How Much Trash Do You Throw Away

The other day I was watching Planet Green and there was a segment of G-Word about a man who collected all his trash for a year. This got my boyfriend and myself thinking: Hoe Much Trash Do We Throw Away??

So we have decided to tally the amount of bags that we take to our trash dumpster a month. We live in an apartment complex and therefor our trash is collected in large dumpsters scattered around our complex. There is no paper collection or recycling in our complex. We have to take our paper products to the yellow and green paper collection dumpsters at a local church. We take our plastic bags to the local Giant Eagle. We still have to find a place to take our glass and plastics.

We also have decided to tally how many ties we use the dishwasher. We have recently cut our use of paper plates in half. Way to many people use paper plates as their main form of plate. We used to. I have been pushing the end of our paper plate usage for a while but the energy costs for us were higher at our other apartment. I think in the long run the money we will save by not purchasing paper plates will be greater than the cost of running the dishwasher.

I plan on posting our progress in our journey of being more trash conscious. By the end of the year it will be interesting to see how much trash we send out and how much money we save by using re-usable resources.

I'm Addicted to Paper Towels!

Earlier today while preparing a marinade for tonight's dinner, I had a revelation: I am addicted to paper towels. I found myself using way too many paper towels as I wiped the counter down, as I washed my hands. I knew that we should be using more cloth towels but I never really counted how many I used.

The other day I had questioned how fast we were going through our roll. I had not realized it was so fast until I looked at the roll today, half filled. My mom always tried to use cloth towels. I was raised not to waste things. Somehow the convenience of wasting paper caught up with me.

It was so much easier in college just to take another sheet off the roll. I never had time to do loads of laundry. Now that I'm not in school I have more of a set schedule (even though retail is not as set as I would like it to be). I find I have more time to do laundry and clean.

A lot of people use paper towels daily in their cleaning cooking when they would just as easily use a cloth towel or old shirt as a rag. If all the people that use towels as cleaning tools used an old t-shirt instead the usage of paper would decrease significantly.

It is such a simple thing to do and I have pledge to break my addiction. I have added a hook in the kitchen over the sink for a towel to dry my hands. I am going to cut up some old t-shirts to use for dusting and cleaning.

I just hope that people read this blog and see how paper towels are a big waste of resources.

I'm Addicted to Paper Towels!

(originally posted on Design to Save the World)

I'm Addicted to Paper Towels!

Earlier today while preparing a marinade for tonights dinner, I had a revelation: I am addicted to paper towels. I found myself using way too many paper towels as I wiped the counter down, as I washed my hands. I knew that we should be using more cloth towels but I never really counted how many I used.

The other day I had questioned how fast we were going through our roll. I had not realized it was so fast until I looked at the roll today, half filled. My mom always tried to use cloth towels. I was raised not to waste things. Somehow the convenience of wasting paper caught up with me.

It was so much easier in college just to take another sheet off the roll. I never had time to do loads of laundry. Now that I'm not in school I have more of a set schedule (even though retail is not as set as I would like it to be). I find I have more time to do laundry and clean.

A lot of people use paper towels daily in their cleaning cooking when they would just as easily use a cloth towel or old shirt as a rag. If all the people that use towels as cleaning tools used an old t-shirt instead the usage of paper would decrease significantly.

It is such a simple thing to do and I have pledge to break my addiction. I have added a hook in the kitchen over the sink for a towel to dry my hands. I am going to cut up some old t-shirts to use for dusting and cleaning.

I just hope that people read this blog and see how paper towels are a big waste of resources.