Wednesday, 19 February 2014

Doing our part

6. Helping Earth a little bit

I enjoy doing things that help the earth and help others, especially to reduce waste and fight against injustice and build community. I love my married life because this is a part of it! Here are some things we are doing to 'do our part':

- We recycle
- We compost, a little bit
- We buy milk bags instead of milk jugs (less plastic usage)
- We have started to buy some of our vegetables from a local farm, so we can support them; and also so that we can start to learn what items are in season (that way we can know what is most likely to be not-flown-in at the grocery story as well)
- We buy Fairtrade or local coffee, tea, sugar, bananas and chocolate. I hope we can add more to this list!
- We buy second-hand clothes, shoes, kitchen and household items, and gifts as much as possible
- We gift-forward (AKA we re-gift things that we can imagine another person enjoying more than we would, rather than letting it sit around not being used or being junk or thrown away); having a 're-gifting' box in our house helps us to avoid buying new/first-hand wrapping papers or bags, or last-minute gifts
- We ride our bikes to and from 'work'
- We save plastic bags to use as water-shielders on our bikes, lunch-packs, or to take back to the store; I'd like to try and use store-bags even less often.
- We use Freecycle and Gumtree 
- We save up batteries and electronics to recycle at a big centre instead of throwing them in the trash
- We use cloths for cleaning up instead of paper towels, as much as possible.
- We are looking into using homemade shampoo and cleaning supplies (not sure how quickly we can switch over to this!)
- If a fruit or vegetable is going bad (so far we have done potatoes and apples), we quickly chop off the bad parts and cook it up so that we use as much as we can rather than throwing them away


I hope we can just keep adding to the list, to do what we can to contribute to a healthier planet.

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