Compost it.

If you’ll recall, a few posts ago I took a reader poll on our next nerdy enviro-topic, and garbage disposals vs. compost bins won in as much of a landslide as you can have when about 15 people vote. So without further ado, here is what I have learned about what happens to food when it goes down that garbage disposal (and what happens when it doesn’t).

We’ll start with the most straight-forward option (which, as usual, is also the best choice). Composting is ideal, it turns out. It takes the food straight out of your kitchen and puts it back into the ground as nutrient-rich soil. The process does produce carbon dioxide, but there are worse/more byproducts out there (see below) and at least you’re getting something extremely useful out of it.

If you can’t compost (or don’t want to, more accurately, since everyone “can” compost, technically), the next best thing is the garbage disposal, but it is not a close second by any measure. It depends largely on how the water treatment plant nearest you functions. Here is the Philadelphia Water Department’s own description of how they treat organic waste in our water:

Secondary Treatment. Secondary treatment uses biological processes to remove organic materials – materials from living organisms – still dissolved or suspended in the wastewater after primary treatment. The wastewater is combined with activated sludge, material containing the same microorganisms, or “microbes,” that decompose sewage in nature. The wastewater and activated sludge are aerated with air and mixed together in aeration tanks.

This creates an ideal environment for the microorganisms to “eat” the organics. The wastewater from the aeration tanks then flows to the final sedimentation tanks. Wastewater slowly flows through these tanks, allowing the solids to settle. The settled solids, secondary sludge, are pumped to another process where they are thickened to 4% to 5% and then pumped to the digesters. Just before reaching the river, the water is mixed with enough chlorine* to kill any remaining disease-causing organisms. The EPA requires 85% removal of suspended solids from wastewater. The treated water that leaves the plant – called effluent – is even cleaner than that.

The digested sludge from the Northeast Plant is barged 12 miles down the Delaware River and up the Schuylkill to the Biosolids Recycling Center where it is thickened, or dewatered, to 25% to 30% solids. After dewatering, the biosolids may be composted, land applied or landfilled off-site.

As you can see, some of the organic “sludge” (formerly your banana peel), does get composted, but they don’t say how much (although later in the article they say that “most” gets recycled). And of course, that whole process initially releases a whole bunch of methane at the plant and then I would assume still produces a significant amount of carbon dioxide when it’s actually composted. Some water treatment plants capture a good deal of their methane and reuse it to power/heat the plant. I did not see evidence of this on Philadelphia’s water site, but I also did not call to check–one would assume they would want to brag about it prominently if it were happening, though.

The worst choice is putting your food waste into the garbage can. As we all have heard a million times, landfills often prevent any sort of useful decomposition, since no oxygen actually gets to the stuff in there. (Although the website for the company I most often see driving around Philly has a lot of pages of PR stuff about how green and sustainable they are…including capturing methane, so maybe landfills have made more progress than we assume from our childhood days!) Another problem I found listed on a number of sites is that the more food waste in your garbage, the wetter it is. And the wetter trash is, the more likely it is to help someone else’s hazardous waste (because we all dispose of our paint thinner and batteries properly, of course) leach from the landfill into the ground and then into our water supply.

I should note, here, though, that although composting was the unchallenged winner in this battle, there was some disagreement across the interwebs about how much better a garbage disposal is than the garbage can. Some sites actually recommended the trash as a better option because of the extra water used by the disposal and the strain the organic waste can put on your city’s sewage system. And if you think about it, if your city’s water plant sends most of its organic sludge to the landfill, you’re really just adding a middle man with more opportunities for inefficiency/waste. So probably, if you are not going to compost, the most responsible thing to do would be to compare the processes for your own municipality’s water treatment and waste removal services and go with the one that is most environmentally cutting edge.

When you think of it that way, though, isn’t it just far easier to compost?

So there you have it. Composting is best. Garbage disposals are second best (by many accounts). And landfills should be used only as a last resort (in many cases). Oh, but I almost forgot (and this one is for you, Larms!): Incinerating is the absolute worst choice. Don’t do that. (And I of course don’t mean to imply that Larms burns her trash, but it’s possible that she knows people who do.)

