I have always prided myself on being a frugal and thoughtful consumer, concerned about the ecological and ethical impacts of the products I buy. I pay that extra $10 a month to support green energy, use CFLs where I can, have low flow shower heads, bricks in the toilet tanks, buy earth and animal friendly cleaning products or make my own, wear my clothes until they're dead, line dry most often, use my dish and pasta water to water landscaping, shower every other day, have no ac, rarely use my gas in wall heater, bike or take public transport almost all of the time, drink tap water, buy local and organic foods to supplement those I grow in my garden, have reusable shopping bags, a reusable coffee cup, a reusable water bottle, save lidded plastic food packaging to store left overs of future meals and compost 100% of my food scraps.

....so what's with all this waste?

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Day 10: Out with the Bad...

Well, it keeps going...I'm deep into house overhaul / cleanup mode. I had the day off so, of course, I spent the entire day working on a project.

Today's project: The Kitchen

I looked back at my blog from the first day where I said I could reduce waste by buying bulk grains, cereal, beans, etc. So, I took a drive over to the Nature Mart Bulk Bin in Los Feliz to stock up.

I love this place! Almost all of their bulk items are organic including sugar, an assortment of flours, grains, beans, pasta, nuts, dried fruit, granola, carob bars, coffee, olive oil, honey and lots of loose herbs and spices all offered for very reasonable prices. Example: my favorite organic 7 grain rolled cereal is $1.89 a pound!

Got about six different items which means six new plastic bags. Ouch. (I gotta stop letting this stuff into my house!) At least, I can reuse them until they die and then switch to fabric bags.

Once I was home, I started putting it all away in glass jars. I have a pretty good jar collection now thanks to my old housemate Torry who left me with some really cool old jars when she moved. (Thanks Lady!) Still, about 1/2 of my collection is spaghetti sauce, pickle and apple sauce jars that I've saved. I like the variety of shapes and they work just as well as mason jars.

Once everything was tucked into the jars I lined them up in color order just for kicks. OHHHHH Pretty! So I decided that I need to have my grained goodies in an open cabinet so I can enjoy looking at them and remember to enjoy eating them as well! That required some reshuffling.

First, you gotta do the truffle shuffle. Here's the play by play:

Top Open Cabinet:

  • Spices, vinegars, oils OUT/ Bulk items IN

Low Open Cabinet:

  • Girlie Liquor OUT / Favorite cookbook, recipe box, tea set IN

Junk Drawer:

  • ELIMINATED / Spices IN

Top Narrow Cabinet:

  • Unused cookbooks OUT / Vinegars and oils IN

Low Useless Cabinet:

  • Unused glasses OUT / Girlie Liquor, canning jars (sort), incense and candle holders IN

Tupperware Drawer:

  • Unmatched, damaged or poor quality containers OUT

Again, not too much trash, but lots of recycling to send away. I'm not totally comfortable with the belief that this will actually get recycled. I feel ok about the paper, because it will always decompose if it gets dumped, but the plastic is pretty stressful for me to send out en masse. Especially, since we have one of the mini recycling dumpsters the city offers and we only seem to get it 1/2 full every other week. This week and the next it will probably be full.

Taking a quick assessment of last week's recycling, 70% of it is food packaging.

All this stress has me wondering how I got all this stuff. Is all this trash just a normal part of American life? I'm guessing that most people just think less about tossing it away to begin with.

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