Week 7
After a wonderful, whirlwind vacation, we’re back in town and gearing up to go back to work (Adam today, me tomorrow) and to pack up our house and move across town. Even without the Green Garbage Project, we’ve had a busy summer: two boys for a week, visiting my mom for a week, a great vacation to Ashland and Crater Lake, and now a move right on the tail of everything. Whew.
Our trip to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival for four days, then two days at Crater Lake was one of the best vacations I’ve ever taken and, though we adhered to our garbage rules, our trash-free lifestyle hardly interfered with what I’d consider a normal vacation routine.
In Ashland, the only trash we generated was from food, and 100 percent of this is recyclable. We probably looked like strange little packrats to our hotel’s hospitality service, but we saved every ounce of trash from restaurants all week long. We’ve come to the realization that practically every type of trash from restaurant meals is in fact recyclable or compostable – including paper soft drink cups, paper napkins, paper condiment holders, straws, and plastic silverware. As usual, it’s simply a matter of getting these materials to a facility that can process them. We saved all this, washed out drink or food containers with soap and water in our hotel room sink each night, and stored it in a plastic bag. Over the course of the week, we generated recyclables to fill one whole plastic bag, but that was it. The only restaurant items we had to avoid were single-serve containers for food items like butter or jam.
If there is a place to vacation trash-free, it’s Ashland, which is a community that wholly embraces environmentally friendly lifestyles. Even so, anyone on vacation could take similar steps to avoid generating vacation trash.
After seeing four plays in Ashland, we drove to Crater Lake and set up our tent in a campsite within the national park for two nights. Camping trash-free was a more unique experience than what we did in Ashland. Though it’s contradictory, car camping the way we do it generally produces lots of trash – perhaps more so than usual. It became a new challenge for us to adapt our love of camping to our garbage-free lifestyle. We did this fairly easily.
As always, it was a matter of planning ahead. We purchased bulk foods and canned foods – very easy to take camping. We ate ravioli from a can, corn on the cob, garlic bread, hot dogs and beans, and sandwiches for lunch and dinner. Breakfast was bulk cereal, donuts, coffee, and juice. In addition, we brought along our compost bin, which proved to be invaluable during the camping portion of our trip. Usually, camping trash is especially gross because it contains food scraps. This time, we had no trash and clean, dry recyclables.
We also swung by the Oregon Caves National Monument and toured the caves. While waiting for our tour to begin, we poked around the visitor center and I found, to my surprise, a small display that discusses the impact of trash in the caves. A fiberglass box held an array of trash items found in the caves, left by humans and impacting the cave environment and cave animals. Now that we’re living trash-free, messages about trash are almost everywhere.
Week 6
This will likely be a brief entry as I’ve failed to mention for several weeks that we’re on vacation this week! Adam and I are taking a much-needed vacation to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon and then to Crater Lake for some camping. Next week’s update promises to be interesting because we’ll have some insights to share about a trash-free vacation and trash-free camping.
Week five of Green Garbage Project was probably our easiest week so far. We had so much to do, with our impending move, vacation, and school starting up again for me that garbage was not on our minds – and we still managed to live without creating any trash. This just goes to show that, with a good, well-thought-out system in place, living trash-free is a simple process. It’s really just a two-fold matter of buying only products that are recyclable in the first place, and spending some time sorting materials at the end of the day.
I was able to sign up for a Master Recycler class in Marion County, Oregon which starts in a couple weeks and which I am extremely excited for. The class is 8 Thursday night three-hour sessions with three weekend field trips to local facilities. I expect to learn a lot while taking this course and will certainly be passing along the info to readers of this site.
We also found a source for recyclable paper tape for our big move. I think this is the only real moving barrier we need to overcome – the ability to tape up moving boxes. A product on the market exists that is called reinforced paper tape – it has to be wetted before use but is completely recyclable. As far as moving is concerned, we’re now only worried that we’ll find some plastic wrappers hidden beneath the futon cushions or behind furniture … hopefully not! That’s all for now – I promise a more thorough update next week when we return from vacation.
