Green Year Resolution

In 2009 I decided to include a few items on my resolutions list to make a difference in my only home, our planet Earth. Today I look back at them and see that yes, we can all have a HUGE impact in our planet if we change even one little habit. Here were my goals (and how they developed) one year ago:

- Eat less meat: since livestock production causes 18-19% of green house gases, I decided to go from a 100% Brazilian carnivore to eating meat once or twice a month, it worked out, I may say that I wasn't always perfect but my HDL cholesterol came up at 91 (the maximum is 90!), so I call it a success
- Bring my own utensils to work: yup, I used to use 3 plastic utensils every working day (spoon, fork and knife) and realized that my footprint was gigantic, that's an average of 750 utensils per year! If 99 other people joined me, our impact would be 75,000 less plastic utensils on the landfill yearly. Mind boggling.
- Pick one trash from the floor per day: yes sometimes I do forget, but so far I've "harvested" a few full bags of trash. As some of my friends saw me doing it, they started to do the same. Lead by example!
- Bring back my fruits scraps to compost: yes I was being bad and throwing them in the garbage at work, but it was such a simple act to put the peels back into the bag that over a year, I've composted several pounds of fruits scraps that would otherwise become methane in our landfills...

My 2010 goals:
- I'll volunteer for one green non-profit per month
- I won't eat any shrimp, for every 1lb of shrimp that big ships scrape the bottom of the ocean for, they kill and destroy 12lbs of other ocean life. Until there's a sustainable and natural solution I won't eat shrimp.
- I'll try to go plastic free for one month. This will raise my own awareness to how much we're depended on plastic and will make me look for better alternatives for it!

If you can take one idea and implement it on your resolutions list, we'll together make a big difference in the end!