- Skipping takeout food. Do you realize how much waste we generate from the "need" to eat food while we go from place to place? Think of the paper and styrofoam and plastic used by one fast food place for one day. If you to to Starbucks (which I never saw the whole time we were in Europe by the way) and order your coffee to go rather than "for here" in a ceramic mug, it seems like no big deal, but multiply that choice by the number of customers, and it's a mountain of trash. If you don't have time to sit down and have that snack or meal, either you don't need it or--just perhaps--your life is too complicated.
- Using a clothesline. In Estepona, our clothes dried much faster on the line than in the dryer anyway because the sun is so hot and bright there! I couldn't stand using the dryer when the sun was shining here, so I strung up a makeshift clothesline on the back porch as a placeholder. We'll probably put in a permanent clothesline out in the sunny part of our yard later this month.
- much more conscious of turning electrical appliances off when not in use, even to the point that we unplug the coffee maker, since we don't really need a third clock in the kitchen. When I walk away from the computer, I don't leave the speakers, printer and screen on.
- installing water conservation devices around the house. In Estepona, there are often water shortages, to the point that we were encouraged to water plants with waste water from cooking, rather than putting it down the drain. We will be replacing an old high-capacity toilet tank with the dual-flush type that is ubiquitous in Europe. The design allows you to use a small flush for pee and a more powerful flush for the other stuff. Why haven't we been using this kind of thing all along? They're not impossible to find here either, if you were looking for a convenient excuse. Your local home supply store can order one for you. I found ours on the web with free shipping. The brand is "Toto." The other thing we're likely to do is put in at least one rain barrel to catch gutter runoff for use in gardening and cleaning. I read that the average suburban house catches 24,000 gallons a year!!! Perhaps we should be putting some of that to use. Funny thing is, our 100-year-old house seems to have had a cistern and pump at one point, but all that's left are some terra cotta pipes near the gutters and a pump mechanism with no handle. Wish they'd left it alone instead of making "improvements," whoever's decision that was.
- eating "greener." We're lucky to have a farmer's market twice a week right down the street where we can buy locally grown produce. It stays so much fresher and tastes so much better. In Europe we paid a bit more for our groceries but everything was so much closer to the source, whether it was bread, meats, cheeses, even chocolate. We look at labels much more carefully, and if something has a bunch of high fructose partially hydrogenated crapola in it, it stays on the shelf.
- driving about as much as we did before. On this score, I have to say we have been doing better than most, because we live a 3-minute bicycle commute from work (even closer to the Family Travel Journal World Headquarters, ha). Once MeiMei finishes preschool, they'll both walk up the street to their elementary school, so we won't need to drive much of anywhere except the grocery store.
- composting. The city of Antwerp has everyone separate out biodegradable food waste, partly because the plumbing system wouldn't be able to handle a bunch of disposals pureeing food waste and putting it directly into the wastewater pipes. I would like to find one of those barrel things that you turn with a crank every once in a while.
- reining in spending on home decorating. Look at HGTV and you realize that America has given itself a House Fetish. People are tearing out perfectly good rooms because the stove is suddenly not trendy anymore or the light fixtures are just all wrong. Where does all that waste go? In Belgium, since it's far more common to entertain friends out at a restaurant than to invite them to your home, nobody needs to have a house with all kinds of room to show off a few times a year at a party. You just need a place to live everyday family life. We enjoy our house here, but have realized how much we spend on pretty frivolous things. I'm having a yard sale on Saturday to de-clutter a bit.
So I challenge you...will it take a trip out of the country to get you thinking about ways you could waste not and want not? Or at least waste less and want less?
No comments:
Post a Comment