make a smaller ecological footprint

Some of the things I’ve done to reduce my ecological footprint:

• Bring my own reuseable coffee cup to work and use it everyday for beverages.
• Use only a reuseable bottle for water and water based beverages while away from home.
• Maintain a garden for some of our own vegetalbles and purchase locally grown produce whenever possible.
• Plant trees in the west and south locations of our yard to lower energy use for cooling in the summer months.
• Save paper for recycling.
• Save aluminum cans for recycling.
• Reduce the number of trips to the store by buying in bulk when possible.
• Use our clothesline for drying in the warmer months to reduce energy use in our home.
• Installed energy efficient replacement windows.
• Replaced our old A/C and furnace with high efficient ones.
• No longer subscribe to magazines and donate our old ones to the local senior center, nursing homes.

Things I’ll probably not do:

• Become a vegetarian.
• Replace our current method of dealing with our mole problem with a more environmental friendly one which has not worked well in the past. Our neighbors are all treating their lawns with chemicals the last couple years and the little varments have invaded our yard with a vengence killing most of our tulips and leaving large trenches. crisscrossing our yard.

Summer is coming and along with it is hot weather. I am thinking of installing reflective shades on my east and west windows to reflect heat out and save on my AC this year.

For those of you who purchase bottled water, unless you have an excellent recycling center in your area, those water bottles may find themselves forever in a landfill. While using reusable water bottles may not eliminate that possibility in my household, I try to keep one handy for roadtrips. I’m proud of myself that I used one this weekend and even remembered not to forget it somewhere and brought it home.

Reuse: As of today, we are saving all our beer bottles. A neighbor is making his own beer.

Here in Saline County, Missouri USA where I live, the Saline County Commissioners signed a resolution for EcoAlgae USA to construct a commercial algae production facility in conjunction with an intergrated biorefinery complex. Here is the link

We still haven’t eliminated buying soda in cans but now that they don’t stay around long enough to pile up my family is making more of an effort to save them for recycling. One of our friends is disabled due to a stroke and now collects them for extra money. He goes around town on his riding lawnmower picking up cans and even trash off the streets. He says that in about 2 month’s time, he collects enough to take a pickup load to Sedalia and clear enough cash to make the trip worthwhile.
With the exception of a couple antique lamps, we are using energy-saving bulbs. Our city will except them for recycling although they still don’t pick up anything at curbside for recycling except paper.
We are giving all our excess plastic grocery sacks to some of the local gardeners selling fresh produce in the old Wal-Mart parking lot now that Wal-Mart moved to their new location.

Except for the monitor on our desktop which we bought originally in 1999 and a new mouse, all our computers and parts are secondhand. The guy who does all the computer work for us makes a lot of his money recycling junked computers and other electronis, cellphones and even vacuum cleaners. He buys computers, fixing and reselling those worth fixing and recycles the rest. Everything is taken apart and separated into combos and sold to someone else who will actually recycle the stuff. It both surprised me to see the amount of junked computers he had in a few short months. It also saddened me to know that the amount of recycled computers is probably small compared to what is going into our landfills.

Why aren’t we all doing this?

For groceries more. As we are down to only 3 grocery stores in town, including a Super Wal-Mart, I’m shopping more often at the local Aldi’s. This has made me more aware of the need to bring my own shopping bags to the store. I’ve been keeping a cloth beach bag for this use as well as a few boxes in my car trunk.
One thing I have noticed at the grocery store is that if you bring your own bags, it is easier to bag your own purchases and not have the cashier/clerk do it. I usually have to redo it if they do the bagging and it takes longer. At Super Wal-Marts, I’ll use their bags then transfer my groceries to the boxes in my car and return the bags to the store for reuse if I don’t have a use for them at home. Otherwise, they multiply.

I’ve made a lot of steps in conserving and recycling. We changed most of our candescent light bulbs for those energy saving kind and recycle as much of our paper waste as possible. I know I can be doing more. Our recycling center handles plastic, glass, aluminum and other materials but currently, they only pick up paper from residents. That means that in order to recycle these other things I have to haul them in myself. I know that this would reduce our landfill waste considerably. My only concern is that by to go green this way might mean using more gasoline to haul this stuff away. Also, I’ll need to designate an area in my home or on my property to separate the recyclables and store them until it is at least worth hauling them to the recycle center. Someone told me that if I took full advantage of recycling everything possible, I could wind up with as little as 2 small bags of garbage a month for the landfill instead of the 2 or more large bags we produce each week in spite of all the paper we recycle. Oh, if I could be just like Kathleen Turner, beloved heroine of all garbagemen everywhere in Serial Mom.

Right now, the planning remains in my head until the weather warms up enough to actually set aside an area perferably somewhere outside to do this. I wonder if I could get my neighbors involved (like the ones who had the automatic sprinklers running twice a week all the way into November with most of the water going straight into the street)