Eating healthier made easy

In case you were unaware, http://www.shopecogoods.com/ carries the bento box lunch system which is part of the Laptop Lunches product line.  These lunch boxes, and the company Obentec, Inc., were recently featured in an article in the Wall Street Journal about executives and professionals bringing in their lunch from home while trying to retain their professional image. What’s great about this article is that is brings a new twist on who could use these products. The bento box system was originally designed by two moms who wanted to help families improve lunchtime nutrition and reduce waste, and now chief executives are utilizing the lunchbox system as a great and stylish way to bring lunch from home. I don’t know if Amy Hemmert and Tammy Pelstring ever envisioned that the concept would trickle up from school lunches to the office lunch room, but the concept absolutely lends itself to both worlds.

The Laptop Lunch system is a bento box system, which has a main compartment filled with separate containers so that each item of food can have its own space. Two of those containers also have a lid, to keep sauces or salads from leaking. What’s great about this idea is that is creates for lunchtime variety. You can be sure you provide your child a well-balanced lunch with four compartments to fill with a variety of fruits, veggies, and whole grains. I love the concept and the idea that the containers are a perfect portion size too.

We’ve chosen to sell what I think are one of their best products on the site. It’s the Bento System 2.0, which includes a bento box with the insulated carrying bag, a water bottle, all-stainless utensils, and a copy of the Laptop Lunches Use Guide. The User Guide, a $7.99 value, is a great resource for  creative menus, recipes, and practical tips. We carry this product in your choice of Berry Blue or Purple Party.

Another important note about these lunch box kits is that although they are made from plastic, they are lead, BPA, phthalates, and PVC free. Since the 2.0 Kit already comes with all-stainless utensils, there is no need for plastic utensils to be used and tossed in a landfill. All around it’s a healthy way to bring lunch to school or work. Healthy for you and the Earth!

Check out the Bento System 2.0 here.

Bento System 2.0 in Purple Party

Upcoming Events

We are going to be very busy in the next few weeks with a lot planned on the calendar. First we have an appearance planned during GreenWeek, the Eco-Friendly Celebration being sponsored by Oakleaf Waste Management in Windsor, Connecticut. This is Oakleaf’s 1st ever Green Week event planned in honor of Earth Day. There will be activities throughout the week celebrating sustainability and environmentalism. We will be there on Wednesday, April 20th, with a  table set up to provide products and information to the attendees. We are looking forward to meeting all the environmentally aware folks at Oakleaf!

Next we have our upcoming Earth Day promotion to plan and unveil. Earth Day is fast approaching and we want to do something special for the day! We are bouncing some ideas around for this and will be revealing the promotion very soon!

On a personal level, we will be planting our first family garden. I am super excited about it, but a bit nervous too because I do not have much of a green thumb. I can’t keep plants alive to save my life so I am keeping my fingers crossed for this rather large undertaking. Fortunately I have my wonderful in-laws who are going to assist in this endeavor. They already grow a plentiful garden every year and every summer we eat the benefits! We thought it would be a great idea to start one of our own to enjoy, and also to use as a learning tool for our daughters. I am hoping that if they help with the garden and see what we can actually grow from it, they might be inspired to try eating what they’ve helped to grow. We’ll see. High hopes, I know. But even still there are many great lessons that can be learned from growing a garden: taking care of something, living off the earth, etc., and I am excited to give it a go.

On May 1st we are going to join the Earthstock Connecticut event at Tunxis Community College. It will be their third year running this extraordinary event and our first time exhibiting. We had a great time attending the event last year meeting some wonderful vendors and artisans. There were performers and food vendors, and the event provided an outlet for some wonderful, local eco-friendly companies to display their wares. We are proud to be among them this year. If you happen to be in the area, please stop by our table and say hi!

Enter for a chance to win a $25 Gift Certificate

Check out the latest post from Mindful Momma! This awesome site for green moms will be hosting a giveaway for us. Visit Mindfulmomma.com and enter for a chance to win a $25 gift certificate to shopECOgoods.com!

This is our first giveaway and we are extremely excited about the feedback that we’ll receive about the site and our products.

The contest will run through midnight central time on Monday, April 11th, 2011.

Make sure you get a chance to comment/enter before it’s too late!

eCycle Your Old Cell

After I purchased my new iPhone, which I LOVE by the way, I threw my old cell phone in the dresser drawer and it landed on…another old cell phone. I have at least 3 old cell phones, with power cords, in my dresser just crying out to be used, poor things. Turns out we’re the poor things, as these old cell phones continue to seep hazardous lead, mercury, cadmium, brominated flame retardants, and arsenic into the environment, even when not being used. Now I really have to get these things outta here. 

