Every day is Earth day…

April 19, 2023October 24, 2023 / Apple Hill Cottage / 7 Comments

And did you know that every Earth Day has a theme? According to earthday.org, this year’s theme is “Invest In Our Planet.” The mission is simple, “Get Inspired. Take Action. Be a part of the green revolution.”

So mostly to just feel like I’m taking action for the stewardship of this earth, last month I ordered a Zero Waste Box from TerraCycle for the food packaging waste that is 90% of our garbage. The company has recycling boxes for just about anything—beauty products, garage waste, batteries, drink bottles, styrofoam… You can check out their website here: https://www.terracycle.com/en-US/.

Our small rural recycling center is limited. They take only 1 & 2 plastics, tin cans, cardboard, and paper. No glass. No aluminum. We save the glass and make quarterly trips into a glass recycling place run by the Pennsylvania Resource Council. We bag up the aluminum and give it separately to the guys who drive our garbage truck. They told Mr. H.C. that they kept it separate and sell it to an aluminum buyer. We were desperate, so we believe them. I guess. Cardboard and paper we either burn or shred and use in the garden as mulch. Food scraps are composted. So that left food packaging, meat scraps, and 3 through 7 plastics that went into our garbage bags. Oh, and kitty litter. (If anyone has any good ideas on how to environmentally dispose of kitty litter, please tell me.)

I bought the Zero Waste Box because I was just disgusted at the amount of food packaging waste we had. Mr. H.C. was unhappy about the high price of the box. I get it. It was more than I would normally spend, so I told him it was an experiment. But at some point, we consumers have to admit that we are complicit in greenhouse gas emissions. Of course, the big oil and gas companies are the worst offenders, but “…45% of global greenhouse gas emissions comes solely from the production of things we use and buy every day.” That quote is from an article “How Buying Stuff Drives Climate Change” by Renee Cho. Here in rich first-world-America we are really guilty: yes, I’m trying to make you feel guilty and think about all that stuff you put in the trash. Think about where it ends up. And our grocery store shelves are filled with food wrapped in plastic and cellophane. We’d better start taking responsibility for it, hadn’t we?

I paid $124 for the small Zero Waste Box that is 11″ x 11″ x 20″. I’ve been cramming stuff in for 7 weeks now, and it is almost full. If I really wanted to, I could dump it out and compress the stuff down a little more and maybe get 8 weeks. That is $15.50/week, and the return mailing is post paid. That doesn’t seem outrageous to me. But even better, our local library has a similar box in their front lobby where I’m going to be taking my stuff after this box is full. They are collecting plastics to be made into an outside bench.

Consider what else you can do to “invest in our planet.” And if you have to pay a little bit more, then consider it your “tax” for earth stewardship. I’ve also recently given up buying plastic baggies. I tried it one other time with some wax covered cloths and bags and they kind of worked for awhile, but I needed large bags for freezing breads, so I succumbed. But this time, I’ve found the answer, I think. These are compostable, and they work in the freezer too. And when I finish with my Finish Powerball Quantum Dishwasher pods, I’m going to be trying out the no-waste packaging of Dropps Dishwasher Pods.

Here’s your Earth Month challenge: Do something to make a difference, and tell me about it in your comments. It can be planting trees, planting a garden, making your own toothpaste, laundry soap, deodorant, face cream. It could be carrying your own silverware around so you don’t have to use plastic utensils. It can be seeming like a weirdo to the check out people at Walmart when you say, “Could you please put everything in this bag? I’m trying to cut down on my plastic use.” The last two times I’ve done this, I’ve actually come away pleased that I started a good conversation about it.

And I’m working on that kitty litter…

Retrieved from the trash bin

June 24, 2020March 5, 2023 / Apple Hill Cottage / 8 Comments

We were fifty minutes into the hour-long Outlander episode “The Deep Heart’s Core” when the DVD player stopped. Didn’t even give us any warning of weird blips or slow motion stoppages–just died. Just as Roger is about to escape from the Indians who are dragging him to New York far away from Brianna. Not only did it stop playing, but the disc wouldn’t eject. Visions of having to pay for a Netflix disc made us disgruntled, as well as the DVD stopping just at the exciting part. It might take us a week to find out what happened to Roger.

