February green tips

Green Team member Jennifer Hobbs is currently reading the book Eco-Friendly Families, by Helen Coronato. The book shares short tips we can all implement each month - things that add up to big changes over the course of a year. We're sharing these with our readers each month as well!

For February:

• If you have club soda that has gone flat, give it to your houseplants! Plants benefit from club soda's minerals, regardless of the carbonation. Instead of pouring it down the drain, share it with a leafy friend.
• Make your own natural air freshener by adding a cotton ball dipped in essential oil to your vacuum bag.
• For mopping, steep a cup of peppermint tea and squeeze in half a lemon. Combine with one cup of distilled white vinegar and swish in bucket. Once cool, mop floors clean. Vinegar is a disinfectant, the peppermint tea has antibacterial elements and helps remove scratch marks, and the lemon will act as a room freshener!

Green Disney - part 2

While walking the short trail to the Conservation Station area of Disney's Animal Kingdom, we were happy to notice handy tips for making backyard habitats - a perfect reminder that we can all make a small difference, no matter where we are!

So here, in pictures, are Disney's tips for making your yard a little greener!

Green Disney - part 1

"Landscapes of great wonder and beauty lie under our feet and all around us. They are discovered in tunnels in the ground, the heart of flowers, the hollows of trees, fresh-water ponds, seaweed jungles between tides, and even drops of water. Life in these hidden worlds is more startling in reality than anything we can imagine. How could this earth of ours, which is only a speck in the heavens, have so much variety of life, so many curious and exciting creatures?”

—Walt Disney (1901-1966)

While on our recent Disney trip, I was surprised to see several "green" initiatives being put into practice. Biodegradable cardboard straws are used instead of plastic, at least in some areas of the parks and resorts, and in-room recycling is encouraged. We found this in our hotel room on the first day:

I loved that guests were encouraged to save their plastic bottles, alumimum cans, and newspapers, and that housekeeping staff follows through with the recycling (I asked Barb, our room attendant, about this). Many of the park's garbage containers had separate disposal areas for plastic as well. Parks like Animal Kingdom and resorts like Animal Kingdom Lodge provide natural habitats for about hundreds of species, many endangered, while also educating millions of visitors. (Just last month, the AKL welcomed two Ruppell's Griffon Vulture hatchlings, the first of this threatened species bred at the Florida park.) And the trains in Disneyland now run on biodiesel fuel that starts as cooking oil in the park's restaurants and hotels.

Corporately speaking, Mickey has gone green. The Disney Worldwide Conservation Fund distributes money to nonprofit organizations worldwide that help wildlife and wild places. The popular fairy Tinkerbell is now a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Energy's "Kids Saving Energy" program. And Disney has partnered with The Nature Conservancy to create the Disney Wilderness Preserve. This 12,000-acre area offers a model of ecological restoration and is one of the largest off-site wetlands mitigation projects ever undertaken in the United States.

But Disney is quick to point out that you don't have to be a gazillion-dollar corporation to make a difference; throughout Animal Kingdom, guests get small tips here and there, all of which add up to helping preserve our planet. Next time, we'll take a look at some of these!

Pardon the interruption ...

- a personal note from LeeAnne, the Green Team member primarily responsible for all things bloggy ...

I apologize for the lack of posts the past week or so - I've been out of town on a winter vacation. I intended to put a couple of things in the blog queue, so to speak, and set them to publish automatically, but with last weekend's snow and the chaos that ensued right before we left, I just forgot all about it. So sorry!

So last week, my family and I were at Disney World! It was a belated birthday trip for our daughter, who turned five in October, and we had a truly terrific time. But as someone who's really "into" the green way of life, I'm usually pretty bothered when visiting theme parks of any sort. I tend to focus on all the consumption and accompanying waste that occurs at places like this - the overpriced food and souvenirs, the mountains of trash, the pollution-yielding cars that pour into the parking lots ... it really gets to me if I let it. So I was worried about not enjoying Disney as much as I might otherwise.

I'm happy to say that I was pleasantly surprised! I found Disney to be pretty environmentally conscious. Maybe it was where we stayed (the amazing Animal Kingdom Lodge, where there's probably more focus on conservation than at other resorts), or maybe I was just caught up in the "magic" Disney likes to trumpet, but I took note of several green initiatives, and these led to more enjoyment on my part. Is Disney perfect? Certainly not. Is there still waste, consumption, and room for improvement? Yes, yes, and yes! But overall, I was really happy with what I saw. Throughout this upcoming week, I'm going to share some of these things here with our blog readers. I hope you enjoy them - stay tuned for more!