For my part, I’ll be signing up for the curbside compost pick-up next month, folding it seamlessly into our family’s new budget that I’ll be creating around that time, thanks to the help of Larms and our savvy readers! I’m thinking when Li’l Miss is old enough to appreciate learning about the process, we can add a worm bin to the mix at home, but for now I know that would only be a drop in our organic waste bucket and take up time and floor space I just don’t have.

Up next month (which is actually just later this month because we still need June’s topic and we’re already in July): What about paper? Should it be recycled or composted?

And because this song has been going through my head the entire time I’ve been writing this post, I have to leave you with some classic Sesame Street:

*As an unrelated aside, just as a public service announcement: They also must chlorinate our drinking water to kill germs that would spread typhoid and such (and I use “must” loosely because there are other ways to do it, it’s just that chlorine is the cheapest). This is a good thing in that we don’t get typhoid, but it is a bad thing in that the chlorine will give some of us, at some point in our lives, cancer and/or other health problems. This is a trade-off the EPA is willing to accept, not unwisely probably. But it is also why you should really filter your tap water before drinking it. Although this article (promoting filters, natch) is making me want a dechlorinating filter for my shower head something fierce, too.

What I Done Learnt About Saving Water Growin Up

Olivemom’s recent comment about saving water got me thinking about the topic and my approach to it. Okay, so, while I won’t advocate sharing bathwater (Yes, my family did this growing up. No, I am not lying. I got to go first, so it didn’t bother me!), I will say that conserving water is kind of ingrained into my psyche. We don’t have, say, poop-composting toilets, but I do make a conscious effort in our household to conserve water.

I apologize if these seem really obvious – a few weeks ago I was reading this book, which I ordered thinking it might have some useful tips. Um, not so much, since about 80% of the book was things I already do. Which is definitely more of a statement about how basic the topics in the book were than my environmental superstar-status, that’s for sure. But it made me realize also that maybe some of the things I do aren’t actually second nature to everyone! Here are my general day-to-day water-saving rules, in no particular order.

Only wash stuff that is actually dirty. For example, I typically wash our bath towels only every maybe 4-5ish days. Hey, we’re clean when we use them, right??

Only wash people that are actually dirty. That includes fairly regularly skipping a day showering for me (or only taking a super-quick one), and only giving baby a bath every few days.

Only flush when necessary. Yes, we let pee marinate around here when it’s just us. Just gotta make sure all the toilets are flushed before, say, going away for the weekend! Or guests arrive.

Install water-efficient toilets. This was not as big a pain or as expensive as I thought it would be. Plus, sparkly new toilet! We installed one ourselves, and we are total DIY noobs. Same goes for low-flow faucet aerators. These are two changes that can make a BIG difference, especially if you’ve got old toilets that use something like 6 gallons a flush. The new efficient ones use 1.6.

Only run the washer and dishwasher when they are actually full (of really dirty things!). And on a related note…

Don’t pre-rinse/pre-wash your dishes. I am still breaking myself of this habit, since we’ve only had a dishwasher for a few years and I just didn’t believe for a long time that you really can put your dishes in there DIRTY and it will CLEAN them. It will. I promise.

Turn off the shower at points like while you’re washing your hair. Free pass on this one if you keep your house super-cold overnight in the winter, though!

Take shorter showers by not doing things like shaving your legs in the shower.

My bad water habit is still taking baths. I love a hot bath, people. I’m limiting it to one a week now, though (and I figure the occasional skipped shower helps make up for it)! And I’d also like to look into getting rain barrels.

I feel like most of the things I do are more just efforts to not waste water than explicit efforts to save water. Nothing I do is very impressive or really saves all that much, I think they just reflect the way I think about water – a limited resource to be conserved, not something that just magically appeared out of the pipes and could be treated as limitless. That really just comes from growing up in a house with an old well we were constantly expecting could go dry any summer (it finally did, but not until just a few years ago!). It’s expensive to have people with giant trucks and equipment come tear up your yard to drill a new well. And even worse to have people with giant trucks and even more equipment come tear up your yard to put in a new septic system, both prospects that strike fear into my paranoid heart!

