How many times have I heard this phrase recently? We’ve almost all been hit hard by the economical hard times, and many people are realizing that maybe their grandparents had something to teach them after all. The new trend for being green (not like Kermit) has become a byword for what was once our way of life. Being frugal is all the rage but if you look at Pinterest or many of the other similar sites, it takes money to do what they’re doing. So much of what we can use is right at our fingertips, if we just look at things a little differently.
How many bags of trash does your family put out weekly? In our family of three we put out one kitchen sized trash bag per week. We live out in the country and we can burn all of our paper and cardboard. We have a garden with a compost bin so all of our food scraps go into that. But the biggest thing that keeps our trash from piling high is what we save and reuse. We recycle our glass and aluminum cans and we reuse our plastic containers and jars.
Jelly jars are good for more that just drinking homemade wine from! (Who knew?) We store dried herbs, pickle peppers, keep random hardware and anything small that can be reused down the road sometime. Just placing a small pillar candle in several and setting them around your house and/or yard will create lanterns to make you smile. If you color the outside of these jars with markers and let them dry they’ll be colorful as well. Of coarse its not just jelly jars, but pickle jars, salsa jars, etc. that get saved and reused.
Most of us have figured out that plastic shopping bags are great for the bathroom trash can. We have a larger bag within which we store the smaller bags. It hangs in our laundry room from the shelf that goes over the deep freezer and W/D. It’s easy to stash them in there and easy to pull them back out as needed. My husband takes his lunch to work in one every day as well. They also make good packing material when you’re shipping. With the holiday season coming up, that’s a cost savings if you need to pack a breakable present in a slightly too big box.
Burning paper is easy if you live in a place that its possible to just take the stack out to the burn pile in your yard. Most people don’t have that option, but you can burn your junk mail in a grill. Burn small amounts at a time and make sure to clear our the ashes. No one wants their burger to smell or taste like a used car dealer!
These are just some of the everyday things we do to keep our impact on the environment down to a minimum. In future posts, I’ll be talking about things we do in our own effort to be more self-sufficient.
Blessings,
Practical Witch
Practical Witch 