This book sounds great



1. Remove toxic products from your home and garage
2. Clean, declutter, clear and organize your home
3. Buy/use environmentally friendly products
4. Learn how to place objects to manifest change in your life

We are well on our way.

Tags: green, homeownership

To go with an earlier post about our efforts to live more green, today I'm thinking about how the world food crisis and rising fuel costs impact me directly.

Because we own a hybrid car and only spend about $20-25 per month on gas, the cost of fuel doesn't impact us DIRECTLY, per se. But it does affect us indirectly, as it does everyone else, particularly due to the costs of transporting goods thousands of miles by truck, plane, and ship.

It is more important than ever to seek out local food and other products. So I'm making that my goal this summer. Of course we will be eating the most local tomatoes possible -- ones grown in our yard, virtually for free. I am going to start getting some of our weekly food from the farmer's market in town, though it's pretty small and I might check out the market on the island which I know will be a lot bigger. I would love to have local cheese and eggs, too. When I'm at the supermarket, I am going to pick produce grown in WA instead of Chile.

Many of the items in the typical American home were made in China. There is very little getting around it at this point. Americans are addicted to cheap crap. The cheaper the better, who cares where it came from and how many weeks it spent on a freighter getting here, burning oil the whole way. So I try hard to find non-Chinese goods when I can, specifically American if possible. Yeah, you pay more for this stuff. Because unlike China, we have a minimum wage. Hopefully when we get a new bed at some point this year, it will be one from a furniture maker in Tacoma. It will last forever and only travel 30 miles to get here.

It's very very difficult to find affordable new clothing that was not made in China or other distant lands (Sri Lanka, Thailand, etc). So you either budget to buy a few pricey, American fashions, or you do what I'm going to do, which is buy my clothing used. Which is kinda what I always did before I worked at Gap and got my (boring) clothes for 50% off for nine years.

What are you doing to deal with inflation and gas prices? Are you changing your lifestyle? Do you conserve energy, re-use things, recycle more aggressively? Anything?

Tags: green

Brian is obsessed with putting a solar array on our roof ($20,000, um ouch), but for now, our other energy + earth saving efforts will have to do. Looking at him, you would have no idea he is really a tree-hugging hippie.

1. We have owned our hybrid car for three years, and will never look back. It gets up to 50 MPG on road trips, 30-35 MPG in cold winters, and will get back up to 40 MPG when the weather gets warm again. Brian wants our next car to be all-electric or biodiesel hybrid. Used vegetable oil! The car is gonna smell like fries. I am kind of torn on this idea.

2. Many of the lights in our house use compact fluorescents. We have the TV plugged into a powerstrip so that when it's off all day and all night, we can switch off the power so it's using no energy. If your TV is plugged into the wall, it's still using electricity even when it's turned off. We keep the thermostat set to 68 degrees instead of 70.

3. We recycle paper, plastic, and glass (this one's pretty common for everyone in WA).

4. We have started using biodegradable kitty litter. It looks like rabbit food and turns to sawdust when it gets peed upon. It does not stink and does not track all over the house. Brian dug a pit in the backyard behind the shed and deposited a kitchen-sized trash can into the bottom, with holes drilled into the base. The used kitty litter will be composted there, though the compost will not be used in the garden or anything. It will just degrade and stay out of the landfill.

5. We got a countertop compost container -- basically a ceramic cookie jar with a charcoal filter in the lid. I fill it with kitchen scraps and other biodegradables, and then every few days dump it into the compost bin outside.

6. The compost bin is a barrel-shaped container that spins around on an axis so the stuff inside can be easily mixed. It's where we will put all yard waste, lawn clippings, and food waste, as well as wormies I find while gardening. The worms do most of the work. Eventually we will have real compost! We will also save some money -- the city charges for yard waste pickup.

7. The washer and dryer that came with our house are hateful energy hogs, not to mention they threaten to eventually ruin all my clothes. Next month we plan to sell them and replace with brand new energy star washer/dryers that have things like low heat and small load settings, and super fast spin cycles to decrease dryer time. I wonder what color I'll pick? Blue? Red?

8. We have an electric lawnmower. It plugs in and charges like any other electric device. No gasoline needed, no emissions.

9. We don't use the car to commute, obvs. Public transportation daily. No stress, less of a "carbon footprint", as "they" say.

10. Most of the time, when we go to the supermarket we bring paper bags to re-use, or canvas grocery bags.

Brian also has this plan to collect rainwater from the gutters and incorporate it into our plumbing to be used in the toilets, but it turns out you actually need a permit or something for that? It's still in the research phase.

Tags: green