Baby Step 1: Reduce Waste

We put out a full can of garbage every week. There are four people in our family. How could we possibly generate so much trash? Ugh. No wonder this picture exists:

Stephanie suggests finding three practical ways to reduce waste. She gives a great list of ideas. Here are the three I will start with:

1. Learn what can be recycled in our curbside program and develop an easy system for recycling.

Here is what can be recycled in my area:

#1 Plastic, #2 Plastic (clear), #2 Plastic (colored) #3 Plastic, #4 Plastic, #5 Plastic, #7 (Other), Aerosol cans, aluminum cans, aluminum foil, bi-metal cans, book recycling, brown glass, brown paper bags, cardboard, catalogs, chipboard, clear glass, computer paper, cookware, gift boxes, green glass, greeting cards, magazines, mixed paper, newspaper, paperboard, phonebooks, plastic bags, scrap metal, shredded paper, tin or steel cans, toys, white office paper. (Source: earth911.com)

We have a recycling container in our kitchen; I need to add one to our bathroom in the back part of the house for toiletry items. So I put a box under our bathroom cupboard. Voila.

2. Utilize cloth rags and cloth napkins instead of paper towels. Make this easily accessible. I bought a large glass jar and filled it with pretty white washcloths (I bought both new- is that irony? Oh well, baby steps.). I keep this on my kitchen counter right next to the paper towels. It looks pretty and is an easy replacement for paper towels.

3. Reduce/Reuse ziploc bags, tin foil, etc. Every time I throw away a ziploc bag I think "oh I could wash this and reuse it" but I don't. I'm just "plain old" lazy. Gah. Well, this is easy to change. I'm going to start reusing ziplocs. Not only will this help reduce waste but it will also save money. I'm also going to use tupperware, glass jars and other reusable food storage more frequently.

Ooh. Here is an idea. We often use ziploc bags for kid snacks. Usually these snacks are crackers or nuts or some other dry type of food. At the end of the day I will take the empty bags and refill them with snack-sized portions of the same snack. That way, I will have easy "on the go" snacks for the kids and will be less likely to buy something while we are out. Many birds. One stone.

That's all for now.

This is the first in a series of posts about my journey through the ebook "Healthy Homemaking: One Step at a Time".

Natural Living

For a long time, I thought that natural living was for a particular demographic. I figured that unless I let my armpit hair grow and went to extremes in many areas of life I had no business living naturally. Recycling bottles and cans was enough to make me feel I was doing my share.

But over the past couple of years, I have become more aware of the need to be a good steward of my resources. I have become overwhelmed at the amount of garbage my small family of four puts out each week. I have seen glimpses of the chemicals used in our food these days and while I don't plan to go to great extremes, I do feel that I have a responsibility to my family and to God to be intentional about what we put into our bodies and into our planet.

It's funny how so many things are done simply out of habit or because everybody else does them. I have realized lately that many of these things are not what I want to do; however, since I didn't carefully consider them beforehand, I simply assumed they were right.

SO, here we go. I am planning to make some changes in our home. To do this, I am utilizing a book called "Healthy Homemaking: One Step at a Time" by Stephanie at Keeper of the Home. She outlines 24 baby steps to natural living. I plan to go through each section- 1-2 weeks at a time, and make changes as I feel directed. This is my journey.