Cleaning and Greening

Ablefamilies — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 10:14:20 GMT

This spring and summer ABLE is cleaning and greening. In an effort to be more environmentally conscious and improve our facility, ABLE will strive to make greener choices.

We are experimenting with eco-friendly hypoallergenic cleaning products like Sun and Earth. However, this switch may not be as easy as it seems. You see, our maintenance man is a bleach guy, and he is not sure that products less than that will make anything clean. The rest of us are hoping these new cleaning products will make a small impact on our polluted watershed and set an even better example in our community. The Clorox company's newest addition, Green Works, might just please everyone.

And we are not stopping with cleaning products. We plan to teach our afterschool children about composting so that they can put their snack scraps in a system that they can set up. We've been thinking about doing a worm compost, just to make it a bit more interesting.

Then there are our paper products. Have you heard of paper products made from sugar cane waste? Well, there are such things. They are biodegradable so if they don't become worm food (in our composter), at least they won't hang around on dump sites very long. Of course, they are more expensive than the ones you pick up at the Dollar General Store. Have you ever noticed that life is full of trade-offs?

Most of our lighting is pretty energy efficient, except for a few bulbs in the kitchen. We are going to try to replace our incandescent lights with compact fluorescent bulbs soon. And "way down the pike," we would like to replace the aging carpet that fills our building with a material like cork or bamboo that will attract less indoor pollutants. And maybe in another life, we will replace our cars with hybrids. ...unless, of course anyone out there would like to donate us one right now.

We are doing our best to reduce our carbon footprint, but we have to agree with Kermit, the Frog, when he says, "It ain't easy being green."

ABLE Families' Afterschool

Cleaning and Greening