ShareThisEarth Day is nearly upon us -- it's April 22 -- and in celebration of, well, our great Earth, I recently went to a natural-products trade show to check out what was going on in the world of green goods. Turns out, a lot! Businesses are increasingly trending toward sustainability -- a combination of using biodegradable goods where possible and making other choices that yield less environmental impact.It's in the bag: Many of us agree that it's less wasteful to use a reusable grocery bag than a plastic one that would soon be discarded. But sometimes you just want a little style: Enter Envirosax. These spacious bags are cleverly rendered -- from retro designs to flowers to black-and-white graphic designs, and cartoon dinosaurs for kids, these bags are as charming as they are practical. They go for $37.95 for a compact set of five, or for $8.50 each. Visit www.usa.envirosax.com.Cleanliness is next to... : If you're looking for the cutest cleaners around, shaped like everything from carrots to ladybugs to martini glasses, consider Loofah-Art's loofahs. They're made from the dried loofah vegetable (a close cousin of the cucumber, if you can believe it). These natural scrubbers can be used for everything from exfoliating skin to getting grime off stubborn pots and pans. After each use, just rinse and air dry it and it should be good to go for a few months. They're $2.99 each and available at www.loofah-art.com.You are what you eat: Snacking healthy can be, honestly, pretty unsatisfying at times. However, some of the tastiest foods I tried at the expo were freeze-dried fruit snacks. They're much, much better than they sound: sweet, delicious and the very essence of the Fuji apples, Asian pears, pineapples and other fruits they're made from.Each bag has a nicely sized serving of fruit, and no added fat, preservatives or sugar. These snacks range from 30 to 66 calories. The price: $21.99 for a variety of 12. From brothersallnatural.com.Now, more than ever, you don't have to sacrifice product quality just to be green.From what you eat to what you wash with to what you carry around, now is a good time to start going green yourself.(Helen Malani is the chief shopping expert for Shopzilla.com, an E.W. Scripps company and the largest comparison-shopping search engine on the Web. E-mail askhelen(at)shopzilla.com.)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
Green body, green mind
Paying taxes unites us. It also divides us. People can pay five and even six times more in state and local taxes than other folks in similar circumstances making similar incomes.
Who's got your number?
In one of the fastest-growing forms of identity theft, crooks are stealing tax refunds by swiping personal information and using it to trick the Internal Revenue Service.
