Grab Bag Friday: Compost Update, Sustainable Household Goods

It's the last day of Earth Week and our town is abuzz with free bike tune ups, cell phone recycling drives, and even a transportation fair. In celebration, I thought I'd give you a compost update and a review of how our various sustainable experiments worked out over the last year.

The Compost Update: All I have to say is, we're ready to go. As some of you know, last year we got a Sun-Mar 200 Home Composter and ended up with zero results at the end of the summer (apparently because our composter wasn't full enough?) Well, we've been adding stuff all winter, and let me tell you, it's full enough. If we don't have compost by June, we're out of excuses, and it was a failed experiment. I, of course, remain hopeful...

The Sustainable Goods Results: Here's where I'll rate the success of our various small household changes and how well we've stuck to them over the year. Click on the titles to review last year's posts:

The Lightbulb Change
We haven't replaced every single lightbulb yet (hence the 4 stars instead of 5), but we love our CFLs. They start out a little dim when you turn on the light, but within a minute or so, they're up to speed. I haven't had to change a single one. They're awesome.


The Yogurt Change
I've been really good about this one. If you remember, the change was to bring a regular spoon to work instead of using a plastic one for my yogurt. I eat yogurt at work at least 3 or 4 days a week, so I estimate that I've saved somewhere between 140-180 plastic spoons from the landfill just since June 2007!


The Sponge Change
These biodegradable pop-up sponges were definitely my favorite change of the year. Because they're so fun to expand! My estimate: we sent 45 fewer sponges to the landfill since June. As I mentioned last year, they don't have the scraping/scrubbing action of the heavy-duty store bought sponges, but between these and a scrub brush, I haven't come across a single thing I couldn't clean.


The Leftover Change
We haven't been the best at this one. We've definitely reduced the quantity of plastic bags and saran wrap that we use, but we haven't been able to totally shake the habit. We do, however, have a ridiculous number of saved yogurt and other containers spilling out of our cupboards, just waiting to be used. Hm.


The Napkin Change
I'd say we've been pretty good about moving to cloth napkins. We use them most of the time. But after a year, I'm not 100% sure about this one. What do you think is worse--the number of paper napkins that get thrown away, or the load of laundry that you do with all the cloth napkins? The cloth napkins seem like the way to go, but then when I'm loading them into the washer, I'm not so sure. Any thoughts?

Well, that's where we stand. Over the next few weeks, I'll try to remember to post some other successes, failures, and discoveries we've made on the sustainable goods front (for instance, our disastrous experiment with earth-friendly dishwasher detergent).

If you've tried any sustainable solutions that are working in your home, please share!

How to Compost Interlude: The Leftover Change

Here's just another small change we've been making in our house to try to reduce the amount of non-compostable waste we produce.

In the past, our leftovers went in ziploc bags or got covered up with saran wrap, right? Well, of course those bags and wrap would go straight into the trash when the leftovers were gone.

So now I've been saving big yogurt containers and other reusable plastic containers (the feta cheese containers are good ones because you can see through them) and trying to put all our leftovers in those, then wash and reuse them.

It seems almost too simple to even write about, but I was stuck in the ziploc habit because it seemed so convenient. As it turns out, using a small little container isn't really much more difficult. And it's not only reducing the amount of trash we're creating, it's also reusing some of the plastic that already comes into our house. Things my grandmother used to do to save a little cash always turn out to be smart in more ways than one.

In other news, here is a great post on 10 Tips for Organic Gardening with Children (thanks to Sustainable Table blog for the link!)

Here is the complete How to Compost series in case you'd like to catch up or review:

Step 1: Make it a Priority
Step 2: Choose a System
Interlude: Nature Tried to Kill My Composter
Step 3: Collect Organic Material
Step 4: Mix the Materials
Step 5: Moisten the Mixture
Step 6: Wait
Interlude: The Lightbulb Change
Interlude: The Yogurt Change
Interlude: The Sponge Change
Interlude: The Leftover Change
Interlude: The Napkin Change
The Sort-of Sun-Mar 200 Review Part One
The Sort-of Sun-Mar 200 Review Part Two
Sun-Mar 200 Compost Update
Sun-Mar 200: Starting All Over Again
Step 7: Use Your Compost
Step 8: Sun Mar 200 Garden Composter Review

How to Compost Interlude: The Yogurt Change

Since my compost project is going a little slower than planned due to the lovely Maine spring "thaw," I'm currently stuck in Step 6: Wait. So while I'm being patient, I'm posting on some small changes that composting has caused in my household...

The yogurt change: Almost every day I bring a yogurt to work for my mid-morning snack. I grab a plastic spoon from the office kitchen, eat my yogurt, and toss the spoon in the garbage can. Now that we've been composting at home, I've been more aware that those spoons are never going to break down. It might seem obviously wasteful to some, but for me, it was just a convenient habit. So now every morning, I throw a regular spoon in my bookbag. Simple. Easy. And that's an average of four or five fewer plastic spoons in the landfill each week. 260 fewer every year!

Jeremy Faludi on WorldChanging.com gives a link to biodegradable plastic silverware (made out of corn, I believe)...just in time for summer picnics! They apparently will decompose within a year.

And here is a fascinating article from National Geographic about the amount of plastic that is found in the ocean. According to the article, more than a million seabirds and 100,000 mammals and sea turtles die globally each year from either eating or getting tangled in plastics. Richard Thompson, a marine ecology lecturer, says:

"Plastics have a wide range of indispensable uses, from telephones to radio sets, but those aren't the products we're finding on the beaches. What we are finding, increasingly, are plastic bottles, caps, bits of packaging—disposable items which are used once and then thrown away...There's a challenge here for all of us to be more careful in the way we use and dispose of plastic."

Missed anything in this series? It's easy to catch up:

Step 1: Make it a Priority
Step 2: Choose a System
Interlude: Nature Tried to Kill My Composter
Step 3: Collect Organic Material
Step 4: Mix the Materials
Step 5: Moisten the Mixture
Step 6: Wait
Interlude: The Lightbulb Change
Interlude: The Yogurt Change
Interlude: The Sponge Change
Interlude: The Leftover Change
Interlude: The Napkin Change
The Sort-of Sun-Mar 200 Review Part One
The Sort-of Sun-Mar 200 Review Part Two
Sun-Mar 200 Compost Update
Sun-Mar 200: Starting All Over Again
Step 7: Use Your Compost
Step 8: Sun Mar 200 Garden Composter Review