New Recruit!

Our loyal follower, Tiffany, has begun to bring some of her recyclables over to our house. Yay! She lives in an apartment; trying to recycle in an apartment is a nightmare. Boo!

Making it Work at Work

Unfortunately, the university at which I work does not support recycling on satellite campuses. Never-mind the fact that there are four, large buildings on my campus, and that they're building an even bigger one right next to us. They just don't want to put recycling bins behind one of the buildings (that's what the administrator of my building told me). So I bring home cardboard boxes that I had food in. I also bring home small cardboard boxes from work, such as those binder clips come in. And it all goes in my recycling bins at home.

I also try to print everything double sided to save paper. This also save space in my filing cabinets and save the institute money on paper. When I can't print double sided, I use the back of the paper to make notes or to do calculations before I throw it out. (You can see it in the picture under the light on the right.) I've got a lot more waste paper than I have notes to make, so I bring it home sometimes to use as scratch paper. Jeff does the same.

I used to take bottled water to work, because the tap water in San Antonio is the nastiest I've ever encountered. There's sediment if you let your cup sit for awhile! I was bringing those bottles home to recycle, but about a two years ago, I started just getting water out of the cooler. It's on the other side of the building, but the walk is good for me. I'm also not contributing to the processes required to bottle water, get it too me, and recycle that bottle.

The Beginning

I've always been annoyed at waste. I remember being a kid and thinking what a waste it was to package things the way they did at the grocery store. When Jeff and I got married, we recycled glass bottles, and we tried to recycle white paper, but it was hard to do much more than that while living in a tiny apartment. When we finally moved into a house (May 2006), we were able to do curb-side recycling, and we've been recycling as much as we possibly can. We recycle more than half of our solid waste.

Last night I started thinking about how much we've tried to "go green" since being in the house in San Antonio, and I realized how much we've done only in the last four to six months or so. Thus, I decided to start this blog as a sort of journal of where we've come from, and how we're trying to ever improve.

I hope this green kick that I'm on not only lasts for me, but also catches on with the population in this country. It's really not as hard as it seems. I realized recently that "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" doesn't just mean "Recycle." And I read somewhere that you're supposed to follow those instructions in the order given: recycling is the last part -- reduce and reuse first. It seems like so much is disposable nowadays that the first two Rs just go hand in hand.

After my first taste of reducing and reusing, I caught the bug, but I didn't know how to proceed. I got online in hopes of finding some pointers on easy ways to live green, but all I found were either things I was already doing, which I really didn't consider green living (i.e. don't waste food by buying too much because you went to the grocery store hungry) or ultra-hippie, and let's face it, I'm not going to stop using toilet paper. And I'm not going to use an old t-shirt as a diaper (yes, I did read that on treehugger.com, which I am now done with for all but humor).

All I did was to stop and think about what I was using and throwing away every day and how that would add up over the course of a year. Once I could identify the waste, it has been easy to correct it little by little so far. God wants us to take care of the Earth -- let's do it!