A new type of furniture polish

I knew that title would grab you. I mean, who doesn't want to read about furniture polish? Anyway, I do have a new idea that will allow you to reuse a product, keep you healthy, and save you money. What's not to like?

The bottle shown above is from a Bobbi Brown product that I use. I recently ran out of the product and was wondering what I could do with it. The bottle is actually quite nice - very heavy, solidly constructed - and I thought it was a shame to put it in the recycling bin. At about the same time, I was reading Home Safe Home by Debra Lynn Dadd, and she had many recipes for homemade cleaning products. One, for furniture polish, consisted of 2 parts olive oil and 1 part lemon juice. So I mixed it up and put it in the bottle. It worked quite well, and you don't need much to clean a few rooms. Regular furniture polish contains a surprising number of toxins, so I consider this a win-win-win.

Think about it next time you're throwing a nice container in your garbage or recycling bin - set it aside and see if you can find another use for it.

The crash of trash

Our Tuesday group is moving on from our fall topic, energy, and has determined that we want to study the area of recycling. After a bit of discussion, however, we thought 'recycling' was probably the wrong term, and have tentatively broadened the concept to 'no waste'. So it was with great interest today that I found this article on the front page of the New York Times: Back at Junk Value, Recyclables Are Piling Up. The gist of the article is that the value of recyclables has crashed, mainly due to the economic downturn that is causing China's demand for recyclables to dry up. As a result, recyclable materials are piling up with nowhere to go, and in some cases community recycling programs are halting pickup of plastics and paper.

I had a feeling we were heading here. A couple of years ago I had read, improbably, a couple of book on garbage: Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage and Garbage Land: On The Secret Trail of Trash, and here's the message I took from both books: stop consuming so much and reuse what you have consumed. Both books felt that recycling was, at best, a band-aid, and, at worst, a way to delude people into thinking they were environmentalists. So it's interesting to see where our bandwagons for recycling have taken us.

Which brings me to today's point: Maybe we need to start becoming more mindful of what we are consuming and begin thinking about how we can reduce not only what goes into our garbage cans but also what goes into our recycling bins. The yogurt container, pictured above, is a prime example. Years ago when I was reading all of this I read that one thing yogurt eaters can do is to move from individual packs to the larger container - less waste. I took that in, but never switched because my brand was not available in the larger size. Fast forward to last week - I was in need of yogurt but the market I was in did not have small packs, only larger ones. So it forced my hand - I bought the larger size and discovered that I loved this yogurt too. And since my husband and I have been making soups this winter, we'll reuse the containers for freezing soup. I love it when things work out this way.

Wall-E and the watch

Can I tell you a story from my honeymoon? I promise, it will relate to Wall-E and the watch. 30 years ago, right about this time of the year, my husband and I were motoring down to Florida for our honeymoon. He had just purchased his first new car - a Dodge Omni - and he decided that he wanted to see what kind of mileage he could get if he left the air conditioning off. Which was fine until we entered the 'hot' states of Georgia and Florida. No pleading from his new wife could dissuade him from testing his new vehicle. Why, oh, why, I thought, did I marry an engineer? And a stubborn Irish one at that.

Fast-forward 30 years. Improbably as it may seem after that story, we are still married. The Dodge Omni and the mileage experiment are gone, but, in its place, is a new project: adapting to a greener lifestyle. It may not surprise you that he is going full guns, and I am limping along, sometimes begrudgingly. I don't mind experiments and changes, but if they impact my lifestyle, not so much. So I'm hoping I sound like the typical consumer, and you can relate.

Anyway, here's where the watch comes in. I have had the same $39 Fossil watch for many, many years. The leather band has broken twice (worn through), and both times when I suggest that I can just throw it away and get a new one, Tom has said, 'No problem! We can take it to the watch repair shop and get the band replaced.' Which we have done. Now, however, I have noticed that the little number 9 on my watch has dislodged and is resting next to the '12'. Uh-oh! Time for a replacement! When I made the mistake of mentioning this to the stubborn engineer, he of course said, 'No problem...' and you know the rest. This time, though, I thought he had gone too far. We are not impoverished! We can afford a new $39 Fossil watch!

Then we went to see Wall-E, a movie about the a trash-compacting robot alone on a desolate earth (except for one cockroach) in the year 2700. Humans have been evacuated to a temporary space station, because the earth is covered with trash and the skies are so polluted they cannot sustain life. Watching the movie, I thought of all the landfills I have passed that are the size of small mountains. I though of the phrase: There is no 'away.' And I thought that the movie may not be all that presumptuous in its premise.