Week 5, cont.
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At the beginning of my summer off, I planned to spend a week visiting my parents in Eatonville, Washington to have a girls’ week with Mom and do all the things we always wish we had time to do. So, in the midst of the media whirlwind we experienced, I was having a great time with Mom and still trying to check things off our lengthy to-do list. On the list: lots of canning, sewing, cheese-making, and soap-making. It worked out rather well that many of the items on the list relate to the Green Garbage Project and help me reduce garbage in my everyday life.
Several readers have suggested that I post tutorials about the canning process as well as how-to’s for making cheese and soap. I’ll definitely consider this suggestion but do want to note that:
1) This was my first time making soap
2) Soap-making is a tricky process that requires a bit of research, reading, and lots of safety precautions. Working with lye is a bit nerve-wracking at first and before anyone tries soap-making on their own, I caution you to read up on the process, particularly safety precautions.
3) Many excellent books and online tutorials have already been written about these processes. Mom and I purchased books on both subjects, and that’s how I learned.
So, perhaps tutorials will be forthcoming, but in the meantime I can certainly post pictures of the process.
I think I enjoyed making the soap the most since it was such a new experience. You start with two or three basic ingredients – tallow, oil, and lye if making traditional soap, or oil and lye if making vegetarian soap. Since Mom and I are vegetarians and buy only cruelty-free products, we went with a castille soap recipe which is amazingly simplistic – heated olive oil and lye mixed with water. We discovered just how important it is to measure precisely and double-check everything, because there are lots of places things can go wrong in soap-making. Eventually, the lye and oil are mixed together and then stirred for a long time. After that, the mixture is poured into a rectangular container to set up. It took more than a week for our soap to set up, and now our next step is to hand-mill the soap, adding fruit/vegetable ingredients and scents.
Mom's skull and crossbones - anything that touches lye should never be used for another purpose.
Stirring the oil, water, and lye mixture until it shows trailings, which are intial signs that the soap is setting up.
The soap after about a week.
As for canning, this is a process Mom and I are much more familiar with. We made blueberry syrup from berries I picked from a local farm here in Oregon, blueberry butter (like apple butter), pineapple jam, kiwi dacquiri jam, and salsa. Here are the finished products:
The results of our hard work - lots of canned foods.
The cheesemaking process was a bit of a disappointment, because we ended up with milk that wouldn’t separate into curds and whey. The cheesemaking process is a fascinating one, and making homemade soft cheeses is a simple matter as long as the proper milk is purchased. Milk for cheesemaking needs to be pasturized, not ultra-pasturized(heated to a lower temperature) for the correct chemical reaction to take place. The trouble is, nowadays, most milk is ultra-pasturized – it keeps longer and is probably perceived to be healthier by many people. We bought milk that said it was pasturized, but upon calling the company found out that is was heated too high for cheesemaking. If you’re interested in making your own cheese, I recommend checking out www.cheesemaking.com.
Finally, we went for an alpine hike in Mount Rainier National Park and had a wonderful time. The hike was a great reminder why we’re doing this project in the first place – the make the great outdoors a little cleaner.
One of many gorgeous views among the Mount Rainier wildflowers.
Week 5
Week 5 of Green Garbage Project was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in my life, largely thanks to lots of media exposure and an overwhelmingly positive response to our project. Other than the person who suggested that if I really want to help the environment I ought to stop using the toilet (thanks for that), we have received encouraging comments from across the globe. I have received comments from readers in India, Brazil, New Zealand, all over Europe, and from many people in the United States as well. A friend in Germany called to tell us he saw us on the news over there. My grandfather called to let me know he saw us on CNN, and the calls keep coming.
