Trash Talk

HAPPY EARTH DAY!!!

This is probably my favorite awareness day all year long. Two years ago I wrote about some simple steps towards more sustainable living that give you very quick and easy little tips to live a more sustainable, earth-friendly life. Today, I want to talk a little more deeply on one specific area that we've been focusing on in our home: trash.

Trash is an inevitable part of our lives, but what we do with it can make all the difference. You probably remember being raised with the Three R's: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, but now it's commonly the Four R's with repair/repurpose added in. Using these four principles, you can greatly reduce what of your waste becomes trash to sit in our landfills.

Reduce

This is the first, biggest, most important step in reducing waste. The concept is to reduce the potential trash that makes it into your home. Here are some tips to reduce your waste:

• Borrow instead of buy. Ask a friend to borrow a dress for a formal occasion. Borrow that tool that you only need once a year from a neighbor. Borrow books from the library. Rent movies from a local video store. By buying less, you'll have less waste coming into your home from packaging, receipts, tags, etc.
• Buy used. Check out pawn shops, consignment shops/sales, garage and yard sales, church rummage sales, etc. for things you need and will use often. Kids clothes are a great item to buy used as they out grow each size so fast that there's usually a plethora of used kid's clothes that are hardly worn. Check out garage sales for appliances that need replacing or for unique housewares.
• Buy in bulk. Buying in bulk can help reduce the packaging that comes into your house. Just don't get fooled by bulk packages that are really just multiples of the normal package with extra packaging holding them together.
• Don't buy single use items. Paper plates, napkins, and towels, plastic cups, flatware, and bags- these convenience items are a terrible drain on our resources. Whenever possible, use reusable alternatives and if you have to buy one-time use items, try to recycle or compost them afterwards. (Go the extra step and eliminate single-use diapers, toilet paper, or feminine hygiene products.)
• Bring your own packaging. Bringing your own shopping bags is becoming more and more popular, but you can also bring your own reusable produce bags or mason jars for loose items.

Reuse

Reusable items can make any home more sustainable with minimal extra effort. Most items will simple need to be washed in between uses. Here are some reusable items to consider: cloth diapers, un-paper towels, cloth snack and sandwich bags for kids' lunches, glass food storage instead of plastic bags, cloth rags instead of paper towels for cleaning, cloth menstrual pads, menstrual cups instead of tampons, cloth wipes instead of toilet paper.

Also, reuse items that are designed to be single use. 

• Save gift bags you receive to use again when you have a gift to give.
• Rinse and reuse plastic food containers.
• Save bread and tortilla bags and reuse to hold snacks or as trash bags for road trips.

Repair or Repurpose

How many times has something around the house broken and you immediately thought to go buy a new one rather than repair the one you have? It's an easy thing to do and we've been told for over a generation that we shouldn't have to repair old things. Whenever possible, repair broken items or buy a replacement part rather than replacing the whole thing. Learn how to fix a busted seam and sew a button back on. Ask friends to lend their skills to help you fix appliances or tech as it breaks. See if there's a trade school in your area that would like to have the item to teach students.

When something is truly past repair, repurpose the item. Find it something new to be. Many household items can be changed into interesting planters or lawn art. Cut up worn out clothing for cleaning rags. Shred magazines for packing material. There are craft projects on Pinterest to cover just about anything from bottle caps to burnt out light bulbs. Before tossing something in the trash, make sure you can't find some sort of use for it.

Recycle
Most of us think of taking bags of plastic bottles and soda cans to big green dumpsters when we think of recycling, and while that is an awesome way to reduce your trash output, there are other ways to recycle things around the house as well. If you're just getting started, check out these tips on recycling.

Composting is the ultimate green recycling. Home composting can take your kitchen and yard scraps and turn them into glorious dirt, perfect for growing your own organic veggies. There are plenty of ways to compost and I'm sure you can find a system that works for your household. (Foods that can't be composted can usually be sent through the garbage disposal instead of doing in the trash bag.)

Return food packaging to the producer when appropriate. Local egg farms usually love for you to return your egg cartons as they can be pretty pricey to buy new. Some companies will take back their glass bottles to refill them (many companies stopped this program some time ago, but there are still some accepting bottles, check with any local bottling plants).

You can do it!
We just took our trash can to the curb to be picked up for the first time in over a month (maybe about six weeks). It took us that long to fill the can up. It may seem cumbersome at first and it can be trying, but if you just take it one step at a time, you can significantly reduce the amount of trash your household produces.

