Personal Life

Slightly-Less-Waste Updates

It’s been a few months. How are my experiments to create less waste going?

  • BIG UPDATE: I started going to “THE LIBRARY.” It’s this weird place where you can get books for free and when you’re done reading them you just give them back! What a trip!!!!!!11
  • Composter? Never heard of her. OK, fine, now that the snow has melted (….several weeks ago), I really should dig the compost bins out from under the deck and turn them over. It is terribly inconvenient to have them under there. I would recommend keeping them out in the open or getting one of those bins that turns itself.
  • On the topic of food waste, I have fallen into the old, bad habit of getting individual-serving yogurts and those steam bags of rice/vegetables. My excuse is that I’m pregnant and I want a wider variety of vegetables and yogurt fruit mix-ins. Not sure it’s a good excuse but it’s the one I have.
    • Speaking of being pregnant, having a kid is probably one of the worst things you can do in terms of generating waste. We’ll make sure to raise her to contribute something to society to make up for it.
  • Still using cloth towels (“unpaper” towels); even Bren has accepted them. 🙂 They do dwindle over time so I will have to order more.
  • Every version of reusable ziploc bags is the worst. The ZipTuck ones were so flimsy we eventually tossed them for good. Bren ordered sturdier silicone ones that are held shut by a sort of sliding plastic bar–the bar broke pretty promptly. The bags themselves are OK and he is prepared to hold them shut with binder clips if the bars continue to be a problem. But dang, who knew this was such a difficult problem to solve.
  • ThredUp finally processed my clean out box and so far I’ve made like 6 whole dollars. Obviously this was about getting rid of stuff, not actually making money. But the system seems to work!
  • The Buy Nothing group is fun, although I’ve only used it to get rid of stuff (I haven’t “wished” for anything yet). I’m surprised by the amount of literal garbage that people (a) offer and (b) take. Truly, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Then again, who hasn’t been in a Crafting Situation(tm) where they needed 15 empty bottles of soda? 😀