Boo to perverse incentives!

So, we recently bought a new car, and I have a li’l rant brewing about it. The model we had pretty much decided on is super-popular, so there are no rebates or financing deals and it’s not like dealers are having trouble getting rid of them. So, for example, the best financing offer they have is something like 4.9% if you have stellar credit. And my incredibly poor bargaining skillz are all for naught since they couldn’t really care less if you buy the one on their lot or not since there is a line of tools lined up behind you waiting to pay sticker price. Not ideal car-buying conditions!

But hey! The next size up – the full-size SUV (16 city/23 highway) – has all SORTS of rebates and deals on it! In fact, you could probably get a pretty basic but nice version of the full-size SUV for about the same price as the small-ish crossover SUV (22 city/32 highway). Especially if you were planning to finance and only looking at the monthly payments, not the cash price.

I know that in the grand scheme of things the mileage difference isn’t THAT big, but it just bummed me out. Even going in pretty committed to the smaller model, it was quite tempting to just say oh, why NOT? and just get the bigger one (until we drove it and felt like we were in a barn on wheels!). I bet quite a few people have – the dealers we visited were quick to suggest it!

(Oh, and if anyone is just DYING to know – and I know you totally are! – the end of the story is that we instead did a sidegrade of sorts and got another “family” sedan instead of the small SUV we originally had in mind.)

Environmental Education

Recently I ran across this essay, written almost 20 years ago by Oberlin professor David Orr. It seemed like a good next “lesson” in our ongoing and generally meandering course in environmental politics and policy. Frankly, the whole topic has seemed so bleak ever since the oil spill*, I haven’t even been able to figure out what should come next. So here’s an interlude in which we get a chance to just sort of think about how, if we’re all so damn smart, we managed to get ourselves to this point of total environmental crisis in the first place. And you know, get kinda quiet and melancholy and stuff. (Since I’m not a church-goer, Sundays seem like good times for thinkin’ deepish thoughts at least.)

Below are some of my favorite passages, for the Sunday-morning skimmer:

If today is a typical day on planet Earth, we will lose 116 square miles of rainforest, or about an acre a second. We will lose another 72 square miles to encroaching deserts, as a result of human mismanagement and overpopulation. We will lose 40 to 100 species, and no one knows whether the number is 40 or 100. Today the human population will increase by 250,000. And today we will add 2,700 tons of chlorofluorocarbons to the atmosphere and 15 million tons of carbon. Tonight the Earth will be a little hotter, its waters more acidic, and the fabric of life more threadbare.

And just think! Those were the stats from 1990! I’m sure we’ve fixed everything since then. Snark snark.

It is worth noting that this is not the work of ignorant people. It is, rather, largely the result of work by people with BAs, BSs, LLBs, MBAs, and PhDs. Elie Wiesel made a similar point to the Global Forum in Moscow last winter when he said that the designers and perpetrators of the Holocaust were the heirs of Kant and Goethe. In most respects the Germans were the best educated people on Earth, but their education did not serve as an adequate barrier to barbarity. What was wrong with their education? In Wiesel’s words: “It emphasized theories instead of values, concepts rather than human beings, abstraction rather than consciousness, answers instead of questions, ideology and efficiency rather than conscience.”

He then gets into some of the biggest myths of the powers of education. Here are the first two:

First, there is the myth that ignorance is a solvable problem. Ignorance is not a solvable problem, but rather an inescapable part of the human condition. The advance of knowledge always carries with it the advance of some form of ignorance. In 1930, after Thomas Midgely Jr. discovered CFCs, what had previously been a piece of trivial ignorance became a critical, life-threatening gap in the human understanding of the biosphere. No one thought to ask “what does this substance do to what?” until the early 1970s, and by 1990 CFCs had created a general thinning of the ozone layer worldwide. With the discovery of CFCs knowledge increased; but like the circumference of an expanding circle, ignorance grew as well.

