Graduating with a B

For graduation gifts, I turned to Plan B (as in B Corporations).

One of my cousins graduates from high school this year, and my gifts to her are slightly out of the ordinary. First, I made a donation to the Arbor Day Foundation, which will now plant 20 trees in her name. (To learn more about this program, click here.) In addition, my cousin will receive products from Klean Kanteen, which I previously blogged about here, and Ecobags, which I covered here.

What Klean Kanteen and Ecobags represent led me to choose them to celebrate my cousin's accomplishment. Both companies are B Corporations, which commit to socially and environmentally ethical ways of operating. Check out a video describing B Corporation certification below, and click here for more information:



In college and her life beyond, my cousin will make a positive impact on the world, and I wanted her graduation gifts to do the same. The Arbor Day Foundation's trees will stand and mark her achievement for years, and she'll have responsibly made, reusable items that replace disposable ones, decreasing her planetary footprint.

If you're still searching for graduation gifts, consider taking this opportunity to "B" different.

It's in the Bag

Hopefully, you are already on the reusable-shopping-bag side of good and evil (well, maybe that's a little dramatic). If you're not, seriously consider making the move.

Besides requiring oil for their production, plastic shopping bags get annoying when they start building up in your home (if you are collecting them to be recycled), go into landfills with the trash, or blow around on the wind. If you buy some reusable bags, you'll get to sidestep these annoyances and, sometimes, receive a discount on your shopping (Safeway gives a three-cent discount per bag). Plus, the planet will feel better knowing it has fewer plastic bags to deal with and less demand for oil.

However, the traditional reusable shopping bag is not really the focus of this post. Whether you use those bags or not, you have likely heard about or seen them. Less known is the reusable produce bag. It may receive less attention, but it will help you earn additional Brownie points with the planet and use even fewer plastic bags.

Even if you are using reusable shopping bags, you might be bringing home some plastic bags that you use to contain fruits and vegetables. The cotton produce bags made by Ecobags are great. Mine are still going strong after two years, and checkers at the store constantly ask where I got them. They are lightweight, so they don't add a lot of extra money to your by-the-pound purchases, and they are thin enough that checkers can look through them to see the little plastic identification stickers on the produce.

Ecobags' produce bags are available at Amazon.com. You can also visit their Web site by clicking here.

Ecobags also makes reusable shopping bags if you are in the market for those as well.