Thanks to the huge response our Web site has seen over the past week (over 5,000 visitors in a week!), I feel I have a lot I would like to address in this blog, so please bear with me if it’s a little long. I’ll add subheads to help organize my thoughts.
Are we really making a difference?
Jessica J writes: “I appreciate what you’re trying to accomplish, but I wander if you’re relying more on one kind of waste in order to minimize another. I read that your grocery shopping now takes twice as long as it used to. I’m sure finding resources and shipping details for all your new recyclable products prompts my question: How much gasoline are you using now, as opposed to before ya’ll started, and how much fuel is being used to ship specialty things like recycled toothbrushes?”
I wanted to respond to this directly because it is at the forefront of my mind all the time. There wouldn’t be much point in a project like ours unless we could be sure we were reducing our overall footprint. At the end of the year, I plan to do an analysis of my expenses this year compared to the last to determine answers to these types of questions. Am I saving in garbage output but still polluting the planet by using more gas? Does living garbage-free cost more or less? It might be too early to definitively answer these questions, but initial comparisons seem to indicate that yes, this project is reducing my carbon footprint and costing us less on groceries.
Let me explain how that works: When I say my grocery shopping time has now doubled, I certainly mean it, but this takes into consideration more than just time driving between stores. It takes me longer to make a grocery list now, and scooping bulk foods takes longer than picking up the pre-packaged counterpart. Unloading and organizing groceries at home also takes longer. As for running around between stores and using more gas, I genuinely don’t think we are. What this project has done is force me to be more organized in my grocery shopping, so instead of making several trips to the store each week, I make one trip every other week, albeit to several stores along the way. If I head to a store that is out of my way, I don’t go until I can combine the trip with another errand I would have to make anyway. A good example of this is my monthly trip to the Portland recycling depot – since my parents live in Washington and I often visit them monthly, I combine the two trips, thereby using the same amount of gas as if I wasn’t going to the recycling depot.
As for the toothbrushes, C.P. Chen writes: “Preserve (the company that produces the toothbrushes) addresses the issue vis a vis their Brita filter recycling programme in particular: “Preserve has calculated that the benefits of keeping Brita® filters out of landfills and making them into Preserve products outweigh the impact of shipping them for recycling through this program”; And re. their recycling process in general: http://www.preserveproducts.com/ourprocess/ They hired an environmental consultant to calculate the net benefits.”
The toothbrushes are the only things we’re ordering online at this point. Everything else can be purchased from a local natural foods store. If we do have to order something online for this project, rest assured that I will be doing a footprint analysis to the best of my ability.
I greatly appreciate comments like these, and I hope readers keep them coming. I am in a continuous process of research about garbage and recycling and the overall environmental impact of a variety of activities. You should see my stack of library books – among them, Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash, The Consumer’s Guide to Effective Environmental Choices, Flotsametrics and the Floating World, and Recycling and Incineration: Evaluating the Choices. I can’t get enough of this stuff, and I’m constantly learning more. As I look further into questions like Jessica’s, I will post my findings.
For now, I keep coming back to this: if the average American produces 4.5 pounds of trash a day, that’s more than 1,600 pounds of trash a year. If I can reduce that number to five pounds or less by the end of the year, I’ve saved 1,595 pounds of trash from entering the landfill. Any way you slice this, it’s making a difference.
Burning
I’ve had two people express concerns about the limited amount of burning we’re doing, and I do want to address this. First, rest assured that we are only burning clean, dry, untreated organic material, and we’re only burning it legally. In my burn bucket right now is dryer lint from cotton clothes, veggie corn dog sticks, match sticks, some butcher paper, and a bag that held movie popcorn.
I can’t recycle these items, and because it’s been shown that biodegradable materials often don’t biodegrade in landfills, I feel that burning is our better option here, especially when you consider that this burnable stuff comes with us when we camp, where we use it as firestarter. We’re actually reusing these materials in a place we would be burning anyways.
