make a smaller ecological footprint

....but I’m at a good point where I’m doing well on a daily basis. Thanks to all of you for your comments and suggestions over the past year. And thank you all for working at this to live your lives with a smaller footprint. Carry on!

...my hubby went with some of the stuff that’s been collecting in our house. Its mostly lawn chemicals & pesticides that we bought back when we were evil to our planet. He said it looked like they were just tossing it in a dumpster. To be brought where? The Nevada desert? A barge floating around in the ocean. Where does this stuff go? I couldn’t find a good answer on where it goes.

I know the answer is not buying the stuff anymore. But what about the stuff like this that I already have? I feel like this hazardous waste collection is a worse option than just using the stuff up. Comments?

.....we’ve walked and rode the subway all over while our car has sat in the hotel garage. We used to live here and I used to walk to work from our 1st apartment, then took the metro when we moved a little farther out. Being back here has been a GREAT change from our suburban car lifestyle. I know if sounds weird, but I love the feeling of being crowded on the subway during rush hour. All those bodies not in individual cars warms my heart.

Those of you who ride public transportation every day, I applaud you!!

The shelf in my garage that holds all my gardening supplies wasn’t nailed in tight and got knocked to the ground. I had 3 large stacks of terra cotta pots inside for the winter. All of them smashed. The first thing I thought of was “oh no, its going to totally increase our trash weight!” (we’re measuring it for my daughter’s earth day project) But then I started looking online for solutions. I’m NOT an artsy type and so a mosaic thing doesn’t really appeal to me. Then I read somewhere if I crush them up MORE, then they could be used as crushed stone around a garden bench. Could be an option. Any other ideas out there?

....my daughter started weighing our trash and our compost for her project. We were all surprised that for this week our family of 6 generated 9 lbs. of trash and 9 lbs. of food waste for the compost. Equal! We were amazed at the compost weight! Grapefruit rinds and coffee grounds are heavy!! So we were happy that we kept 9 lbs. of garbage out of the trash cycle by composting. But we still generated 9 lbs. of trash….1.5 lbs. per person per week.

Now that we have a benchmark we’re going to see what we can do to reduce our 9 lbs. of trash. Hope to have an improvement next week.

My daughter is doing a project on composting for her school’s earth day fair. She’d going to focus on residential composting vs. landfill. She’s going to weigh our trash, our garbage going to compost and our recycling each week and chart it for the next month. I’m really looking forward to seeing the results! This will be a great measure of how we live our lives!

I challenged her to do her project without any wasting of our earth’s precious resources. My other daughter did a project on junk mail last year that wasted (albeit recycled) SO much paper in the process; her poster was elaborate and she reprinted MANY pictures for her poster….. Rather than a disposable poster, I’m encouraging her to be creative in her display. We’ll see how she does!

.....well, it had a little help from a flying soccer ball (how many times have I said no ball playing in the house?????) THe glass is intact, but alas, its lit its last light.

I thought this would be a good time to post my dilemma about these bulbs and remind folks not to throw them in the trash. They do contain small amounts of mercury. From what I’ve read, many municipalities don’t require residential users of these bulbs to recycle them (and I guess they are expensive to recycle). But we really should request recycling. Responsible vendors of these bulbs should offer to take them back for recycling. Some hardware stores are starting programs to take them back; Ace Hardware and Truevalue Hardware stores among other places. But both of those chains have independently operated stores, so not all of them take them back.

Just wanted to post before anyone else had a “soccer ball incident” that shortened the life of their cfl bulbs. I’m going to stop in @ my local Ace Hardware to talk to the owner about getting involved.

If anyone has any experience recycling these bulbs, I’d love to hear it!! I’m hoping I’m missing something and that they are getting easier to recycle!!

.....about BP and Shell jumping into wind power. Hooray! Maybe they are doing it for the green PR. Or maybe they see the Peak Oil writing on the wall. I don’t care what their reasons are, I just want more mainstream funding for wind power. And big oil has deep pockets and offices full of manpower to help fund and carry out large projects for alternative fuels. Maybe I’m being too optimistic, but it gives me a little bit of hope. I’d be so happy to see BP and Shell make big bucks from wind power!!!

Any differing opinions out there? I’d love to hear them!!

.....is maple syrup time. I was going to buy maple syrup from a local source this year. But instead I’ve decided to BE the local source. I have 8 large sugar maples on our lake property. Today I got 4 test taps going and the sap is FLOWING! I need to purchase more taps, because each tree is large enough to sustain 3 taps!! I have an outdoor fire pit where I can boil down the sap. So its the perfect endeavor for me. My goal is to make a minimum of 1 gallon of syrup or enough to sustain my family for a year (we eat alot of waffles!!)

Yesterday I made my first foray into buying in bulk. I went to Whole Foods and got quinoa, granola and cous cous. That was all I needed yesterday, but there was a great variety of oats, rice and cereals. I did the math and it is either cheaper or the same price that I can buy at the grocery store (@ least on those things I bought). With less packaging. I didn’t plan ahead, so I used the paper bags from the store. But next time I’ll bring my own plastic bags.

I’m looking at the packaging I’m buying in a whole new way. For a long time now, I’ve want to reduce it or be able to recycle it. But now I’m thinking, “Can I use this container again??”

I’m pretty happy to buy prepared foods from places that use those standard size plastic containers (are they 1 qt?). I can reuse those for SO many different things. :)