5 Simple Ways to Help Protect Our Planet (and in some cases out wallets!)

“The geometry issue” by pensivepeacock on Polyvore

Tube Top: H&M || Skirt: Gap (this was a dress from a clothing swap, ofcourse 😉 || Shoes: Gap Outlet Store

Today’s outfit post was inspired by Earth Day (and this Polyvore set), which just passed a couple of days ago on April 22nd. The pictures were taken at my friend’s building’s green roof. They are growing all sorts of wonderful veggies up there and when they are ready to be picked they will be distributed amongst residents and others interested in taking part in their share program. Pretty cool for a building in the middle of NYC, huh? So how can we do our little parts in helping to protect and preserve this wonderful planet of ours? Some things i already do are:

• Bring my coffee or tea to work in a thermal mug.

• Carry a reusable water bottle instead of buying disposable bottles of water .

• Bring my lunch to work in reusable tupperware. I save so much money by bringing my lunch and coffee/tea to work, its actually one of the tips i often give my clients that i advice financially.

• Take part in clothing swaps. My readers will already know that this is one of my favorite ways to save money on clothing, but it’s also good for the environment because it keeps good clothing out of land fills.

But, speaking of clothing and textiles, did you know that those should be recycled too?! For some reason this is one thing i had not thougth to do before. We all know that recycling bottles and news papers is a great way to protect our environment and are pretty familiar with how to do it, but i find that clothing and textiles are not as easy to know what to do with. So for my 5th simple way to help protect our environment, which i will have to start to do too:

• Find a clothing and textiles recycling program near you. According the non-profit organization GrowNYC ʺNYC residents discard 193,000 tons of textiles every year.ʺ And thats only one city! GrowNYC has a clothing and textiles recycling program, and according to them these items are either donated to be reused if it’s in good condition, or it is sold to be reincarnated into a plethora of things, such as rags.

So what are some ways you take care of our lil’ ol space in space?

Yours in Inspiration,

Wendy Coral

P.S. The cute dog, location and pictures were all courtesy of my my friend Josie Bisono, whom took the Shop your Closet Challenge a few posts ago :). Thanks for being such good sports, Rocky and Josie!

It’s Electric

My friends and i recently had a clothing swap where i acquired the green striped button up that i’m wearing in today’s photos. As times have gotten harder financially, and we’ve grown older and wiser, we’ve become more interested in finding ways that we can spend time together without spending a fortune. Admittedly in our younger years one of our favorite pass times was “window shopping”, and the reason i put that in quotation marks is because we rarely only looked at clothes from the windows. We were more likely to spend way more than our budgets allowed on impromptu shopping sprees. I’ve benefitted quite a bit from our new found interest. Quite a few of the pieces i’ve styled for the blog have come from clothing swaps, and friend’s no-longer-want piles, like the shirt in this post and the short sleeve sweater in this post. If you and your friends are looking for creative ways to add new pieces to your closets and save money all at once, i highly recommend doing clothing swaps! You can even take them one step further by timing them with each season.

This bright green J Crew button up truly came just in time for me. Turns out electric colors are right on trend for Spring 2013. I paired it with a navy cable knit sweater from Gap, Mossimo boyfriend jeans from Target, nude Dolce Vita pumps via Marshall’s, and tiny shoulder bag from Zara. The gorgeous necklace is Amrita Singh via Gilt.com.

Are you inspired to plan a clothing swap with your friends? If you do, come back and share all your great finds!