When exchanging gifts, cards and treats with your sweetheart this year, take time to consider the global impact of your gift choices. Here are a few ideas on how to make this a greener, more friendly holiday for the planet and each other.

Buy Fair Trade Chocolate

The chocolate industry is leaning heavily on the backs of child slaves in the Ivory Coast. Buying Fair Trade chocolates sends a message to the huge chocolate corporations that we would prefer they pay adult workers to harvest our chocolate.

Good Sources: Divine, Endangered Species, and Equal Exchange

Buy Recycled Paper Valentine's Cards
    Look for the recycled symbol on the backs of the cards, or ask for them at the stationer.  Avoid cards made with virgin paper.
    Good Sources: Elmwood Stationers, Whole Foods

Avoid Buying Cards with Music Embedded In Them
    Those little chips are impossible to recycle and will not break down in a landfill.

Buy Fair Trade roses or flowers.
    The flower industry in Colombia is brutal on the people, mostly women, who work in the massive warehouse greenhouses where most of our roses come from.  Buying Fair Trade, or Whole Trade, will ensure that the people who grew the flowers were treated fairly.
    Good Sources: Whole Foods, One World Flowers And even FTD has a Go Green selection.


Make your own Valentine’s cards
    Use recycled or repurposed paper, decorate with your own drawings or stamp them with paint on the bottom of a celery stalk, or bok choi bunch (it will look like roses).
   
Buy potted flowers and plant them
    Cyclamen’s, pansies, and violets are all good choices for this time of year.
    Good Sources: local nurseries: Moraga Garden Center, Mt. Diablo Nursery and Orchard Nursery.

Make cookies or treats with real and organic ingredients
    There’s nothing like a sugar cookie made with real butter, organic flour and fair trade, organic sugar.
    Good Sources: Open Sesame, Diablo Foods, Whole Foods and Trader Joes.

Give seeds for spring flowers
    Zinnias, sweet peas, sunflowers are all easy to grow.
    Good Sources: Seed Saver’s Exchange, Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds and Peaceful Valley Farm Supply

Re-use last year’s Valentine's Cards
    Remove the images and glue on a piece of folded recycled paper

Paint rocks with the letter U
    When you hand them over, say, “You Rock!”  You can also paint female sheep on the rocks, but then people really have to do some thinking.

Buy Sustainable, Local, Organic Wine

     Good Sources: Open Sesame, Diablo Foods, Whole Foods, Wine Thieves, Parducci Winery

Buy Beeswax Candles

      Beeswax is far easier on the planet than burning petroleum candles.

      Good Source: Across the Way, Open Sesame and Whole Foods