Here are some Pinterest boards to help you find tips and tricks to reduce your trash output:

• Tips to Reduce Waste: http://www.pinterest.com/OurLittleClan/waste-less-reduce/
• Reusable items: http://www.pinterest.com/OurLittleClan/reuse-no-more-disposable/
• Composting: http://www.pinterest.com/OurLittleClan/compost-creation/
• General "green" tips: http://www.pinterest.com/OurLittleClan/greener-life/
• Canning Info (great way to keep food from being waste!): http://www.pinterest.com/OurLittleClan/canning/
• Cloth Diapering: http://www.pinterest.com/OurLittleClan/cloth-diapering-crazies/
• Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: http://www.pinterest.com/OurLittleClan/reduce-reuse-recycle/
• Earth Day Activities for Kids: http://www.pinterest.com/OurLittleClan/earth-day-activities/

7 Goals for 2014

I'm not a big resolution person but here are some of my goals for this year. I share these with you lovely readers so that you can help keep me accountable! We've moved into our lovely new house and soon we will have our second little boy here with us. With all the change and transition, it just feels like a good time to start building up some new, better habits. Without further ado, here are some of my goals for 2014:

• Keep the house clean enough. I'm not shooting for Martha Stewart, picture-perfect every day here. I just want to keep the cleaning manageable and not feel like I need to apologize if someone stops by unexpectedly. I'll be posting a cleaning schedule later. I wrote it out today and will start enforcing it tonight!
• No more medical debt. With all of Alex's health issues from last year and having two babies in two years, we've got more doctor's bills than I would like. We've been paying them off as we can, but I hope to have them all paid off by the end of the year! (Alex's pediatrician was paid off this month!)
• Try new recipes. I'm in a rut. I cook the same 7-10 meals over and over again. Once new baby is here and we get a decent rhythm down, I want to try one new recipe each week. Each recipe will be a whole foods recipe and will hopefully help expand my culinary skills (I'm getting better!) as well as increase our dietary variety.
• Make fitness a priority. This will be hard with two littles and a full time job, but it's very important to me! Yes, I'd like to lose some weight (maybe a lot of weight), but I really want to focus on helping my body to function better.
• Decorate the house. I am not a big decorator. Home decor is one thing that just kinda didn't get downloaded into my programming. However, I want to decorate our little house and have it looking good. I'm giving myself a year here and it's gonna take me some time.
• Build up a garden. I'm so excited to have a yard! Not only will the boys have a place to run and play, which Alex already enjoys, but we can have a garden! I want to grow many of our own fruits and veggies and herbs. Be watching for details as our plan unfolds!
• Make our lifestyle more sustainable. While our lifestyle is already pretty "green" in some respects, I'd really like to make even more improvements. One area I really want to focus on this year is eliminating one-time-use products and extra plastics. I don't think this will be a difficult goal, but it will take some time to build up a stash of reusable items to replace our commonly used disposable stuffs.

Alrighty, that's quite a bit! Check in with me and keep me honest! I'll be posting about each of these goals through out the year and hopefully we can inspire and motivate one another along the way!

What goals do you have for this year?

7th Step towards Sustainability: Cloth Cleaning Towels

In keeping on theme of green cleaning, let's work on reducing paper waste in the cleaning process. Often when you go about your routine cleaning, you'll use paper towels to wipe down your counters, your fixtures, your bathroom mirror... Just about everything. How many paper towels does that add up to? Well, I haven't done the math, but it's a lot! Even the most absorbent paper towels get used up and tossed out for new ones. Cloth cleaning towels solve that problem!

By switching to cloth towels for your cleaning tasks, you can stop the never ending cycle of using and throwing away paper towels, saving countless amounts of paper waste and tress! Back in the "old days" before paper towels, cloth towels were used for all cleaning tasks. That's just what you had. We invent paper towels and out go the cleaning rags.

How It Helps: Paper towels might be convenient but they require many tress to die and are really only usable once. Then, they go to that ever-so-hated place, the landfill. By using cloth towels, you reduce the needs for paper, and therefore trees, while also keeping our landfills a little bit more empty.

How To Do It: Use old washcloths or buy some cheap towels and set them aside to use for your chores. Once they've gotten all yucky toss them in the wash and do it all over again. We have a stack of towels in the linen closet reserved just for cleaning. Now, in all honesty, we do still have some paper towels in the kitchen, but  I go through a roll maybe every two months, probably closer to three or more. (I'm considering going to un-paper towels, but that's for another day...)

Cost: If you want to just use some old washcloths that you have lying around, they've already been paid for so there's no new cost! If you want/need to buy some towels for cleaning, you can get a good bundle at Wal-mart or any other store for $5 or less. Remember: you're using these towels to dust your furniture and clean your toilet, they don't need to be anything fancy.

There you have it. Another very simple and easy step to help make your life a little bit more sustainable.