It’s been a hectic, non-stop busy week for Adam and I, and the fact that I haven’t hardly thought about our garbage project indicates that our garbage-free lifestyle seems to have hit its stride. 

That’s not to say, unfortunately, that we produced zero garbage for the week.  A few small pieces of packaging have been added to the garbage box, this week from a package of gauze we opened up for medical reasons and more tape from a desk fountain I bought for my new office.  In a moment of self-indulgence, we purchased a few things to make our new place feel more like home, and since this is the first time we’ve each had our own office, we wanted to add a few personal touches to our individual rooms.  I picked out a fountain that was packaged in Styrofoam (I have now found a place in Salem that recycles Styrofoam, thanks to the Master Recycler class) but couldn’t see that inside the box, the fountain was taped down.  I still haven’t found a solution for packing tape, and the stuff keeps adding up in our shoebox – Styrofoam can’t be recycled with the tape on it, and once torn off, the stuff is useless to me, as it’s no longer sticky. 

I attended the second week of my Master Recycler class and enjoyed the instruction immensely.  We discussed at length why recycling is good but not great, an issue that has been brought to my attention since we started this project.  In the world of environmentalism, recycling is like playing catch-up – energy has already been expended to make, ship, sell, and use a given product.  Recycling said product is a good idea because it uses less energy to recycle it than make a whole new product, but the recycling process is by no means pristine.  It still expends energy and uses finite resources.  This is why the “solid waste hierarchy” suggests we reduce, then reuse, then recycle.  Reusing a product generally uses no energy, and cutting back on what we buy (reducing) might just save energy from ever being expended. 

This class session also raised a question I have been wondering about, which is ironic given our current project: is recycling really worth all the effort?  The recycle process is seriously time and energy intensive – as consumers, we spend time sorting our trash from our recycling, making sure the recyclables are clean and in the right container, then heavy trucks drive on the roads and use gas, drivers must be paid, and then the recyclables go to sorting facilities to be sorted several times before they are finally broken down and remade into a new material.  Phew. 

According to an Oregon Department of Environmental Quality study, recycling is indeed worth the effort by a long shot.  If you first consider the energy used to mine, process, make, ship, and sell a product like an aluminum can, you can then compare this energy use to the energy expended during the sorting, transporting, melting, and reforming of the same can.  The DEQ study found that a person would have to truck aluminum 121,000 miles across country before the energy used in the recycling process equaled the energy used to make the can from scratch.  Metal, as the most valuable recyclable, of course has the highest figure here, but even glass would have to be truck 1,300 additional miles before it broke even on the virgin mining versus recycling comparison scale.  That’s a seriously encouraging figure.

Oh, and I did start using a fountain pen at home and at work.  I have a bunch of fancy office supplies I’ve bought and then used as decoration.  Now, I’m actually trying to use my quill pen from Ireland and my glass fountain pens, which I have to dip into ink to use.  My hands are often stained blue at the end of a writing session, but this just makes me feel like a more authentic writer.  Cheers for another week!

More than two months into Green Garbage Project and we’ve adjusted to this lifestyle so thoroughly that it’s become a habit for us.  It’s hard for me to pick up where I left off since my last updates have been so brief, but I’ll do my best. 

Adam and I are officially moved out of our old house and into the new one.  One collosal weekend of effort and we’re more than halfway unpacked.  Our new house looks more like really messy people live in it than like we just moved in which is definite progress.  We hate living out of boxes, so our goal is to be completely unpacked by next weekend.

We managed to move from one house to another almost completely without creating garbage.  I can’t say we were 100 percent successful, because little garbage pitfalls tripped us up along the way – little things I don’t think we could have worked around even if we’d anticipated them.  We had to peel off a piece of tape in our old house while cleaning, which went directly into the trash can thanks to the dead bug that was attached – gross.  A kitchen timer was broken during the move and cannot be repaired, so this now constitutes our first piece of garbage that isn’t packaging.  That in itself, by the way, is quite the statement about the way our society works – that a vast majority of the unavoidable garbage we’ve accumulated over the past weeks is packaging-related.  Maybe we need to do something about our wasteful packaging….  But I digress.  We unpacked and, as always happens when we move, started a list of items needed to complete our new house.  Among them, a new extension cord, hot pads (left the old ones at the old house, silly me), a dryer pigtail, and a holder for venetian blind cords.  We accumulated a very small amount of packaging when buying these items (one more piece of tape and a plastic tag thing on the oven mitts).  Still, our garbage from the past weeks fits nicely into the bottom of a shoe box.  I’m simply amazed at this myself – it’s hard to believe we’ve gone from a bag of trash a week to virtually no trash whatsoever.

In other news, I started teaching again this week and was a minor celebrity to my students when I returned.  We had some good discussions about why I’m doing what I’m doing, and I have some students interested in being greener and more trash-free, too!  All my students now point out any time they are using a green product, from the student using pencils made from tires to the student wearing green-friendly socks.  I gave away green, recycled prizes to students during my first day back as well.  I mentioned in my last note that I may be working with the district’s elementary school to make the district, and particularly the high school I work in, more recycling savvy.  On the teacher side of things, I am totally at a loss about how to avoid garbage created by used pens.  I can’t exactly grade papers in pencil, and it’s only a matter of time before a pen dies on me.  I’ll be researching this, but in the meantime, if anyone has any thoughts, please share.

I’m starting my master recycler class this week on Thursday, which I’m really looking forward to.  I also posted a new, handy article to the links page – if you haven’t checked it out already, it has A to Z tips on recycling unusual items like keys and tennis shoes. 

Finally, I owe a public apology to a Korean news station that was supposed to interview me live today, an interview I was quite looking forward to.  My cell phone charger got buried in the move and I think my phone must have gotten confused when I first charged it and turned it back on.  The phone registered phone calls but couldn’t answer them – not sure why but ended up missing the interview.    

Thanks to all for reading.  Look back next week for info about my first master recycler class.  Cheers!