7 Month 5: Waste

Hello New Year! I so meant to blog in December, but then I got busy avoiding Media. (It was sort of a fail. The only media I managed to truly avoid was Twitter. Oh well.) I was also busy getting our apartment ready for our first Christmas together, making lots of yummy cookies to hand out, reading books, playing games with Brian and getting caught up on the first two season of Justified.

But now it's January, and we are in month 5 of 7: Waste. This snuck up on me, and the next thing I knew, Brian and I were sitting in the Charlotte airport yesterday, entirely too early, trying to wake up our brains and come up what I'd do this month to eliminate creating waste from my life. It took awhile for the wheels to start turning, but here's what we came up with:

1- Carpooling. Brian and I are going to try our hardest to drive 1 car this month.*
2- Become recycling vigilantes. We do recycle, but are lax about what goes in the garbage. No more!*
3- Always using our reusable grocery bags. Another habit I'm lax about. The key is putting them in the car.
4- No fast food/take-out. Basically, no food that comes in a container you have to toss. This also means I have to eat all my food at restaurants.
5- All Starbucks runs have to be made with a travel mug. No cardboard cups.
6- Eating everything in the fridge before it goes bad. Also, eating out of the freezer and pantry before hitting the grocery store.
7- Hopefully composting. We are asking our landlord if we can built a little compost bin in the backyard, and we'll get a counter top pail for the kitchen for scraps. I'm hoping to do some gardening this summer and hate the item of good compost items going to waste.*

* = drawn directly from the book. Jen also gardened (not happening in Wisconsin in January), conserving energy and water, buying second hand, and the hardest for us financially: buying local. I do plan to hit the winter farmers' market this weekend. Brian and I also talked about eating less meat, but we usually have one vegetarian meal a week anyway. Frankly, we don't create that much waste, we fill up one garbage bag a week, we don't leave lights on, and I wanted some habits that would be a stretch. I'm also going to be aware of what I'm buying in the grocery store that comes packaged.

I truly have hippie leanings at heart (you don't work at a farmers market for three years without them), so I'm excited to see what sticks through the month and beyond.