Glacier

Here is a picture of Nat, Benjamin and Luc and Jacqueline in front of the receeding Glacier in Jasper National Park, Alberta.

Our boys/Nos garçons

For about a year and a half, Benjamin has been extremely passionate about marbles...  Here he is at the Vancouver Aquarium showing off one such treasure.  Depuis 1 an et demi Benjamin est passionné de billes...  Le voici en montrant un de ses trésors.

On est fier de Josué car il a été choisi pour participer dans 2 cérémonies de mariage cette année.  Il portait les bagues.  We are proud of our handsome Josué who was a ring bearer twice this summer!

Having Principles... a real cure to consumerism

Over the past few years as our family has been on this journey of becoming green, we have developed some serious principles....

And once these principles are in place and we stick to them, they are actually really good for our pocketbook- it is very hard to find things we can actually buy!

Here are some of the principles we've developed- a lot of them with the help of Adria Vasil's ecoholic- A fantastic read!!

1) Cotton is one of the plants that, if it's not grown organically, requires the most pesticides.  So for clothing we have a couple of choices:  organic cotton clothing or clothes made out of wool or recycled materials.

2) If we can't be certain the clothes being sold weren't made by children or people treated and paid poorly we don't buy them.

3) As much as possible we avoid plastic all together-  it has a limited capacity for being recycled, keeps putting the demand on the crazy oil and refining industry and eventually could end up taking 2000 years to biodegrade....  personally I would like my life not to leave a plastic legacy.

4) One can be proud of Canada for our lack of pollution, but if we are sourcing all our goods to China, then it is quite normal for them to have more air quality issues etc. than we do!  So as much as possible we try to buy products made in Canada, Europe where we hope the production, environmental standards are high ( you may or may not agree with me on this one- but in other words we tend to avoid made in China)

So all of these principles make walking through the mall relatively temptation free!!!  Here's an example:  H&M has some organic cotton clothing, but I won't buy from them because I can't be assured of good working conditions for the makers of their clothes!

Here are some stores we can buy from in good conscience:

Mountain Equipment Co-op (they have organic cotton and recycled polyester clothing and the labour conditions are verified by a 3rd party)
Hemp & Co  (on Vancouver Island) clothes made from organic cotton, hemp etc.  lots made in Canada.
American Apparel has some organic cotton clothing and everything is made in the USA

But the greenest store of all:  ANY thrift store!!!  So many things that aren't yet available in earth friendly materials we can buy from a thrift store and at least not be encouraging that industry - we are not in the supply and demand loop!

Hope you find this challenging and interesting!

Catherine

Green Kitchen Part 1

This past spring Nat and I got to the bottom of a leak in our kitchen.  It had been leaking for a long long time and so it rotted out our wall, floor and part of our cabinets...  Although no one jumps for joy at news of a leak (and the impending money that gets used fixing it!) we used the opportunity to do as green of a kitchen reno as we could.

The leak was coming from a plumbing vent cap that cracked, every time it rained water was trickling down along the pipe.

We did some good hard thinking and thought about the following things:

1) What will be good quality and look good (which will help with resale)?
2) What will return to nature (or biodegrade) when we are done with it (or when the next owners want to redo the kitchen again!)?
3) What will have low or no VOCs and give us good air quality in our home?

With these things in mind we decided to go as plastic-free as possible...

Here's what we decided on:

Floor:  Plain ceramic tile from Home Depot  (there was a recycled variety available a Rona but only in 2 colours, so we didn't go with it).  No VOC grout from a tile store.

Cabinets:  Solid wood and Plywood cabinets made from a local company:  Maple Ridge Woodcraft.  This meant no chipboard held together with glues that can offgas.

Countertop:  Ice stone- recycled glass and concrete surface.

Lighting:  6 potlights- LEDs with dimmers.  This thanks to our friend and Neighbour Peter- what a blessing!

Paint:  Benjamin Moore's Natura no Voc blue paint and Yolo Paints No voc cream paint.

Backsplash:  Hand-picked of the beach pebble sticks from Mosaic Stoneworks- where the owner assured us the workers were treated decently and paid decently too (we don't have 3rd party certification for this one- but the owner has been to see the conditions himself so we are trusting him on it!)

We were really blessed to have 2 of our neighbours help out: Peter & Ken.  Nat is really a lot handier after this experience!  We also redid our bathroom but I'll blog more about that later!

It was an expensive reno because we decided not to do a quick fix, but by January it will be mostly paid off!  So we have no regrets about the choices we made!    Here are some pictures!