• Each organic cotton T-shirt you buy eliminates the use of 150 grams of agricultural chemicals
• Avoid filling up your kettle if you only want to use it to make a single cup of tea or coffee. Not only does it take longer when you do this, but it also runs up your electricity.  Only boil what you need
• More than 8 billion disposable cups are thrown out every year in Canada, according to Change The World for Ten Bucks: 50 Ways To Make A Difference. Buy one of our Stainless Steel Thermal Mugs and take it with you on your next coffee run
• Drink Tap Water.  Carry our Sustainable Stainless Steele bottle with you wherever you go to avoid any potential problems with leaching into your drink
• Take a shower instead of a bath. As nice as it is to have a long soak after a hard day at work, a shower is much more economical. 5 minutes in the shower as opposed to having a bath will save approx 400 litres of water every week
• Purchase foods with less packaging: Many convenience foods on the market today use an unnecessary amount of packaging
• Go paperless. Consider reading your newspaper and magazine subscriptions online. Switch to electronic banking and credit card payment, too
• Use rechargable batteries: Over 2 billion household batteries a year containing toxic metals such as mercury, cadmium and nickel will end up in the landfill where they can leach into groundwater supplies
• Don’t buy expensive chemical cleaners for your home:  keep the air you breathe clean and make your own with our MIY Green Home kit
• Remember to take one of our reusable bags or basket along when you go shopping: plastic takes approximately 100 years to degrade and in the meantime they clog our waterways and contaminate our earth
• Microwaves use less energy than if your stove so try out some different recipes and forget using the oven for the night
• Don’t throw out that toner cartridge. Instead, reuse it. About 167 million toner cartridges are dumped into landfills every year, totaling about 18 million kg of waste
• Donate unwanted items rather than sending them to a landfill.  What you consider trash could be another’s treasure
• Only run a dishwasher when it’s full & run on the economy cycle
• Avoid disposable Items.  They may be convenient but they are a waste of resources and chock full of fossil fuels.  Bring your own containers and utensils with you if you are planning on eatingout
• Buy products that use recyclable materials whenever possible
• Teach kids about the environment
• Turn off your Television and any other appliances if it is not being used, remember even when it is on standby, it is using electricity
• Put up a “No Junk Mail” notice on your mailbox. Postal carriers respect it and won’t drop off coupons, flyers and free catalogues.
• Drive at the speed limit. Slowing from 120 kilometres an hour to 100 cuts your fuel consumption by 20 per cent
• Screen savers don’t save electricity. Instead, set your computer to go into sleep mode when you aren’t actively using it. That can cut your power consumption by five times, cutting your electricity bills by more than 500 kilowatt hours per year
• Reuse as much as possible to lessen your environmental impact. Recycling is great, but reusing is better!

Plastic Bottles:
The average person consumes 168 water bottles a year.

8 out of 10 plastic water bottles end up in a landfill.

1.5 million barrels of oil are used to manufacture a year’s supply of bottled water in the US.

26 billion bottles were sent to landfills or incinerated. In landfills, they take 400 to 1,000 years to biodegrade. During incineration, toxic chlorine gas and ash containing heavy metals are produced.

Bottled water costs 5,000 times more than tap water - despite the fact that a large percentage of bottled water is just filtered tap water. That’s up to $10 per gallon.

One Planet Forward bottle saves approx 200 bottles a year from ending up in landfills

One Planet Forward bottle saves you approx $350.00 - save money and the planet.

For soft drink giants, bottled water is now twice as profitable as their carbonated drinks.

Plastic Bags:
1 Million - Estimated number of plastic bags that are handed out worldwide each minute.

500 Billion to 1 Trillion - Estimated number of plastic bags that end up in landfills each year worldwide.

Residents of the City of Toronto alone use 800 million plastic bags annually.

A plastic bag may be used for only 15 minutes, but can take up to 1,000 years to decompose.

47 per cent of all wind-borne litter from landfills is plastic, mainly in bag form.

The two main sources of energy used to make plastic bags are oil and natural gas.

Cleaning Products:
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the air inside the typical home is on average 2-5 times more polluted than the air just outside—and in extreme cases 100 times more contaminated—largely because of household cleaners and pesticides.

More than 7 million accidental poisonings occur each year, with more than 75% involving children under age 6!

The Average American Uses about 25 Gallons of toxic, hazardous chemical products per year in their home… major portion of these can be found in household cleaning products.

According to the National Research Council, no toxic information is available for more than 80% of the chemicals in everyday-use products. Only 1% of toxins are required to be listed on labels, because companies classify their formulas as “trade secrets.”

In the past 50 years more than 75,000 chemicals have been introduced into the environment. Today 300 synthetic chemicals are found in the bodies of humans. Even newborn babies have synthetic chemicals passed on from their mothers.

More than 75,000 chemicals are licensed for commercial use. More than 2,000 new synthetic chemicals are registered every year. The EPA tallied close to 10,000 chemical ingredients in cosmetics, food and consumer products.

Very few of these chemicals were in our environment or our bodies just 75 years ago.
In 2000, major American companies dumped 7.1 billion pounds of 650 different industrial chemicals into our air and water.

Within 26 seconds after exposure to chemicals such as cleaning products , traces of these chemicals can be found in every organ in the body. At any given time, there is 3.36 million tons of household hazardous waste to contend with in our country.

Over 80 percent of adults and 90 percent of children in the United States have residues of one or more harmful pesticides in their bodies.

Cotton Farming:
Of all insecticides used globally each year, the estimated amount used on traditional cotton: 25%.

Five of the top nine pesticides used on cotton in the U.S. (cyanide, dicofol, naled, propargite, and trifluralin) are KNOWN cancer-causing chemicals. All nine are classified by the U.S. EPA as Category I and II— the most dangerous chemicals.

In the U.S. today, it takes approximately 8-10 years, and $100 million to develop a new pesticide for use on cotton. It takes approximately 5-6 years for weevils and other pests to develop an immunity to a new pesticide.

600,408 tons of herbicides, insecticides, fertilizers, fungicides, and other chemicals were used to produce cotton in 1992 in the 6 largest cotton producing states. (Agricultural Chemical Usage, 1992 Field Crops Summary, USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service)
The problems with clothing production don’t stop in the field. During the conversion of conventional cotton into clothing, numerous toxic chemicals are added at each stage— silicone waxes, harsh petroleum scours, softeners, heavy metals, flame and soil retardants, ammonia, and formaldehyde— to name just a few.

Energy and Recycling:
One recycled aluminum can saves enough energy to power a television or computer for 3 hours or a 100-watt light bulb for 20 hours. A six-pack of recycled aluminum cans saves enough energy to drive a car 5 miles.

Recycling one glass bottle saves enough energy to light a 100-watt light bulb for 4 hours.

Recycling a one-gallon plastic milk jug will save enough energy to keep a 100-watt bulb burning for 11 hours.

Recycling one pound of steel conserves enough energy to light a 60-watt bulb for 26 hours.

Recycling a one-foot high stack of newspapers saves enough electricity to heat a home for 17 hours.