A second myth is that with enough knowledge and technology we can manage planet Earth. “Managing the planet” has a nice a ring to it. It appeals to our fascination with digital readouts, computers, buttons and dials. But the complexity of Earth and its life systems can never be safely managed. The ecology of the top inch of topsoil is still largely unknown, as is its relationship to the larger systems of the biosphere.

Then he lays out what he thinks should be the principles of education. The first is my favorite because it is so true and so often completely overlooked:

First, all education is environmental education. By what is included or excluded we teach students that they are part of or apart from the natural world. To teach economics, for example, without reference to the laws of thermodynamics or those of ecology is to teach a fundamentally important ecological lesson: that physics and ecology have nothing to do with the economy. That just happens to be dead wrong. The same is true throughout all of the curriculum.

And here is of course the most timely principle, given current events in the Gulf:

Third, I would like to propose that knowledge carries with it the responsibility to see that it is well used in the world. The results of a great deal of contemporary research bear resemblance to those foreshadowed by Mary Shelley: monsters of technology and its byproducts for which no one takes responsibility or is even expected to take responsibility. Whose responsibility is Love Canal? Chernobyl? Ozone depletion? The Valdez oil spill? Each of these tragedies were possible because of knowledge created for which no one was ultimately responsible. This may finally come to be seen for what I think it is: a problem of scale. Knowledge of how to do vast and risky things has far outrun our ability to use it responsibly. Some of it cannot be used responsibly, which is to say safely and to consistently good purposes.

There’s lots more good stuff in there if you want to read the whole thing, but even that sampling is plenty of food for thought for one morning. As is this pic of the Li’l Miss skeptically eyeing what bits of green she can find in the city:

*To put our country’s current crisis in perspective…while this spill is catastrophic by any measure, it represents just “another day in the life of oil extraction” in Nigeria. So, it’s finally in our own backyard and will jolt us into (maybe) confronting the issue head-on, but while we’re sitting here thinking deep thoughts, let’s take a moment to reflect on how an entire country has been drowning in oil spills and the related corporate pillaging, political violence, human suffering, and complete environmental degradation of one of the world’s largest wetlands for the last 40 years. (And yes, Nigeria is currently the U.S.’s 5th largest oil importer.)

Thou Shalt Have a Giant Baby Car

Does adding one infant to our lives REALLY require that we upgrade from a midsize sedan to a Chevy Tahoe?

I’m curious about this phenomenon. My normal car is a compact, so I get that a really small car would feel cramped for the typical car-dependent suburban-ish lifestyle. But does it really require a ginormous SUV? I’ve noticed this trend among family and friends: one baby = omg we need a family car. Family car = giant SUV. Typical SUV mileage for models like Explorers, Suburbans, etc is in the 14-16 city/19-21 highway range.

From a simple-green perspective, this just seems very, very unnecessary to me (and I’m not even all that crunchy!). What has me brewing on this is that Mr. Larms wants a truck something FIERCE. No, he is not a farmer or contractor. His response to my concern that it would be a serious pain in the butt to have one vehicle that couldn’t hold the carseat was to half-seriously suggest that he get a BIGGER truck with second row seating.  Well, gee. Why didn’t I think of that?!?

The thought that we could end up one of these giant-car families with a unnecessary-truck-drivin’-dad and SUV-drivin’-mom – because I’d been thinking my next vehicle (since both are coming up on needing replacement in the not-too-distant future) might be like a small SUV crossover type deal, to be our family car – strikes terror into my heart. I’d be so guilt-ridden I’m sure my next car would end up being a moped. Okay, probably more like a Prius.

I’m sad to say that my first gut reaction to the thought of me having another small-ish car was “Wah! I need something BIGGER. I’m a MOM. Gots a BABY to tote!”

But then I got to thinking, well, why not? Would it really kill me to be a baby-hauling suburban-ish mom with a small-ish/midsize sedan? Do we really take so many lengthy car trips that a smaller family car would just be the end of the world? Nope. It would be just fine, and since we are already used to driving smaller cars and not gigantic tanks, would not be much of a change.

