Our efforts to “Go Green” at the Church of the Good Shepherd have been quite successful.  Many thanks to our Property Committee for making many valuable changes in that direction before it was even decided to officially “Go Green”! We have new boilers, locked thermostats, new commercial dishwasher, new LED light bulbs, etc.

During our June Vestry meeting, we agreed to form a Green Team to implement environmentally friendly changes at the Church. A lot has been accomplished since that decision was made. We specifically focused our efforts on reducing the use of paper, plastic and Styrofoam during Coffee Hour. On July 22, 2018, we kicked off our campaign by using ceramic plates, cups and serving dishes in lieu of paper and plastic products. Since then, we have started using real silverware rather than disposable plastic utensils. We also switched to using the Church of the Good Shepherd mugs since the old ceramic cups simply aren’t practical as they are very small and difficult to manage.

The response from parishioners has been overwhelmingly positive, and the support and encouragement from our Coffee Hour hosts has been tremendous.  We have received several great suggestions to make the Coffee Hour process easier. Please keep those ideas coming!  We also created a brand new Going Green logo to make our announcements easier to spot.  Many thanks to Katherine Kaltwasser for creating this for us!

We have a significant amount of non-recyclable products already stored in our kitchen. We know that there will be occasions when using ceramic dishware is simply not practical and these may be the times to use the products we already have in stock.  Additionally, we currently serve cold beverages using non-recyclable plastic cups (as they are not recyclable in Pitman).  We are looking into different options to resolve this.

The support of Good Shepherd as we strive to be good stewards of the Earth is greatly appreciated, although not surprising!  Thanks everyone!