Living an involuntary hermit's life. Working towards living a healthier, gluten-free, hopefully cancer free life with my 2 dogs, 3 chickens and loving family.



Living with intention

When stumbling through life isn't good enough anymore..... decide to be yourself and enjoy life, and pay attention to Gods gifts all around.

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Plastic Surgery While Shopping

In trying to live a more sustainable life I am finding more challenging than I thought it would be. But while my long term goal is to have as close to a zero carbon footprint as possible, my short term goal is that every month I improve. A couple weeks ago, I started to tackle two areas. Transportation and Laundry. I kept track of my use in these categories and will continue to do so. I would like to see improvement every month to the point that I feel I am doing the best I can do. Here is where I am at.
Transportation

Out of town in car-9 In town in car-0 Walk-1 Bike-7
If I was to double the results, that would give me an idea of a month's worth of transportation. Obviously I did well in town but need to reduce out of town trips in car.
Laundry
Other people using dryer-5 Dryer-2 Clothes line-5
The last two weeks have been challenging because we have had almost nonstop rain. The first problem is we don't reuse towels enough. 2nd is that my son comes and does his laundry but doesn't stay long enough for his clothes to dry on the line. We will work on this.
June's new focus is PLASTIC!!
In the US, most of our waste is plastic. All the plastic that has ever been made still exists or has been burned which releases toxic chemicals into the air because of petroleum. There are several garbage swills in our ocean. The Largest is called the Pacific Gyre. Or The Great Garbage Patch. It is 2 times the size of the continental United States. It is responsible for killing marine fish and mammals and vegetation.

I have looked at my buying habits. Oh boy, my family is terrible when it comes to purchasing items in lots of packaging. My goal is ultimately reduce all packaging. But for the month of June I will be just keeping track of plastic. No plastic is good, but some is recyclable. I will save all plastic that is not recyclable that we normally would throw away. I want to see how much I collect in a months time. But I will also be working on reducing. Like buying more bulk items using reusable containers and purchasing less items covered in plastic. A lot of what we already have in our house is packaged in plastic, so I don't anticipate we will do well for the month of June. My short term goal is not perfection, it is improvement. We'll see how I do. This will drive LL and B. nuts but OH WELL.

2 comments:

Kuusou said...

Looks like you're doing a good job on your personal goals! Good luck with this month. :)

Konnie said...

Thanks, Kuusou