Maybe this is just a general complaint about how slowly even my own attitudes are to change, how slowly we adjust to new norms even when I’m putting effort into thinking more about things like this. All the progress we have seen in the last few years, the reduction in the popularity of monster SUVs (although mostly replaced with still-not-hugely-efficient smaller ones), expansion of hybrid vehicles, etc. isn’t even beginning to REALLY challenge the actual core issue that a huge swath of the country is completely and utterly car-dependent. Notice that my conundrum wasn’t about going down to one car, or no cars, it is just a question of how grossly fuel-inefficient the two cars we have will be.

I think part of the whole “simple green” thing for me is trying to think through wants vs. needs, especially perceived needs vs. real needs. Maybe maybe we’d feel less pressure to scrimp on other things if we didn’t “need” a huge family vehicle – both more expensive to buy AND operate. Shopping encourages us to focus on the little deal – 2-liters of Coke on sale for 99 cents! Such-and-such unnecessary cleaning product is 50 cents off this week! – but I think all too often we (myself definitely included) ignore many of the much bigger things draining our family budgets.

Talk about rambling! I’m still torn about the car plans. Any rants or raves about recent models or thoughts about how much a new family really needs a substantially bigger vehicle from more experienced parents would be much appreciated!

Vote early and often!

Hi all. Back before I realized that I was totally overwhelmed this month, I had an idea to do a little “environmental” profile on the PA candidates for Senate and Governor before the primaries that are coming up…today. I was kicking myself for completely dropping the ball on that idea when I realized it’s not technically too late.  But then I also realized that it IS too late to do any substantive investigative googling to really come up with meaningful comparative reports on everyone.

So as a compromise, here are a few bare bones pieces of information on the two biggest races  (and apologies to any readers who are registered Republicans, I’m only covering Dems here):

Senate:

Joe Sestak: 97% from League of Conservation Voters, and endorsed by Clean Water Action.

Arlen Specter: 64% from League of Conservation Voters

Governor:

This is an excerpt from an email from a friend of mine who tries to stay in the know on candidates every election season:

Dan Onorato is the favorite, and I was fairly impressed with him in person at an environmental forum last month. He knew his stuff, came across as a good leader and seemingly got stuff done as Allegheny County Executive. He’s receiving most of the endorsements from mainstream newspapers, etc, and I think he’d be a fine governor.

The main knock on him is that he’s received BOATLOADS of money from the oil and natural gas industry. If you haven’t heard about it yet, natural gas deposits in the Marcellus Shale are going to be a huge state issue in the near future. PA has tons of the shale and huge gas reserves, and the industry vultures are circling. The problem is that drilling for the gas is incredibly detrimental to the environment.

Hoeffel and possibly Anthony Williams are the only candidates who show any signs of standing up to the industry. Hoeffel is the unabashed “liberal darling” of the race – which bothers me a bit – but he’s bright, appealing in a wonky sort of way and on the right side of pretty much every issue.

So there you have just a little bit of info to take into consideration. I apologize that it is completely unthorough in every way but something is better than nothing, right? And really, mostly I just want to remind everyone in PA to vote today. Primary elections are a GREAT time to make your voice heard because not that many people actually show up. And if you don’t vote now, in November you’ll be dejectedly deciding between the crappy candidates that other people picked for you.

Truckloads of tampons.

Those without ladyparts might not find this topic interesting. I warned you!

Switching to reusable feminine products (that’s as dainty as I can make it sound, I guess? feminine products?) has long been on my to-do list. For, like, years. It’s one of those simple, environmentally- and human-friendly switches that should be easy to make. Well, I kept putting it off and never got around to it and just always seemed to have a huge stockpile of the other stuff.

BUT. I’m doing it, people! And you might want to think about it too. Why?

Trash. The sheer volume of really icky, really non-biodegradable trash created by disposable products is highly disturbing. I’m having a hard time finding solid sources to link back to with estimates on the number and volume of stuff, but regardless, we’re clearly talking many billions of individual “products” being tossed every year.

