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Sunday, March 20, 2011

Getting Greener: A start

After discovering an article on Yahoo about a zero-waste family, I've become intrigued by their story. I found the mother's blog (here) and have been reading ever since. While I think she takes it to an extreme (e.g. I'm not sure how my local grocer would take me bringing glass jars to buy meat and cheese from the deli), I can appreciate the motives behind living minimally and with minimal waste. She also points out that this lifestyle is impossible to create over days, weeks, and even a year. She's spent years making changes to her family's lifestyle; however, it did get me thinking of little things I could change to start towards being a little less wasteful.

My start to producing a little less waste: cloth napkins. I'm saying good bye to paper napkins that are easily used and tossed without a thought to where they'll land up. And while I'm sure they will break down faster than other wasteful items I use (e.g. plastic pens, tooth brush heads, etc), I feel like it's something I can do that I don't even have to think about. Plus, it gives me small little sewing projects to satisfy my project ADD (we all know I get bored quickly with lengthy, complex projects....). Here are the first of my napkins... they just so happen to be the rest of the curtain material from the kitchen and breakfast nook valances.


With some more reading and inspiration, I hope to post some more of my small changes to hopefully get others thinking of what they could do as well. Let me know your ideas...

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

>Invest in reusable grocery bags and only shop once per week. That not only avoids wasting gas/polluting the environment more with trips to the store, but doing it once per week allows for a routine of 'write the list, get the bags, go to the store' = you forget the bags less than if you randomly go to the store here/there. Whole Foods has 99cent bags that they will replace if/when they 'die'- and they're made of recycled materials.
>Considering mixing your own household cleaners.
>Be in tune with where your food comes from. Buy in season and as local as you can. Resources are wasted transferring foods crazy distances.
Lu