Discarded cell phones account for nearly 65,000 tons of toxic waste each year. Cell phones are made with precious metals, copper, and plastics, all of which can be recycled to make new products. More than 500 million unwanted cell phones are awaiting disposal. With new features available every year, a cell phone’s average life is now less than 18 months, adding more than 125 million cell phones to our landfills each year or 2 million toxic mobile phones each week.  Because the United States has yet to establish federal regulations requiring mobile phone recycling, donating or recycling cell phones is at less than 1 percent.

I wasn’t sure what to do with my old phones so I headed to the good ol’ internets to help with the search. Here is what I found:

According to the EPA, there are several different ways that an old phone can be disposed of. You can contact your current service provider and see if they accept your old cell phone for recycling. Most accept drop offs at a retail location or can provide an address to mail cell phones and accessories to. Several retail stores will also accept cell phones, such as Staples, Office Depot, and even Best Buy. You can also visit the website www.call2recycle.org to find a drop off location for your old phone and batteries.

Another great way to get rid of your old cell phone is to donate it. There are several worthy causes out there that are using cell phones in life-saving or life-affirming ways. Cell Phones for Soldiers Inc. is a non-profit organization that provides free cell phones for soldiers overseas so that they can get the chance to speak to loved ones back home. Along with one of their largest contributors,  AT&T,  they also provide free talk time so that military families can reconnect.

You can also donate your old phone to help victims of domestic violence. The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence partners with ReCellular Inc. to provide collection of used cell phones. The sales of the refurbished phones directly support the programs of the NCADV. ReCellular also partners with non-profits such as Easter Seals, the March of Dimes, and Goodwill Industries that undertake cell phone collection drives as a way of funding their charitable work.

Even without a wireless service plan, donated cell phones are reusable, because any working mobile phone can dial a 911 call center (an FCC requirement).  As a result, recycled cell phones can be used as emergency lifelines for senior centers or senior citizens living alone and for women’s shelters.

However you decide to unload it, be sure to erase all data from your phone first. To ensure that personal information is cleared from your phone, you can manually delete all information and remove the SIM card, contact your service provider or phone manufacturer for instructions, or use a data erasing tool such as ReCellular’s Cell Phone Data Eraser.

Recycling one million cell phones saves enough energy to power more than 185 US households with energy for a year. Visit the EPA for more information about cell phone recycling.

We’ve Got Them!

You have been asking for them and now they are available for purchase on shopECOgoods.com! We now have the EcoDiscoveries Refill packs for the Kitchen and Bathroom cleaners! Now you can keep cleaning without buying another wasteful 32oz bottle. Simply pour the refill into the bottle you received when you purchased the refill starter kit and swirl. Voila!

Oh and be sure to check out the new lower prices for the entire line of EcoDiscoveries cleaners. Nothing beats all natural household cleaning like saving money on it too!

Happy Green Cleaning!

Save Money. Shop Online.

It’s a tough time right now for everyone. As gas prices rise people are feeling the pinch once again. People are looking for ways that they can reduce their spending in any way that they can. There was a blog post published in today’s Hartford Courant on 10 ways that one can try to save money by using less gas. The #2 item on the list is (drumroll please): Shop Online.

I have been a huge fan of online shopping ever since my second daughter was born and going to the store with two small kids was just.not.fun. Not only is it way more convenient to shop online at my leisure but I can comparison shop, read reviews, search for online coupons, all while shopping in my PJs, after the girls have gone to bed.  I wouldn’t go shopping at the mall now unless I absolutely had no other choice.

This is one of the reasons why we wanted to create www.shopECOgoods.com. Not only is it a time-saver to shop online, but the appeal of the site is that one can buy all their eco-friendly needs at one place. Yet another way to save you from shopping around to several different stores to find this collection of products, and save gas.

To read the entire list and learn some valuable gas-saving tips, check out the blog post that was reprinted in today’s Hartford Courant.

Spring Fever!

With the weather a beautifully warm 73 degrees yesterday afternoon in Plainville, it got me wanting to throw open the windows and air out this stuffy stale winter air. The girls and I spent a nice afternoon outside on the swings enjoying the warm sun and the cool breeze. This weather has me already ticking off in my head the many things we need to do to get the house summer ready. And first on the list? Spring Cleaning!

