making a change

i've always been interested in "being green" and being a "good steward of earth's resources" and the reduce, reuse, recycle philosophy....but lately i decided that using cloth grocery bags wasn't enough (although it IS awesome and i am so excited about all the ladies i gave cloth grocery bags to for Christmas telling me how they are trying their best to use them-thanks!!!).  i figured there was probably a LOT more i could do.  i've been reading some fabulous blogs like kitchen stewardship and new nostalgia and progressive pioneer (a lot of them on my blog's sidebar have good info) with great information each week.  these ladies are amazing. they make their own household cleaners to eliminate expensive chemical cleaners that cost an arm and a leg to purchase over and over and put dangerous chemicals in your home and in the air when used, not to mention into the waste system when they go down the drain and eventually into the water supply.  these ladies garden and compost.  they make homemade toothpaste and deodorant and cloth diaper and use homemade cloth diaper wipes.  all these things and so much more in the name of protecting their family from the overdose of untested chemicals in so many food and cleaning products, providing healthy safe options for their family...reducing their contribution to the earth's landfills....protecting earth's resources.......and saving tons of money.....and getting back to the basics, back to a 'simpler' way of living (i realize that simple does not mean easy....not at all).

i have to say i've been trying to educate myself more and more and am taking baby steps, as many as i can at a time, but tiny steps in the direction of making some changes.  so far, many of the changes have been more of a shift in thinking than requiring a ton of actual effort.  things i'm doing so far:

1) reducing disposable paper waste in the kitchen:  i was the queen of paper towels. i love my paper towels. they are so handy, especially with kids and dogs and cooking messes. they are right there on the countertop, smiling at you and offering their "just wipe it up and toss me out" mantra to make everything messy and gross go away.  but it doesn't really go away. it goes into the trash and into the landfill. and it costs approximately a-bazillion dollars (my accountant is still working the final figures) to replace them over and over and over.  my solution based on much inspiration from this post at simple mom - purchased some additional kitchen cloths and towels.  now, we have a cloth that we use to clean up petey's post-meal messes from him and his tray at the end of meals, a cloth to hand wash dishes with (see below) and a cloth to clean the countertops with which also might become the mess-on-the-floor-cleanup cloth if necessary. and then they just get washed after a day or two, depending on the amount of cleaning duty they've seen.  the first few days i was still habitually reaching for paper towels. but not really needing them.  and now i'm getting used to it.  i keep a roll of paper towels under the sink for an emergency situation (not sure what i deem an emergency yet).  i think we've only used 2 paper towels in the last week which is a HUGE shift - we used to go through probably 20 at a minimum each day. success!!!
*we also quit buying paper napkins and have purchased some plain white fabric napkins to use at meals. frugal AND feels fancy. can't beat it.

2) reducing water waste in the kitchen: i love my dishwasher and i will continue to use it. but i am now daily hand-washing the bigger items that take up half the space of the dishwasher after cooking a bunch of meals.  i know for a fact that saves energy from running the dishwasher and definitely saves water.  and once i run out of dishwasher detergent i am going to try Biokleen's products and possible attempt to make my own (although i've read a lot of negative reviews of a lot of diy dishwasher detergent recipes) based on New Nostalgia's recipe.    
as long as its made from good stuff and gets my dishes clean, i'll be happy. just tired of paying lots of money to clean our daily use products in toxic chemicals - why expose my family to it if there are great companies making safe products that have the same or better results?

3)  reducing plastic waste/use in the kitchen:  have been reading about alternatives to plastic food storage because of the plastic contents, disposable/non-recycleable aspect, and chemical leeching dangers (check out kitchen stewardship's monday mission: get in that plastics cupboard)......so i'm going through all my rubbermaid and getting rid of all the damaged plastic. and once the others get to that point, i'll get rid of them too. i just wrote rubbermaid an e-mail asking them how i can responsibly recycle their number 5 plastic containers which my recycling company does not accept.  interested to hear their response. i'm guessing you can't. so sad.  trying to shift to using glass storage containers and/or stainless steel.  pyrex is awesome. mason jars are awesome.  i even read about one lady who resuses glass food containers like spaghetti sauce containers once they are  empty to store leftovers in the fridge.  no more plastic disposable water bottles for me - i just invested in some stainless steel kleen kanteens for us to have around and take our water with us.  our two plastic water bottles, although bpa free, are starting to get damage from wear  and tear so even though we have been using reusable plastic water bottles, we still purchase the disposable bottles of gatorade or other things from time to time. so that's coming to an end.  ziplocs are going to be my hardest change i think. i adore ziploc. the sandwich baggie. the snack size baggie. the gallon size bag for large objects or for freezing soups or whatever. oh man. this one is going to take a lot of imagination and research on how to change that habit.  since reid packs his lunch every day, there need to be some small-ish solutions that are easily transportable without being totally breakable. i know wax paper is good for sandwiches (but you can't recycle that either). i've also seen some sandwich bag-like wrap-it-up things that are cloth on the outside and oilcloth on the inside for easy wipe-down cleaning and reuse. what about chips? what about taking a salad or apple sauce?  like i said.....lots of figuring out on this one.  i'll figure it out though, i promise. do you have any good solutions for this one?  i'm guessing i'll be looking for smallish glass mason jars to solve these lunch packing issues.

