and non-shiny surfaces make it easier to recycle.
• Use string, ribbon or wool for wrapping gifts rather than sticky tape. The string and paper can then be reused.
• Shipping a fragile gift? Instead of Styrofoam packing peanuts, use unbuttered popcorn. Got peanuts with your present this year? Drop off clean Styrofoam peanuts and bubble wrap for reuse at mailing companies.

Now, it’s your turn. What green gift wrap tricks do you have up your sleeve?

Before you get the party (planning) started, check out our previous Green Holidays tips on precycling, holiday cards, holiday lights, and Christmas trees.

North Americans produce 25% more waste during the winter holidays – that’s 25 million extra tons of garbage going to the landfill. The Whole Foods Market Green Mission Team has gathered our favorite tips to feature on this blog throughout the holidays to help us all reduce our load. Our customers are some of the greenest folks around, so please share your tips with us too. Hopefully we’ll help each other discover new and creative ways to live lighter on the planet this holiday season.

Holiday Parties

At least 28 billion pounds of edible food are sent to the landfill each year. Isn’t that amazing? Especially considering much of that can be composted. This year, let’s all challenge ourselves to green those holiday parties and try to make them zero waste. Who knows? If you set a good example for your guests they may take some of your green ideas home with them and keep the momentum up in 2011.

• Send e-cards or e-mail instead of paper invitations.
• Rent dishes or glassware to avoid using disposables.
• Or, go with compostable disposables.
• Host a “Bring Your Own Bowl” party,where guests supply their own reusable dish.
• Support sustainable farming practices bycooking with natural and organic ingredients.
• Consider hosting a party featuring food that has travelled less than 150 miles to get to your hometown.
• Turn down the heat before the guests arrive. The extra body heat will heat the room while you save energy.
• Recycle and compost everything you can. Set up recycling bins for bottles and cans. If composting is available in your area, put out a bin for compostables.
• Walk, ride your bike, snowshoe, ski, car-pool or take the bus to neighborhood parties.
• Keep an eye on the buffet table and make sure nothing sits out longer than two hours – this will help prevent having to throw out the food that’s no longer safe to eat.
• Pack leftovers to go for your guests. Freeze what you can’t give away! Make sure no food goes to waste.

Now, it’s your turn. What tips do you have for making holiday parties and gatherings as green as can be?

The holidays are a time of joy and celebration, of getting together with family and friends and sharing the gifts of the season. This is also the most wasteful time of the year. In fact, North Americans produce 25% more waste during this time of year than any other, which equates to 25 million extra tons of garbage going to the landfill.

The Whole Foods Market Green Mission Team has gathered our favorite tips to feature on this blog throughout the holidays to help us all reduce our load. (Check out our previous posts on trees, lights, and holiday cards.) We know our customers are some of the greenest folks around, so please share your tips with us too. Hopefully we’ll help each other discover new and creative ways to live lighter on the planet this holiday season.

Simply put, “precycling” is a form of thinking before you buy. From Wikipedia: “Precycling is the practice of reducing waste by attempting to avoid bringing into the home or business items which will generate waste.” Good luck with THAT this time of year, right?! Well, let’s break it down even more.

According to Jim McConnell, Whole Foods Market supply specialist who works in our Rocky Mountain region, “Precycling relates to what one can do to eliminate waste or prevent using a ‘disposable’ item prior to using it. An example would be to drink water from a reusable bottle, rather than buy water in a plastic bottle-even if the bottle is recyclable. This saves unsustainable resources from being used to create the bottle; and it saves the resources needed to recycle it.”

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The holidays are a time of joy and celebration, of getting together with family and friends and sharing the gifts of the season. The holidays are also a time when North Americans produce 25% more waste than any other time of the year, which equates to 25 million extra tons of garbage going to the landfill. Ho! Ho! Holy crap!