Although some would dread this task I look forward to it. If I could get the time to really clean the house, uninterrupted and unencumbered by little people with big voices and many demands, I would feel great! I bet my husband would be laughing at this post right now because he feels I do not clean nearly enough. But it’s hard to get any job done to completion with toddlers running around. He doesn’t get it.

Another fun task for spring is the closet purging. As we go through the closet turnover looking through what we didn’t wear last year and most likely won’t wear again this time around, piling up what we want to donate and/or bring to consignment, to make room for, well, just to make room.

Now is the time to pull out the appliances and clean behind them. To wash windows and curtains. To change the batteries in your smoke detectors. Martha Stewart has a nice long list of spring cleaning chores here. You can choose what on the list is most important and just how you want to go about it and what you’ll use. I find just plain vinegar and water work great on a lot of surfaces. Also, the EcoDiscoveries line of cleaners will do a wonderful job. While preparing your house for the rebirth of Spring, the last thing you want to use are chemical laden cleaners.

Even if you don’t get to do all of the items on the list, just doing some will lighten your spirit as you prepare for the beautiful Spring season ahead!

And so, with EcoDiscoveries and rags in hand I will begin the task. Bring on Spring! Our house will be ready!

www.shopECOgoods.com on Better Connecticut

I’m a little delayed in this post because so much has been going on in the last week! First, we appeared on Better Connecticut on Channel 3 WFSB. What a great opportunity for us! We had a great time meeting the hosts and crew and introducing our company to the Connecticut viewers.

We talked about the importance of protecting yourself and your family from toxins and chemicals in your household cleaners and soaps and how that translates to the environment itself. Well, that is what I would have talked about if we had more time! What we did talk about were a few of our products and why we have chosen to include them on the site. We talked about our recycled products, like the Preserve line, and our money-saving, waste reducing products, like the Wrap-n-Mats.

And then it was my lovely daughter’s 4th birthday so we had lots of party planning to do, including two birthday parties and a birthday snack for school. What a blessing we have had in our two daughters and it just amazes me to watch them grow each day. It’s such a cliché but they do grow so fast! She’s my sweet little angel with the biggest heart and I hope her birthday was everything she had hoped for.

Ok, that’s enough gushing. Back to business. So with the appearance came lots of inquiries about products and an influx of orders and just lots and lots to do. And that’s a good thing.

As I am not that computer savvy I have yet to get the video up on the store site but once its up I will link it to the blog.

In the meantime, please watch the link from the WFSB site here: http://www.wfsb.com/betterct/26953491/detail.html

Better Connecticut

So tomorrow is the big day! Tomorrow I will be appearing on an afternoon talk show called Better Connecticut to talk about shopECOgoods.com. I’m super excited to get this opportunity to talk about the site. I am however a bit nervous about appearing on camera and hope that I don’t freeze up when I am up there!

Be sure to tune in if you are in Connecticut to Channel 3 WFSB at 3 pm. I’ll attach a link to the site once it airs.

Wish me luck!

little twig

One of our best sellers in the baby department is from this very company: little twig. Moms and Dads are very concerned these days about the chemicals that they are putting on their precious little bundles of joy. And they have reason to fear. One study revealed at least seven different phthalates were found in the bodies of study participants which is great cause for concern. And out of 289 participants, every one of them tested positive for DBP, dibutyl phthalate, a commonly used plasticizer, and a suspected endocrine disruptor. (http://www.ecocenter.org/dust/Phthalate_hcwh.pdf)

A study done by the Environmental Working Group found that the use of personal care products can expose young children to up to 60 chemicals that they can breathe in or can be absorbed through their skin. (http://www.ewg.org/release/study-shows-infants-exposed-reproductive-toxins-shampoo-lotion-and-powder) Better start your kids off right.

People have been loving the little twig line of bath soaps and lotions ever since we added them to the site. I personally use them as well. My four-year old has very sensitive, easily irritated, skin and needs the extra mild unscented baby wash and bodymilk that will, in her words, “feel me better”.

little twig uses only the best organic and botanical ingredients in their line, heeding the advice of pediatricians and parents alike. Included in their line of products are shampoo and baby wash, bubble bath, diaper cream and lotions, and their highly rated, much sought after, sunscreen.

We are super happy to carry their line of products and hope that everyone loves them as much as we do. Have you tried little twig on your little ones yet? If so, what is your favorite product?