Ick Factor = Not so Icky. It’s not really any more icky than the handling involved with using disposable products, in my opinion.

Toxins’n'Stuff. There are toxins’n'stuff in regular bleached tampons and pads. Rayon, conventional cotton, bleached wood pulp. Sure, there might not be a LOT in them, but something like 10,000 – 15,000 tampons over the course of your lifetime is kind of a lot. Organic products are expensive and, well, still disposable.

Inexpensive! No more running-out! Hey, one more thing to not have to pay for every month or look for coupons and sales on!

I won’t report in a whole bunch of detail on how all these different things can work, but the basics are reusable cups of various materials (silicone, latex) and sizes (for those of us who have had the joy of childbirth), and/or cloth pantiliners and pads. Here are some great links to explore:

Lunapads & Diva Cup (helpful info too)

A video on the basics of using cups

Gladrags (also sells several different cups and has helpful info)

Various Etsy Stores!

Enjoy! And if you’re already doing this, feel free to share rants or raves in the comments!

Update: Olivemom is on board!!

Welcome!

Sorry I went MIA after Earth Day last week! Hubby was out of town so the little lady and I were on our own. We kept busy and had a ton of fun, but it didn’t leave much time for blogging about my ideals.

Assuming the few new readers we have didn’t abandon us due to the weekend dry spell, I was thinking this would be a good time to give you an official little welcome and help you get the lay of the land around here–both in terms of what we’re about and the projects we’ve got our hands in at the moment.

For starters, this blog is NOT meant to be a place where you must be uber-green or go home. Larms and I are but mere, very imperfect humans who decided we’d like to do the little things where we can to make our families healthier and our carbon footprints smaller.

Funny thing about a blog with a theme, though–after a few months of posts on or related to one topic, you sort of sound like you’re obsessed and your readers start to imagine that you flush your toilets only once a month and turn on the poop-powered generator just between 5-7 each night. NOT SO! I want to make it clear that while sure, this blog has pushed us to be greener than we would otherwise simply because we have to try things ourselves in order to write about them, we are far from paragons of greenness. Also, just because we have officially recommended a strategy and/or tried it on for size does NOT mean we stick with it 100% of the time–or even 50% of the time.

Our goal is to do what we can, when we can, without killing ourselves, and we hope that’s the approach you’ll take. As my husband always says when I’m loudly despairing that I haven’t gone running in over two weeks so WHAT is even the POINT of going now when I only have twenty minutes anyway: “Something is better than nothing.” And damnit, the man is right. If every family in America just did those few little somethings when they could, it would take us a giant step in the right direction.

My point is, we want this blog to be a safe space where you can browse for the two or three ideas that will fit your lifestyle most easily and question/comment on any topic freely without worrying that its writers are judging you for your lack of commitment to the green cause. Larms and I get really excited about the assignments we give ourselves (the overachieving, eager-to-please 4th graders in us never quite left the building, okay?), but we do not expect the same of our readers by any stretch! If you come away looking at just one commonly accepted notion from a slightly different perspective, or willing to try out just one crazy idea of ours, then we’ve more than done our job!

That said, here is a quick rundown of ongoing projects:

1) Chemical-free living! As conventional cleaning and beauty products in our homes run out, we are trying to replace them with non-toxic alternatives. You can go straight to the master list, or you can browse through the individual posts. Coming up over the next week — the first of my baking soda shampoo exploits, a research project on toothpaste, and a romp through the land of non-disposable (and non-toxic-shock-syndrome-causing) feminine hygiene products. I know. You’re on the edge of your seat.

2) Rock out with your wonk out! In order to expand our general green knowledge and challenge even the conventional notions of what actually is “environmentally-friendly” we’re taking a once-each-month in-depth look at some product or process out there to help you figure out which green choices truly “matter” and to what degree. This way we’re all armed with more knowledge when weighing the pros and cons of going green in a particular area of our lives. Last month was the first installment and we examined organic cotton. This month’s topic is local vs. organic produce and is coming up by the end of this week!

