Save the Paper!

Something we did to reduce our paper usage awhile ago was to stop buying paper plates. I hated throwing them out all the time. Sure, you're not using water and soap to wash them, but if you use glass plates, you're not responsible for all the electricity and chemical usage in the manufacturing process as well as the trees used. And if you use a dishwasher, you'll probably have it full of glasses and flatware that need to be washed, so you just fill the rest up with plates.

And importantly, you're saving money. It's $45 for a pack of 1200 paper plates on Amazon. One of these packs is about what a family of four uses in one month if they each use a plate every morning for breakfast and for lunch on Saturday and Sunday. That's $540 per year. Many things that you can do to reduce and reuse actually save you money.

We often trade games through the mail. Sometimes we've bought a game, thinking that we're going to like it, but we really don't play it that much, or it's not what we thought it was going to be. So we find someone else who wants it and trade. We save the packing materials from these shipments, along with materials from online purchases, to box up our trades to send. I'm sure some of these packing materials have been used in many, many trades. We just keep everything organized in the closest in the office. Also, if we sell something on eBay, we can use the packing material to ship the item. Again, this is saving us money by reducing what we need to buy. Also, when we're done with a cereal box, I cut it up to use as backing to send pictures to family.

Just recently, we've started purchasing napkins made from recycled paper from Seventh Generation. They're a little thinner than what we were getting, but hold up just as well.