However, that said, I’ve been hard pressed to find scientific information of the environmental impact of, say, burning versus landfilling waxed paper. It’s easy to discover that in many cases, burning other materials like plastic is much worse for the environment than just simply putting them in a landfill, because burning these sorts of materials releases toxic chemicals into the air. I’m still researching this, and will keep this blog updated with my findings.
In the meantime, I’m going to experiment with composting the butcher/waxed paper and dryer lint. Some people say it can be done. If that’s the case, the burn pile is eliminated.
Kitty litter
We had an excellent article appear in The Guardian about our project, and the reporter mentioned that our cat Lexy refuses to use biodegradable litter. Since the article, we’ve had lots of suggestions for dealing with our non-green kitty, all of which we appreciate.
We’ll keep trying to get Lexy to accept biodegradable litter, but the litter itself isn’t as much of an issue as the fact that cat feces can be toxic whether flushed or buried. From nrdc.org: “Now, here’s the scoop on cat poop. EPA brochures and a variety of other publications say you can flush it down the toilet, minus the litter. However, research suggests that the eggs of Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite found in cat poop, may survive the wastewater treatment process and contaminate waterways. While Toxoplasma rarely affects healthy people, it can cause defects and brain damage in babies whose mothers were exposed when pregnant. Brain disease can also develop in people with compromised immune systems. In addition, Toxoplasma has been shown to harm sea otters and may affect other wildlife as well. As the eggs can last for up to a year in soil, burying cat poop is also problematic. For this reason, researchers working in the field recommend keeping cats indoors and disposing of waste and litter in the trash in sealed plastic bags.”
I know I sound like a broken record here, but I will continue to research this issue. In the meantime, however, flushing, burying, or even composting cat poop just doesn’t sound like the best plan. While we could switch to biodegradable litter, I’m afraid it might be an exercise in futility since it will be heading to the landfill anyway where biodegradable materials are doomed to a stagnant life for many years.
I will, however, look into pet poop composting once we move into our new house in a couple weeks. This could be a good option for us. Please, keep suggestions, ideas, and thoughts coming.
Dental hygiene and preventative health
I had an email conversation with Sue Mills, RDH, regarding dental health and the dental routine I indicate on the “tips and tricks” page. To preface, I need to update the tips page, because our routine has changed somewhat. We make our own mouthwash, use Preserve toothbrushes (plastic handles made from recycled yogurt containers), and use a rubber stimulator and water pik in place of floss. Mills says, “I am a Dental Hygienist, 20 years now and I just want to comment on your dental thoughts. Wooden toothbrush with natural bristles-NO, don’t do it. I can’t say much about the wooden handle but the natural bristles will harbor bacteria, yuk! Don’t compromise your dental health or overall health for this project. A rubber tip stimulator doesn’t replace floss, sorry! The only thing that does what floss does is floss. You can try using flat toothpicks to get in between teeth, but that still not Dental floss and over time you might set yourself up for cavities between the teeth. I would definitely talk with your DDS or Dental hygienist and see what suggestions they have specifically for your dental needs.
“Personally I am a huge fan of the Oral-B Braun rechargeable models. I tell my patients who are trying to be green that after they have charged up the handle to unplug the base until they need it again and you should be able to take out the battery and replace with a new rechargeable one in 4-6 years. Yes, you are throwing out a brush head, but that is a dental health related issue.”
After telling Mills that I have communicated with a dentist about our project, she pointed out that, while our current routine is adequate for our current health needs, it may not always be so. Basically, Mills cautions us to practice preventative care, and I think this is a marvelous idea, because in all health areas, if preventative care incurs a little trash, this is always preferable to reactive care, which is not only worse for one’s health but also creates a boatload of trash, too.
I’ll leave my comments there for now, as this has (as predicted) gotten very long. I still want to write about my garbage-free week with my mom, which we spent making soap and cheese and canning jams and salsa. Look for that update by Wednesday.
What a day!
