Reducing our dependancy on petroleum goes further than switching to hybrid cars and using public transportation. It effects nearly everything in our daily lives. We can help by taking small steps backwards and start looking at products that our parents used when

they were young. Let's take a look at a typical bagged lunch and see how we can lose the oil.

The basic lunch starts with store-bought bread in a plastic bag. Add in plastic packaged cuts of meat, mayo and mustard in convenient squeezable plastic jars and finish up with a nice head of lettuce all wrapped up in a plastic netting. Do you see a theme here? All that plastic may be recyclable but it is certainly not biodegradable in our lifetimes.

Making your own bread at home eliminates both the unknown ingredients in your bread and the excess plastic, plus you can buy ingredients in bulk that last quite a bit longer than the cooked bread will which will save trips to the grocery store. It takes a bit of work but the

taste is well worth it. If you want some sort of meat on your sandwich go to the deli and have them wrap it in paper, it will still last quite a while in your refrigerator but that paper, which is usually recycled before it gets to you, has almost no environmental impact. Also make sure you buy your jarred products in glass. It may make them a bit heavier but that glass can easily be crushed down into sand at your recycling center and made into new glass.

Leave out the plastic wrapped snack bars and deserts, and forget the plastic drink bottle in that lunch. Wrap the sandwich up in some wax paper and throw in a couple pieces of fresh fruit. The fruit makes a much more nutritious snack and the wax paper is very much

biodegradable. Put your drink of choice in a reusable container such as a thermos or metal water bottle so you can use it again and again. This will eliminate a growing amount of plastic bottle waste.

If all of this looks familiar and not at all shocking, the reason is that you probably have used all of these products in the past. The excessive use of plastic that we now think of as normal has only been a recent development. It may be sold on the idea of convenience or

sanitation, but in actuality all of this plastic is now building up in our landfills and plays an active part in increasing our oil usage.

If the idea of using paper scares you because of deforestation you can find recycled and renewable paper products in almost any supermarket. It's also easy to forget that while trees can be planted and will grow back, once we have used up the oil it is gone forever. Still not satisfied? Why not visit a reforestation site such as http://www.rainforestrescue.org.au/ in Australia or http://www.americanforests.org/ in the United States to help offset some of the additional tree usage this lifestyle switch will entail.