Photo: byrne7214
If you don’t raise chickens for eggs, you can make a more sustainable choice at the grocery store. For goodness sake, stop buying eggs in Styrofoam! You may pay slightly more for eggs in fiber cartons but those cartons can be composted! And if your neighborhood egg sellers are offering you eggs in plastic (one of the dumbest things marketed to egg people), let them know that you’d prefer yours in a basket.
I mentioned to my 18-year-old the other day that I’d written about homemade oatmeal in a jar here on Attainable Sustainable. “That’s not very sustainable,” he said. “We can’t grow oats here.” He’s right. My oat habit is not entirely sustainable. I can’t grow oats myself. I can’t get locally grown oats. But, while I like the idea of utter and complete sustainability, it’s not something I’m aiming for. Certainly, in a pinch or emergency situation, we’d do without, but I’m just not willing to do that as part of my day to day diet. Instead, my compromise is to buy our oats in 25-pound brown paper sacks. The same could be said for the flour, the dry beans, and the cornmeal that I buy. They’re not grown here, but by buying large quantities of real food and cooking from scratch, I’m causing less of an impact on the landfills and our environment than if I were buying, say, ready to eat granola bars and Lunchables. I’ve had this post in draft for a few weeks. Interestingly, just last week, Tamar from Starving off the Land commented on my post about setting goals for food consumption and I think...
Instead of mailing or shipping items in bubble mailers or those indestructible Tyvek envelopes from the post office, switch to a more environmentally friendly option. Envelopes that use recycled newsprint as padding are a much better option for the earth than those plastic laden shippers. Of course, if you’ve received something in a bubble mailer, reusing that rather than buying a new envelope is fair game, too.
An awful lot of people have said an awful lot about composting. Mostly, they make it sound like an awful lot of work. Let me clear the air: composting is easy. You (yes, you) are nothing but a middle man (or woman, as it were). The compost? It doesn’t need you. You do not have to do anything to turn your kitchen scraps and garden waste into compost. Mother Nature will do it for you. Your only obligation is to collect material and gather it in one spot. First, let’s talk for a minute about why we should all be composting. Kitchen food waste that is tossed in the garbage ends up in our landfills, taking up space and emitting methane as it decomposes. Food waste that’s tossed in the trash wrapped in plastic has a hard time decomposing at all. Composting creates terrific soil amendment for use in the garden. Silly to throw away food waste and then go buy compost that’s been trucked in complete with a plastic bag, right? Even if you don’t have a garden, there are plenty of people who would be happy to take compost off your hands. Passive composting is an easy...
Giving up the convenience of paper towels is something many people won’t consider. If you’re one of those people, there is something you can do to make your paper towel use just a bit greener. Instead of buying bleached white paper towels, switch to those that are unbleached and made from 100% recycled material. It’s not the best option, but it’s definitely a better option, and we’re all about small changes around here.
If you’re still using incandescent light bulbs consider making the switch to compact fluorescent light. A CFL uses a third of the energy of a comparable incandescent. A 25-watt CFL bulb (comparable to a 100-watt incandescent) can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 1,000 pounds over the lifetime of the bulb. According to the Environmental Defense Fund, if every household replaced just three 60-watt incandescent light bulbs with CFLs, we would reduce as much pollution as if we took 3.5 million cars off the roads.
Whether you’ve got kids in the house who burn through batteries at an alarming rate or you just use a few in the course of a year, it makes sense to invest in a small collection of rechargeable batteries and a charger. Single use batteries end up in the landfill once they’ve run out of juice. Rechargeable batteries can be recharged and reused hundreds of times. We’ve had a battery charger for years. Not only does it prevent lots of waste, it prevents emergency trips to the store when our batteries die at a critical moment, and it saves us money. Once you pop a rechargeable into the charger and plug the whole thing into the wall, you’ll have batteries ready to go in just a few hours. Single-use batteries will run you about $6 for a 4-pack of AA batteries. Four-packs of rechargeable batteries go for about $10 each. You can get a small battery charger that works for both AA and AAA batteries for around $10 (this battery charger from Duracell comes with 4 AA batteries for $14). Or you can get a universal charger from Energizer that charges AA, AAA, C, D, and 9V batteries for...
I’ve been reading a lot lately about clever people turning wood pallets into creative projects. It makes sense; many pallets are not reused, but destined for the landfill; might as well use that wood for something. It makes good sense especially here on this island. Locally made rocks, we have (c’mon, it’s a volcanic island!) but 2 x 4s, not so much. All of our milled wood for construction projects has to come by barge, so repurposing pallets into something usable has a certain appeal. I picked up three pallets the other day, with several projects in mind and enlisted the help of my 15-year-old to dismantle the pallets. While some people are doing this with pallets: This is what I got: Taking pallets apart is not as easy as one might think. Someone in the pallet manufacturing industry decided that pallets should be built with a strange hybrid of a nail and a screw. You can’t pull ‘em out with a claw foot hammer because of the threads, and there’s no backing them out with a screwdriver or drill because the head is flat like a nail. After fighting to remove the boards without cracking them for an...
Not only is a mailbox overflowing with catalogs and junk mail a pain, it’s also an environmental waste. All that glossy paper (and oh, the fake credit cards!) wastes fuel as it makes its way to your house. And then what? We throw it away. Reduce the pile of junk mail that arrives on your doorstep by visiting the Direct Marketing Association or Catalog Choice where you can register for free and then opt out of receiving certain mailings.
When you’re cooking on the stove top you can cut your cooking time and/or energy use by up to 75 percent just by using a tight fitting lid says Richard Ehrlich, author of The Green Kitchen. Boiling water? Warming soup? Put a lid on it! I use a lid on almost everything I cook to save energy, but it also helps to save time – and who couldn’t use more of that?