This season, we’re sharing a few favorite tips from the Whole Foods Market Green Mission Team to help us all reduce our holiday waste. (Check out our posts on greening your Christmas trees and lights.) We know our customers are some of the greenest folks around, so please share your tips with us too. Hopefully we’ll help each other discover new and creative ways to live lighter on the planet this holiday season.

Holiday Cards

Did you know that over 2 ½ billion (BILLION!) holiday cards are sold annually in the U.S.? That’s enough to fill a 10-story building with a footprint the size of a football field. And what happens to most of those cards? Yep, you guessed it, into the landfill.

Some ideas on what to do instead:

• Send e-cards or e-mails instead of paper cards. If you feel this makes you look cheap, lazy or (gasp) uncreative — add a line about your efforts to curb waste this holiday season. Who can argue with that?
• If you do send paper cards, make sure they’re printed on post-consumer recycled paper and choose non-metallic cards so they can be recycled (cards embossed with foil and envelopes with a foil insert are not recyclable).
• Make your own greeting cards from your household paper items normally slated for the recycling bin – bring back the art of collage!
• Reuse the greeting cards you receive as gift tags. You’re probably not planning to re-read every single card you receive this holiday. Grab some scissors and get crafty.
• Remove the fronts of your cards and send to St. Jude’s Ranch for Children Recycled Card program.

How do you “green up” your holiday greeting cards? Let us know!

The holidays are a time of joy and celebration, of getting together with family and friends and sharing the gifts of the season. The holidays are also a time when North Americans produce 25% more waste than any other time of the year, which equates to 25 million extra tons of garbage going to the landfill. Ho! Ho! Holy crap!

This season, we’re sharing a few favorite tips from the Whole Foods Market Green Mission Team to help us all reduce our holiday waste. We know our customers are some of the greenest folks around, so please share your tips with us too. Hopefully we’ll help each other discover new and creative ways to live lighter on the planet this holiday season.

Holiday Lights
Yes, we know that lights are festive, but you can find ways to save money and energy while turning on the twinkle.

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The holidays are a time of joy and celebration, of getting together with family and friends and sharing the gifts of the season. The holidays are also a time when North Americans produce 25% more waste than any other time of the year, which equates to 25 million extra tons of garbage going to the landfill. Ho! Ho! Holy crap!

This season, we’re sharing a few favorite tips from the Whole Foods Market Green Mission Team to help us all reduce our holiday waste. We know our customers are some of the greenest folks around, so please share your tips with us too. Hopefully we’ll help each other discover new and creative ways to live lighter on the planet this holiday season.

Christmas Trees
More than 50 million trees are sold each Christmas and it’s estimated that 30 million of those end up in our landfills. This year, make mulching your mantra.

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While I know we don’t do it for the awards, it certainly feels good when others recognize the importance Whole Foods Market places on green issues. Just last night, we received a Green Power Partner of the Year award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for the third time. We were one of only four organizations— and the only grocer — to win the award. We’re honored, and it’s certainly a tribute to the many who have been leading our green mission efforts for so long. Read the rest of this entry »

Jim is our Store Supplies and Services Specialist for Whole Foods Market’s Rocky Mountain Region.

Our 30th birthday celebration got me thinking about some of the great green changes we’ve implemented over the years: buying in bulk (reduced packaging), company-wide recycling programs, composting, wind and solar power and eliminating plastic bags. While all of those things (and more that I didn’t mention) are great, I’m even more excited about what we can do in the next 30 years!

What you may not think about is that those big changes all started out with a lot of research, trial and error, and working with suppliers and experts to figure out how to make change happen. And that’s exactly what we are doing currently with Styrofoam trays. Now, I don’t have a big announcement to make. We are in the trial stages on this, but I thought you might be interested in reading about some of the process involved with assessing our options. A good thing about Whole Foods Market is that we invest the time, energy and dollars into making change happen. Once we get things going, other retailers come on board and we’ve changed the way business operates. Read the rest of this entry »