Our Mom is totally losing her cred here....

This week, I fail at being a conscientious reusing/reducing/recycling citizen. You can take away my GREEN card. I am sorry, Mother Earth. Give me my time out. Make me stand in a corner. I’ve been a bad girl.

My ambitious plan to live a more simple life is becoming more and more complicated as I flail about, try to figure out how to best reuse things, pass along our used items, and produce less waste to be transported to a landfill. In my defense, it’s also summer, and I have almost NO time to spare for the implementation lately, and not enough attention for following through with most of my big objectives.

Still. It sucks to feel like you’re failing at something you were so motivated about initially.

My big idea for back-to-school shopping involved figuring out which of my friends have older/bigger children than mine, and begging for their cast offs. This is not working, as it’s rather hard to procure twirlable dresses for the 6 year old and t-shirts with robots and/or puppies on them for the 8 year old. Buying from a consignment store is better than going to Target, right? Except that the prices are either the same OR HIGHER at the consignment store! Yeah, right, and then I’ll replace our toilet paper with twenty-dollar bills! I really can’t do something that is so financially wasteful. So it looks like I’ll be hitting the sales racks at *insert department store name here* and trying not to beat myself up too much about it.

I have even failed lately at putting the organic waste into the compost bucket in the yard. Mostly because, ahem, COMPOSTING IS UTTERLY DISGUSTING *wretch, hurl, ewwwww, icccckk*. We use a small plastic bin to temporarily store the compostables until we can bring them outside, but it stinks when I open the cover, and it keeps getting dropped onto the floor, to the jollies of the ever-present fruit flies, who hover in my kitchen’s corners like crack-addict buzzards. No one wants to continue the composting experiment we started at the beginning of spring with such high hopes. My kids, who LOVE science and bugs and getting dirty, have gone on strike over the disgusting chore of emptying the compost.

And lastly, I have items that are seriously worn to nubs, and I don’t know what to do with them. Like the bathrobe Allen got me in 1998. Or the 15-year-old stompy platform shoes that are too worn out to pass along. I’m sure there are clever uses for these much-loved but worn-out things, right? Martha Stewart could probably transform that robe into a sassy winter wrap or a spiffy looking blanket. She could make delicious meat-free burgers from the worn shoe leather of my stompy shoes. I, on the other hand, threw them in a trash bag and “stored” the bag in my basement.

And speaking of basements — mine is where clutter lives in perpetuity. What I want to do is rent a dumpster and be less sentimental. But that would also mean sending stuff off to the landfill instead of being conscientious and thoughtful about my refuse. I should put things on Craigs List and Freecycle, have a yard sale, advertise my cast offs on the town’s list serv.

Should. It’s a word I use too often these days. I should do something about that.

What do YOU do when you have too many “shoulds” but even more “don’t wannas” and a serious lack of time/motivation/energy to get stuff done? Should I just get the ADD diagnosis now, eat more bran, drink more coffee, have a beer, get a life?

My friends reuse hundreds of Stoneyfield Farm yogurt containers to make homemade ice cream during our annual camping trip!

Today I want to talk about PLASTIC. Part of Project Simplify is my plan to reduce what goes into our trash can AND into our recyclables disposal. We’ve stopped buying bottled water and are using stainless steel bottles filled with our own tap water instead. When you consider that Americans use an average of 2,500,000 plastic bottles every HOUR, the little any of us can do would make a huge difference. What an easy way to make long-lasting change. Use a refillable bottle. Use your tap water. Let’s make use of that amazingly convenient privilege most Americans take for granted in their houses: the faucet and access to clean water.

What about plastic bags? The answer isn’t as simple as STOP USING THEM. Most Americans use plastic bags to transport store-bought items to their homes from the store.  But if you think of the amount of oil used to produce plastic bags (about 12 million barrels per year to produce plastic bags for Americans’ use, according to one source I found ), it makes it a lot more compelling to make use of those reusable shopping bags. But even if you use reusable bags for most of your shopping, you still end up with some plastic bags. Don’t throw them in the garbage, please. Plastic bags are clogging up landfills, killing more than a million sea creatures every year, and they don’t break down for approximately 600 years. Plastic bags are hard to rid ourselves of. My town doesn’t take them in the recycling, so I have to bring them to the grocery store to recycle. What I end up doing is reusing them a ton of times for transporting things, and then returning them to the holder in the kitchen. When the holder overflows, I take a handful to the recycling box at the grocery store. It’s a little bit of effort that goes a long way.

It’s taking slightly more effort to rid ourselves of *plastic baggies that seal, for food storage and for lunches. Getting rid of these is causing trouble in my marriage.

Allen, my long-suffering co-conspirator, who happily goes along with all my nefarious plots, turned to me one day when doing the agonizing exercise of putting the kids’ lunches together and said, with some level of exasperation, “My gods. Can we please just buy some EASY disposable-type stuff to put in the kids’ lunches?” He was, at the time, washing out some containers to put fruit into, while looking for more containers for the crackers. My response was not helpful. “Well, honey, if we order out for more Indian food, we can re-use those containers for the kids’ lunches!” Since he’s in charge of the family budget, and eating out is one of those things we shouldn’t do often, well…that wasn’t the answer he was looking for.

What Allen is lamenting is the ease with which we used to make the school lunches. I would buy serving-size bags of pretzels or crackers, or those neat little plastic bags filled with cubed or stick cheese, or tiny bags of perfect little organic baby carrots. Now, we have to clean out the myriad of containers we use and find healthy snacks to fill them up with. We now use REUSIES, which we adore. We have stainless steel containers to send water or juice, instead of disposable juice boxes (with plastic straws). We use plastic containers over and over again for goldfish crackers, carrots, fruit–all that stuff you put into your kids’ lunchboxes that you hope they aren’t just throwing away. Making lunches for the kids is, to put it bluntly, a pain in the ass. But it’s small change that we CAN do, and that makes a difference, and thus is worth the effort and inconvenience.

What are some ways you’ve found for saving resources/reducing your use of/disposal of plastics? Don’t tell me I’m the only one who washes out the bags the bread comes in ….

*Most of our food still comes wrapped in plastic, in plastic bags, in plastic containers even. Making more changes will mean buying food differently, which I’ve begun doing, or *ahem* making things like bread myself. Eek. But it’s hard to imagine getting things like cereal or noodles in something other than plastic. In so many ways, plastic has truly been a boon to the modern world. A cheap way to preserve and transport and store food. But our over-reliance on plastics in the US  is having serious environmental impact.

So far, we have made drastic changes to just about every facet of our lives. I’ll be talking about this in the coming weeks. But today, I’m going to run around the park and chase my kids! Have a lovely 3-day weekend!