What’s your “do or die” green effort?

I’ve been thinking, lately…there are a number of things I haven’t dared try on the “green” front, and others that I do pretty much without thinking.  Taking the “Practically Green” quiz got me thinking, both about what is easy and automatic, and what is still a real effort.

Food, as anyone who reads this blog can easily figure out, is one of my big priorities.  I really, really am trying to keep processed foods out of our diets, to the extent where today when we took my mother-in-law to Baker’s Square for lunch, and my husband got the “mixed berry pie,” I could taste the articificial fruit flavor without even trying–it was just so completely in my face that I couldn’t even pretend it’s not there.  Cooking well and simply is a change we’ve made that has actually shifted into “lifestyle;” it’s not an effort.  We shop differently, we cook differently, we eat differently.  Maybe not a huge amount of variety, and maybe what we used to spend on delivery pizza we now spend to upgrade our ingredients to organic, but it’s almost all very simple and as unprocessed as we can possibly manage.  Even the rare takeout pizza doesn’t taste as good to me any more (though Chinese is still a great and fat-laden guilty pleasure).

On the other end of the spectrum: I could name a couple of things, but one of the biggest is plastic. Ziploc bags, especially.  Buying food in plastic.  Plastic all kinds of stuff.  Intellectually I know I should cut back on my plastic use, and I do recycle whenever possible (which is most of the time), but I can’t yet break myself of using it.

How about y’all? True confessions time, free of all judgment or interpersonal criticism: what changes have you made that have been easy and even fun? What are the ones you try but just can’t seem to click into?