3) Climate change! The above-mentioned project spurred one of my more mischievous readers to challenge me to solve the entire global climate crisis. Oh, if only. But it did make me think about the fact that it is important for us to understand what is really at stake here and how all those little choices I mentioned earlier really ARE going to matter for what kind of world we leave for future generations of first-world citizens (that would be our kids’ kids) and actually DO matter RIGHT NOW for third-world citizens (that would be the 3 billion or so people who live on $2.50 or less per day and are already feeling the effects of climate change through devastating droughts, flooding, and famines–isn’t it great? They get none of the advantages of progress but are left to foot the bill for the rest of us!). Hence, I’m slowly creating my own personal course in the global economics of climate change. Feel free to follow along if that’s your thing.

And heck, I might as well announce the new project I cooked up over the weekend while helping my child climb the FOUR STORIES of steps in our house for the 5th time in 30 minutes. Leaves you lots of thinkin’ time. Lots.

4) Pennsylvania primaries! They are just around the corner, and since most of our current readers live in the state I thought it would be fun to take a quick look at the green records of the candidates for senate and governor. And yes, I said fun.

So there you have it. We hope you’ll visit often and start to feel at home!

Happy Belated Earth Day!

It appears I am as good at remembering Earth Day in a timely fashion as I am about remembering the birthdays of those I love. (I’m sorry…everyone…for forgetting your birthday…every year.)

Next year we’ll have some sort of month-long thematic celebration and there will be much fanfare and hoopla, I PROMISE. (And if you’re sensing that that pledge is about as realistic as when someone on Lost says “I WILL get you off this island. I PROMISE,” then you, my friend, have a good sense about things.)

But really, isn’t the mere existence of this blog hoopla enough? We are living the dream every day, people. We don’t need no stinkin’ feel-good, pandering holiday.

Two more planned baby steps

The post below was written by Larms a few weeks ago. She’s the type of hyper-organized person who takes the time to queue up a bunch of articles for her blog before her first child’s arrival so that you won’t miss her while she’s out on maternity leave. (Is there such a thing for the blogosphere? Well, anyway, she’s on it!) Check out the beautiful baby boy!

Then read her post, which I apologize is slightly out of order because this blog’s dumb admin screwed up the sequence. (You can find the results of her toilet-cleaning experiments here!)

(This is hearkening back to the whole reducing-chemical-use topic from a few weeks ago…I promise, we haven’t fallen off the wagon on it! I’ve got a big ol’ bag of baking soda just waiting to show this dirty house – okay, parts of it – who’s boss)

I tend to get very gung-ho about things like this! I have a big stockpile of some traditional cleaning products I’m trying to foist off on others so I can REALLY get into it. So, two things in the works:

I am fired up about toilet bowl cleaning, people. We installed new water-saver toilets when we moved in, but still abide by the old “if it’s yellow, let it mellow” rule to save water and do not flush, um, with every liquid-visit. While water-friendly, this can however make for some funky toilets that require that adherence to a rigorous cleaning schedule. There’s apparently a litany of various Borax/vinegar/baking soda concoctions online for me to test out. Hopefully I don’t accidentally turn our toilets into meth labs somehow.

And a shameful confession! We have gotten very, very lazy about overusing Clorox-type wipes. I first started buying the wipes for basically one purpose: to wipe the particularly nasty parts of the toilet. But then we started using them for more general wiping-up on occasion in the bathroom, and now it’s degenerated to such a point that Mr. Larms thinks that wiping a filthy sink down with one counts as “cleaning” it, and I’m also guilty of doing this on occasion.

They’re expensive, chemical-laden AND wasteful paper-wise, so I’m ‘fessing up and committing to stop buying them completely so they just will not be around for us to waste/overuse. Also, they are a good example of the sort of modern cleaning product that you don’t have to bother trying to save money on via sales and coupons if you…just don’t use them!

So, those are two more feeble little steps in the works around our house! I plan to do some toilet-cleaning experiments in the near future. If you’re lucky, I won’t include before and after pictures for documentation.