Green Santa Barbara

Welcome to Santa Barbara, California. Our town is the epitome of calm and serene and that is maintained by us all in an ongoing effort. Our vision for a green Santa Barbara will need continuous work, but we want to thank all involved for the efforts bestowed already.

Santa Barbara is located with the Pacific Ocean on one side and the Santa Ynez Mountains on the other. You cannot ask for a better location to live it. It has the perfect Mediterranean weather and several unique landscape and surroundings that not preserving this would be abysmal.

Several Santa Barbara communities have gotten involved in the Green Movement and have volunteered funds, time and resources to make the city Green. Saving the environment doesn’t just preserve the planet but will also provide a healthier living space for us and our family for the years coming.

The Wonder Boxes

One of the first steps we took as a community towards our efforts of going green was to reduce the amount of trash bags we produced as a community.

We did our research for the best ways to collect and dispose of trash and came up with a solution. We help bake sales and gathered enough money to buy huge trash compactors for our community. One for the regular waste and the other for the recyclable waste.

Getting further into this idea, some of us have also invested in trash compactors for our own homes. They fit right into the interior of our kitchens or the trash area outside the homes, and save us a lot of effort of emptying the trash every so often, as well as benefit the environment.

These machines have filters and deodorizing compartments in them, so they eliminate the odour and keep the surroundings cleaner as well.

The kids in our community are now calling these trash compactors the wonder boxes.

Hot Wheels or Green Wheels?

Most of us use spend a lot of time of the day in our cars. Us, Americans are used to using our cars as the mode of transportation almost indefinitely. Even to go a short walking distance, we tend to direct ourselves to our cars.

Think about the footprint all that driving and fuel consumption, not to mention the pollution this ends us causing. The Green Movement has made us as a community decide to think and evaluate the use of our cars before we step in. We now, take a moment and ask ourselves, can I or we walk instead of drive? If the answer is yes, then we walk and give our cars a rest.

Another great idea that an outside visitor shared was to buy hybrid cars instead of the regular fuel cars. One of the neighbours had a sister visiting right after buying a hybrid from used cars dealers in Phoenix and did a road trip to Santa Barbara. She went on and on about how awesome her hybrid is and we all were amazed and took test drives of it.

Since that visit, we as a community have made a pact that if anyone of us decides to buy a new car, then it will be a hybrid.