It's easy being green
By HEATHER ANDERSON GateHouse News Service

The mailman must get miffed at Peggy Greenough.

The 53-year-old homemaker and her brood subscribe to at least seven monthly magazines, including the mother lode of thick, slick glossies - Vanity Fair.

Add in the family's weekly and daily subscriptions to four newspapers, as well as the 20- odd catalogs that arrive monthly, and the weight would make even a pack mule groan.

And yet, a lone trash barrel stands sentinel each week outside their home. It's enough of an anomaly that Greenough's neighbors have begun to talk.

"Like most people, I probably just started out doing newspaper, bottles and cans," says Greenough about her 9- year recycling efforts. Eventually, "you start to think about the mail you get, paper towel tubes … I even think about a Post-It note now and put that in recycling."

Greenough is a far cry from a tree hugger. She doesn't drive a Prius, grow her own vegetables, or compost. And she disdains that swirly, softserve look of candescent fluorescent bulbs. But when it comes to recycling, Greenough is a zealot.

"We all should be doing something," says Greenough, who confesses that her efforts may be offsetting some environmental guilt. "[Americans] use a lot of energy. That lifestyle - an affluent lifestyle that generates a lot of waste and uses a lot of energy - has an impact."

Thanks to Al Gore's global warming documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," going green is now a moral imperative to a certain subset. But the typical soccer mom is unlikely to swap the SUV for a hybrid any time soon and hasn't yet embraced solar paneling. That said, they can make simple, practical, eco-friendly changes at home that just may help save the planet.