I'm big into the whole environmental-consciousness thing. I don't consider myself a tree-hugger or anything like that but I am always thinking about the ecological footprint I am leaving on our earth.

My wife and I are big recyclers and I am proud to say, my kids are also now eager recyclers. In addition to the plastics, steel and aluminum, all paper that comes through our house from tissue boxes (we tear out the plastic opening at the top) to cereal boxes, junk mail, magazines and paper towel rolls - all paper gets recycled.

For Christmas wrapping, I tend to swim upstream. While my family uses gift-wrapping paper, which incidentally is for the most part NOT recyclable since it has coatings, I use sections of newspaper-the comics are my favorite although I never enough sections of the funnies saved up.

If we would all think about doing something for the environment and stop arguing about the existence of global warming, we could make a tremendous positive impact!

If any of you have your own favorite ecological practice, please add a comment to our post or e-mail me to share it for a future post ( stevehoem@edinarealty.com ).