4) changing the way we eat: we've always eaten pretty healthy and i definitely try to cook most of our meals at home, from scratch. but now i am paying a lot more attention to the ingredients i'm using to cook our food.  not just for health reasons but the origins and contents of those ingredients. are they organic? are they from a local farm? do they contain pesticides and growth hormones? do they contain ingredients i can't even pronounce?  after reading "The Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan (truth be told i'm only halfway through and its already caused my mental process relating to food to shift directions) and watching "Food, Inc." i've learned some interesting things about where our food comes from, what is added to it or its animal or soil origin, how it is grown and picked and cleaned and processed and packaged into the item i am purchasing on the grocery store shelf.  so - i'm trying to look for organic, sustainably grown, local sources of the things we use most: eggs, chicken, fresh produce and milk.  this ensures there are no chemical additives like growth hormones, pesticides or preservatives, indicates that fewer fossil fuels were burned in the process of getting the items to my house and helps me support the local farmers.  i'm experimenting with baking more breads here in my home, trying out new recipes for these breads that use whole wheat flour, apple sauce or healthy oils instead of butter and honey or other natural sweeteners instead of refined sugar.   buying whole chickens that are vegetable fed, that aren't given growth hormones, etc - and cooking them in the slower cooker and actually using the carcass to make my own chicken stock (which is WAY easy thanks to New Nostalgia's recipe) and using the chicken to cook meals throughout the week since we use a TON of chicken anyway. there is a LOT of learning to do yet.....each time i look at an ingredients label on what i'm buying at the store i'm surprised what i find.

5) getting it from the earth: the newest experiment i'm embarking on is gardening and composting.  we've cleared some space. i'm hoping this weekend to build some raised beds and a compost so i can get started. i can't tell you how excited i am about all of this.

6) babies make a lot of waste: i am not going to stop having babies so i wanted to find a way to stop the pileup of diapers and wipes we go through every day. not that they are piling up in my backyard, but i am curious to know how big that pile would be if i could see it stacked up back there against the fence. how many diapers (and how much money) have we gone through in the past 15 months of peter's life? and how many more will we blow through before he is toilet trained? and we are starting over with baby #2......so i've decided to give cloth diapering a whirl and use cloth wipes while i'm at it.  i'm also going to try to pay very close attention to peter and attempt to send him in the direction of toilet training as soon as he's remotely ready for that.  i know its challenging and i don't want to do it too soon and have it become a source of anxiety for him but i've been reading some articles about how the US toilet trains their children MUCH later than the rest of the world.....that tells me it is possible and even maybe normal to do it sooner than most people are doing it here in our country....i mean, there can't be a huge fundamental difference between the capacity for toilet training between peter and a chinese toddler....its a cultural difference.  so we'll see how that goes.

7) dogs make waste too! (you can stop reading if you want - if you are a dog owner, stick with me)

this one seems a little weird but is surprisingly satisfying at the amount of waste i've been able to minimize already.  my sweet dog makes a lot of poo, yes my sweet 18 lb pug goes 2-3 times daily. that has meant 2-3 plastic doggie bags filled with poo each day going into the trash and then onto the landfill.  after reading about cloth diapering and how putting the baby poo in the toilet is best because that system is designed to deal with it as opposed to the poo sitting in the landfill and becoming petrified poo to be dissected thousands of years from now.  so, this got me thinking about alternatives for dealing with dog poo.  you don't want to leave it where it lies to spread disease and attract flies, not to mention stepping in poo is the worst thing EVER.  so what to do?  for now, until my bag supply runs out, my solution is this: i have 1 baggie in the backyard to pick up messes and when they happen i use the bag as a glove of sorts and carry the poo straight to the toilet to be flushed, turn the bag inside out so the icky side is on the inside and put it back out on the patio out of reach of my sweet little boy.  i've used the same bag for a week and its no problem.  it won't last forever and shouldn't be used forever but imagine how many bags i've already saved.  there is a similar routine for messes that happen on walks, they get picked up in the bag and tied loosely and then flushed when i get home. however the bag still goes in the trash but it goes in minus the poo to become petrified. we are heading in the right direction -AND my outside trash can no longer smells terribly of dog poo.  coming up on the hot hot summer months, that is a GREAT thing!  once i am out of those plastic doggie bags i will need new solutions.  probably a trowel/small shovel/metal pooper scooper of sorts for backyard messes.  perhaps even utilizing that somehow on walks.  OR there is this option-flushable, water-soluble biodegradable doggie bags.  i just bought some from flushdoggy.com on sale.  the bags apparently break down in the water of the sewer system in less than a minute and the waste system deals with the poo.  awesome.

there is so much to learn and i'm trying to train myself to ask questions about my consumer habits and lifestyle habits in general.  i do a lot of things because i've always done them. its interesting to see how many things i've been able to easily change just be questioning my current practices, reading about reasons to change and finding easy ways to implement those changes. i'm staying realistic. there are going to be times when i drive through mcdonald's for a meal.  there are only so many hours in a day.  not everyone does this so i'm not offended when i'm in someone else's home and they use paper towels.  i'm not opposed to my child eating a chicken nugget every now and then.  last night i brought home olive garden leftovers in styrofoam to-go boxes.  but now i'm trying to figure out how i can recycle them.  i just wrote ziploc to ask them if their baggies can be recycled anyway.  i found out that number 5 plastics CAN be recycled, even if my local recyler doesn't take them. i wrote rubbermaid and asked them how i can responsibly dispose of (ie: recycle) my microwave damaged rubbermaid storage containers that are also number 5 plastic.  it takes extra effort and it takes awareness and it takes a little thought......but i think once i get these things incorporated into my every day life it'll just be part of my normal and all that extra effort won't seem like extra. it'll just be my every day life. and hopefully my children will learn from my example and will grow up to think this way about conscious consumerism, about avoiding the disposable-everything lifestyle and about appreciating the basics of sustainable living.  i'm just on the tip of my journey and i'm really excited about the possibility for change ahead!