The Day After Earth Day

Before yesterday's Earth Day Extravaganza, I felt like Joe and I were making a massive effort to be green. But then I read all of your posts and realized there are so many more things we can and should be doing.

At Sassy Britches post, I realized I should give more thought to disposing of medications. Wish I'd thought of that before I cleaned the hall closet. She also mentioned dryer balls, which I was not familiar with.

Hyacinth's post reminded me that we should be trying to run appliances at off-peak energy hours. We always wait until the dishwasher is full but then we tend to run it immediately.

I really appreciate Lora's willingness to speak up. Not only did she check to see that her fastfood container was recyclable but she then followed up by asking the restaurant why they didn't also provide a bin. Excellent point!

It's Frugal Being Green is an entire blog dedicated to greenness. I can't wait to dig around there and am so glad to be aware of the site.

I'm very fortunate to live in an area that offers extensive curbside recycling. We don't have to sort and they take a wide variety of items - plastics, glass, paper, even small chunks of cardboard. And we live within five miles of a major recycling center where you can take large cardboard, phone books, etc. We also have a hazardous waste center not too far away that will take lightbulbs, paints and about a million other things.

I mentioned yesterday that I was going to start working on our household cleaners and some of you provided great information. As I use things up, I'm going to replace them with safer alternatives. Two other things that I've decided after yesterday is that I'm going to ditch my daily can of soda at lunch - it's bad for my reflux and even though I recycle the cans, aluminum is a very unfriendly material. And I also need to work on ditching the paper towels - I use them conservatively (while Joe will use half a roll to mop up a small spill) but we have plenty of rags that can be used instead.

Something else that I think is worth mentioning is that while it's awesome to recycle, that's only part of the solution. We should also be cutting down on what we're taking in. Joe almost always puts two full recycling bins at the curb each week and I feel good about that - until I wonder if maybe we shouldn't be consuming that much stuff to begin with (this is what started me thinking about my aluminum cans). Also, we should make an effort to buy products made from recycled materials. When we bought file folders a month or so ago, it was a little more expensive to buy the ones made of recycled paper. But if there's more demand for these products the price will come down. And if there's no demand for these products, they won't be produced which will dry up the market for purchasing the recycled materials from the places that collect them. Nasty cycle.

Hope this post didn't come across as preachy though I suppose if there's one thing I'm willing to be a little "nutty" over, this isn't a bad topic. I really enjoyed all of your posts yesterday and thank you for participating.

And so now, finally, it's time to announce the winner. Here's our random.org results:

Congratulations to Tori! I love that she won because her post really makes an important point. Earth Day should be every day. And every little bit we can do counts. That's really what it's all about.

P.S. Tori - I can't email you through your profile so drop me an email at showmyface@gmail.com when you're ready to claim your prize.