I routinely look on Craig’s List for items, such as moving boxes when we’ve needed them, and have sold our items through there to other people. When Mum was moving last year I gave her our old computer desks to use; and she’s in turn passing them on to other people given we don’t have room for them any more. When we had our mega clean out last month I put several things up on FreeCycle including the munchkin’s old car seat (given it was accident free and fairly new it was still good). So, here I thin I’ve not been recycling and I have, just not as much as I could have been!

I’ve spoken before about the fact that we use green products. We have low chemical or no chemical cleaners, and we have the water softener so that we use less detergents and soaps, or can use ones that are softer and gentler because they don’t need all the fluff to get them foaming. When we use our fire pit it’s dead wood or wood that we don’t want to put to the landfill (like all the broken left over pieces from the construction we’ve done). Things like that.

According to the EPA, the national recycling rate is just 30%. Increasing materials recycling in the US to 60% could save the equivalent of 315 million barrels of oil per year. Recycling is a great way individuals can make a difference, both locally and globally.

However, despite that, our bright shiny yellow recycling bin had been hiding behind the shed for a year untouched and unused. Very bad of me. So, after Yule I called the waste department and found out all I needed about when, where and how they took the recycling, and today marks the first day of the New Year it’s gone out properly, as Tuesdays are our recycling day. Kore and I put our heads together for a place to put the recycling bin during the week so that it’s easy for us to access and use, and as full as the thing has become it seems to be working out pretty well so far, so we’ll see. Fingers crossed the refuse collectors actually do something with it today.

The only things that are in our bin right now are empty soda cans and a few empty champagne bottles. I’ve been looking at EarthEasy.com’s recyclable lists to see what else we might be able to recycle. I’m not sure our area takes paper products, so in the mean time I’m trying to stop getting paper plates and cups because it’s exceedingly wasteful, and we should just actually WASH our dishes, go figure!

So, one of the things I want to do is fix the taps so that they don’t leak. We’re using a well, so while we don’t have to pay for all the leaking water the environment will.

The other thing I’m going to do, and keep forgetting to do is put a bottle full of sand in each of our toilet cisterns so that we don’t use as much water each time we flush. Simple but effective.

What other creative ways have you guys heard of reusing things?

I had to think that I contribute to this. There have been so many times recently that I’ve thrown out things, the other day from our fridge, pantry and freezer I threw out a whole helping of Pizza Hut cheesy bread that had dried out, half a tub of cantaloupe pieces, half a bag of grapes, 5lbs of potatoes which had gone rotten, and about a cup of stale milk and some sour orange juice.

Why?

Because they get forgotten in our fridge, and in the case of the potatoes they’d gone rancid. That was the third bag of potatoes I’d thrown out in as many weeks, because I was being lazy and using mix-mash or french fries instead of potatoes, so they would sit in the bag in the pantry until they went soft and exploded.

We’ve come up with better ways to handle that. I’ve stopped getting french fries altogether, which also saves space in our freezer, and when I get the potatoes I take them out of the bag and sit them on the wire shelves in our pantry so that they don’t squash each other, or sweat in the bag. My husband commends my home made french fries, which are actually baked to be more healthy over the frozen ones any day, and I’m happy that my son is going to know what potatoes look like instead of thinking they come in a box.

Real food! And it’s BETTER for you too, who knew? LOL.

But seriously. I am ashamed about how much we’ve been throwing out. I get this stuff with the goal of eating healthy and then it gets ignored in favor of snack food that we bring in or that our friend’s bring over when they come over to game. It’s not good for many reasons. I’m debating starting a compost heap for those times that we have to throw something out, but in the mean time I’m trying to inventory what we do have so that we can engage in better purchasing and disposing habits, and hopefully use more than we have been.

It doesn’t seem like much for just us, at times, but it sure does add up.

Today, as many of you out there in the world know is Earth Day. I’ve been hearing the “save our planet” Walmart commercials for a few weeks now, and while I was in there today they were selling “organic cotton t-shirts” and lots of other products were prominently placed around the store touting their “eco-friendly” nature. All through the store their televisions were talking about how if we all buy Pur water filters and use re-useable cups we’ll save a bunch of money and save the environment too by not drinking bottled water, how we should switch to energy saver light bulbs and things like that, but yet, when I checked out at the register I was given the choice of plastic bags or plastic bags.

Nowhere in the store did I see tote bags, and the only paper bags they had were the right size to put something like a bottle of wine into. I would have happily paid an extra couple of bucks on my bill to get more tote bags. I have about six that I got at my local grocery store for 99 cents each and I’ve seen them at Target for $1.49, but I keep forgetting to pick them up when I go out. If I don’t use them I have tons of friends I can hand them out to, but Walmart didn’t have any.

All over the place in the store they were talking about saving a ton of gallons of water, and how much energy could be saved by each Walmart customer using even just one energy bulb, but what about the fact that we use a billion plastic bags EVERY day in the United States, and I’m sure a good majority of those come from Walmart given how many people I see shopping there any time I drive by. The company themselves could do something about that, rather than telling us customers how much energy we could save buying their energy saver bulbs. Then maybe they could do some decent benefits for their workers too.

To find out more about Reusable Bags click there.

Here’s part of it:

SEEMS GREEN Recycling your disposable plastic water bottles.
TRUE GREEN Sipping tap water from a safely reusable metal bottle.
In the U.S., we dispose of about 70 million plastic water bottles daily. Fewer than 15% are recycled, and bottled water often isn’t any purer than what you can get from your faucet. Meanwhile, tap water is inexpensive and readily available.

That hits home to me because I’ve started drinking a lot more tap water recently, and what am I drinking it out of? An old Zephyrhills water bottle that I have leftover from when we were drinking bottled water because our well hadn’t been fixed yet.

The rest of the article is here: Better Ways to Go Green. I’m off to mail a couple of tote bags to some friends in St. Pete as I’ve started using fabric totes and they’re sending me two of their home-made tote bags in return for some of my earrings and two of the grocery store tote bags.

Trade is fun! and environmentally friendly!
Earth Day is tomorrow! Celebrate our planet!

I’m doing fairly well with other things like my internal detox. I’ve successfully cut back to only one can of soda a day. The rest of the time I’m drinking water. Hopefully now that I’m weaning down the caffeine intake and the sugar intake it won’t hit me as hard as other times when I’ve just tried to cut things out completely. Some people can do “cold turkey”. I’m not one of them. It’s good to know your own limitations.

I had a nice time today communing with nature too. It’s great to have a yard, and to live in a fairly quiet neighborhood. I was putting up fence posts and once I was done I spent some time just lying on my back in the grass staring at the sky and feeling the sun streaming through the trees. It’s very cool. I forgot how good it feels and did a bit of grounding at the same time which was an added bonus.