Green Options

Sweet! Anyone receive any Climate Change Chocolate this past Valentine’s Day weekend? Well, chocolate bunny season is coming up so you might wanna bookmark this one…

I wrote about the TerraPass carbon offset chocolate offerings on Shaping Youth with a jaundiced eye toward greenwashing, since the main Bloomsberry factory is located in New Zealand, but good news! Bloomsberry chocolate manufacturer CEO Paul Pruett confirmed the TerraPass chocolate that’s sold in the U.S. is produced in the U.S.!

It’s evidently part of their business model to stay local with manufacturing, in addition to the chocolate’s recyclable wrapper and 15 tips for reducing your carbon footprint. Even better? Bloomsberry reports so far they’ve sold enough chocolate bars to offset the equivalent of:

814 passenger vehicles for 1 year
10,333 barrels oil
588 homes for 1 year
31 acres of forest preserved from deforestation
23.2 railcars worth of coal

What’s an eco-friendly family to do up against mega-million dollar marketing when brand-identity rears its head?

Once upon a time I could hit the local Outrageous Outgrowns, Zwaggle and haggle online for eco-friendly finds, or find green parenting ways to make a difference by showing how to host a kids’ clothing swap among my pals.

But when kids get a bit older and media peer pressure kicks in, tweens and teens are ripe for consumption junction mall rat mentality, sometimes even calling gently used items ‘gross,’ or being turned off by wearing their own friends’ castoffs in a swap-n-shop format…

So how do you effectively combat commercialism and turn brand influence on itself?