So we're heading to the watch repair shop - again. The dump doesn't need another piece of electronics, and maybe the watch repair man could use the business. The engineer was right again. But just don't push me too far.

Using Craigslist

Many of you have basements full of the type of stuff in the picture above. We have been slowly but surely moving things out of our basement recently, some items going to the recycling center, some getting thrown out, some going to our kids, and surprisingly lots going to paper recycling. But we had another pile: the donation pile. Usually I just put these items in a bag, call Purple Heart or St. Vincent DePaul and have them taken away. This time, however, we had a wide variety of things to donate, not just clothing, and we wanted to come up with a way to get these items to those who could use them (reuse!). So we took photos of 4 items (a popcorner, an old VCR, a small coffeemaker and a Robocub) and put them on Craigslist, in their free section. Within 3 minutes I had at least 15 e-mails, and all of the items were taken. Today, between 3 and 4 PM, we arranged for all of it to be picked up. Many other items we had set out were taken also. So before you think of disposing of an unwanted item, consider this option!

Composting

It has taken us a while, but we finally have our composting routine down, so I thought I would share it with you. The composting bucket, pictured above, is kept under the counter, and is pulled up when we're making meals. We toss any food scraps in it, with the exception of meat and dairy. While in Wales this summer, we also learned that you can put any paper towels or napkins in there too. Once a day, or once every other day, we empty this bucket into the bigger bucket in the garage (this one is just a reused kitty litter container with a snap lid). Then once a week we take the garage compost bucket out to our compost bin at the corner of our yard.

You'd be amazed at how much less garbage you take out every week if you compost and recycle paper and plastic. We are down to 2 bags a week. And somehow the compost doesn't smell...

The Devil in the Details

I think the story of my coffee mug is a great example of the process we are all going through trying to live a more green lifestyle. A little background: Over the past couple of years, I have read 2 books about garbage (please hear me out...I know I have already lost credibility with any sane person reading this!). First I read Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage by Heather Rogers, and then, apparently compelled to read more on the subject, I read Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash by Elizabeth Royte. The one important message I derived from both books was: Recycling is OK, but the real deal, the thing you absolutely have to start doing, is REDUCE the amount of stuff you consume. One small way I decided to do this was to use a reuseable mug when buying a drink outside of my home. This should be simple, right?

Wrong! First, I actually had to remember to bring my mug with me (helps to carry a bigger purse), and then, a while back when I had my mug with me, I went to a Starbucks and asked them to put my coffee into my mug. I got rewarded with a 10-cent discount, and then watched as the barrista made my coffee in a disposable cup, poured it into my mug, and threw out the cup. Great.

So the next time I went to a Starbucks, I handed my mug to the clerk and said: 'Can you make me a coffee in this mug without using another cup?' 'Sure,' was the reply I received, and when I explained the situation from last time, they told me that the person was not trained correctly, and that their policy is not to use cups just to throw away.

I know this seems microscopic in the grand scheme of things, but it represents decisions and conversations I have every day in so many areas. A big part of the work is just KEEPING AT IT.

Techno Trash

We have been working at cleaning stuff out of our house, a little bit at a time. I have taken used books and video tapes to the library, but ended up with some homemade tapes, or tapes missing the boxes, and didn't know what to do with them. In the past I have just thrown them in with the regular trash, but a few years with this group have made me think twice about that option. I googled 'videotapes recycling' and came up with a site called GreenDisk. This company wants all of your techno-trash (see list of acceptable trash), and they promise to "...safely and securely destroy your old data, recover reusable components, and recycle..." it. So I gathered together some old video tapes and threw in a couple of outdated portable disc players, weighed it, boxed it, and went to their site to order a mailing slip for $6.95 (their processing cost). Then I took the box to the post office this morning and paid another $15.46 to send it (note: The post office employees told me that it could have been much cheaper if I had not included the CD players - live and learn). So I'm out about 20 bucks but my conscience is a lot clearer.

Restaurant leftovers....what to do?

I mentioned at our Tuesday meeting that we have had some success with the Rubbermaid collapsible containers we bought for leftovers from restaurants. They are so flat...

...you can keep them in your purse. When it's time to take some of that food home...

...you just pop it open and put your leftovers in. I bought mine at Kroger, and you can also get them at K-Mart. One more step towards a no-styrofoam world.
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