I don’t normally update the blog except on Mondays, but after the amazing day we’ve had, I did want to share our thanks to everyone for their support of our project.
I received a phone call from CNN this morning (!) about Green Garbage Project and was on air by 11:30 a.m. Pacific Daylight time. They dedicated a two-minute spot to us, which can be seen here: http://newsroom.blogs.cnn.com/
After the CNN interview, my phone rang off the hook and my email did the electronic equivalent. We did interviews with London’s newspaper The Guardian and Adam spoke with San Francisco’s Air America for about a half hour tonight. I’m being interviewed by a Portland radio station tomorrow morning. Additionally, the newspaper at my alma mater, UW, is working on a story about our project.
We’ve been receiving emails and comments on the website all day, and every single bit of communication has been positive. I am delighted when I hear other people saying they, too, will work to reduce their trash. Thank you to everyone from the bottom of my heart for your support. I’m both humbled and amazed at the outpouring of help, information, and support from all over. I hope you all keep reading our blog each Monday and please always feel free to contribute to the discussion. Thank you.
Week 4
My update this week may be a bit brief as Week 4 of our project passed in an utter whirlwind of activity with no end in sight. We’ve reached a landmark, however - one month without garbage!
As I noted last week, we had our two nephews visiting us, which could have thrown our project for a loop. Our nephews, Taylor and Hunter, live in Washington and had a great week visiting Uncle Adam and Aunt Amy. Taylor, 12, and Hunter, 11, surprised and impressed me throughout the course of the week as we lived as garbage-free as possible with two kids around.
Our week was filled with typical vacation-type activities – lots of swimming to escape the 107-degree heat, ice skating, visiting the Evergreen Aviation Museum, a double feature at the drive-in, and several trips to the beach. Whew. I was (and still am) exhausted from all our activities, but we had a great time.
Since Adam and I don’t have kids, I wondered what to expect garbage-wise when it came to Taylor and Hunter. For the vast majority of the week, the boys were not only okay with helping us avoid garbage, they embraced our lifestyle to an extent that truly impressed me. Both boys, during the course of the week, offered to avoid buying new souvenirs to avoid garbage, they helped sort our recycling, were good sports about the compost pile, and asked many intelligent, thought-provoking questions in the way only a child can ask. For example, when I referenced the Pixar cartoon WALL-E as a prop to help explain our project, Hunter said to me point-blank, “I really respect your project and don’t want to hurt your feelings, but isn’t WALL-E just a cartoon?” This led to a great discussion about whether the earth could actually run out of space for garbage. I was so proud of him I wanted to burst; like I tell my students, whether you agree with me or not isn’t the issue here, I care that you can think about this critically. The boys definitely demonstrated excellent critical thinking and led me to some new perspectives about our project.
We produced a teensy bit of plastic garbage this week in the form of two more safety seals, this time on the recycled/recyclable Preserve toothbrushes we ordered. We also added a foil wrapper from a bee-sting swab to the box. Additionally, we used more band-aids during the week than I think Adam or I have ever used during our entire marriage, but ironically, none of the used band-aids ever made it back to me. Hmmm – they could be on a beach or in a swimming pool somewhere, I suppose. So, inadvertently, we may have been responsible for the accidental displacement of a few band-aids into the environment.
Also, the universe proved just how ironic it can be during Week 4, when our landlord notified us that our rental property is now up for sale. This means a move is in our future – a garbage-free move. To be honest, one of the reasons we’re doing this project this year is because we thought we might avoid a move, which generally generates a lot of trash. Well, now we’ll just have to find a trash-free way to get our stuff from one place to the next. Luckily, we found a house only a few minutes away, so the move won’t be difficult. Adam is friends with our new landlady and she welcomes pets and our garden, so we’re all set. We’ll be moving over Labor Day weekend.
I’m spending this week with my mom in Washington, where we’ll be making soap and cheese, canning, crafting, sewing, and baking. I should have lots to write about next week, too. Cheers!