Mr. H.C. is handy with pliers and screwdrivers, so he took the thing apart and we physically took the disc out of the player. We retired to the bedroom and watched the last ten minutes on the laptop. Roger escaped.

Now, I can hear you saying, why do you even rent discs from Netflix anyway? Can’t you just stream like the rest of the world?

Well, thanks for asking, but no. We can’t, actually. Because we live in rural Pennsylvania, where there are hills and hollers, and the nearest 5G network is 50 miles north in Pittsburgh. We have three options for internet service: Windstream, whose fastest rate in our neck of the woods is 1 mbps (yes, 1); Dish networks, which everyone knows are worthless when it is cloudy (and let me just say, we have cloudy here); and a hotspot. Which is what we have. It’s serviceable. It works. Sort of. Most of the time. It’s expensive. We don’t have unlimited data. But I digress. This is not a post about our crappy internet service.

The next morning Mr. H.C. took a look inside the player and (unbeknownst to me) tossed it in the garbage.

Let me tell you, this is something that NEVER happens. Mr. H.C. keeps everything so he can fix it someday.

By the next afternoon we had surveyed our options and they were: 1. Buy a cheap one on Amazon for $45; or 2. buy the one they had left at Walmart for $150. (I would just like to interject here, that when we lived in Pittsburgh, we had a very modern set up with streaming and a decent-sized multi-screen that functioned both as a TV and a media screen, and if we ever got discs we played them through the computer. It all worked smoothly.) DVD players seem so 90s. So I spent some time online the next morning to see if anyone could tell us how to fix it. The best I could come up with was a YouTube video on cleaning your DVD player.

“Maybe it just needs to be cleaned?” I asked him.

“Well, it’s in the garbage, so it really needs to be cleaned now,” he said, as he rooted through the trash and dug it out brushing off some crusted oatmeal. (No, that’s a lie. There was no oatmeal on the DVD player because we are a zero-food-trash- composting family.)

Genius husband then cleaned the DVD player and tried an old disc we didn’t care about, and then ended up watching the whole thing. DVD player is as good as new, which is a great thing, because now we don’t have to spend our Lockdown money on a 90s DVD player. It’s also a great thing, because now we can avoid the news and watch the last few episodes of Outlander. Unfortunately, we’re a season behind, because we live on a country road (almost heaven, but not quite) where there is no streaming (in heaven the light will be all the streaming we need). Oh, I mentioned no streaming already.

The moral of this story is Never throw anything away because you might have to retrieve it from the trash bin. Yes, our recycling place is closed too.

The real moral of the story is Don’t live in rural Pencilbania. Where there’s no recycling and no decent internet. And the yard signs are all for the wrong guy. (I’m debating about whether to put a Biden sign in the front yard, but I don’t want to start a sign war…)

The real, real moral of the story is Can our country be retrieved from the trash bin, cleaned, and fixed so it works once again?

Plastic wrap? Sandwich baggies? Just Say No

November 18, 2017March 5, 2023 / Apple Hill Cottage / 9 Comments

Lunches get packed around here five days a week. I take the leftovers; Mr. H. C. prefers a sandwich, fruit, and cookies.

I have Pyrex bowls for the leftovers, but sandwiches just don’t fit well in the bowls. Plus, trying to cram three bowls into a lunch cooler that already contains an ice pack, a pair of safety glasses, sundry small tools, first aid supplies, and yesterday’s banana isn’t easy.

I would guesstimate that 90 percent of our trash is food container waste: plastic that isn’t recyclable. We burn our paper here in the country, we recycle hard plastic, glass, and metal. We are down to one small garbage bag per week. But plastic bags…

Yes, I buy sandwich baggies AND I HATE THEM. I also hate plastic wrap (and if you have never had a long length of the stuff just magically turn into a stuck-together-mess in your hands, I’d like to talk to you about your skills…) The stuff is just plain evil, but until a couple of weeks ago I felt that I didn’t have any other options.

And then I bought 9 organic food wraps from Eteeshop. Here is Mr. H. C.’s neatly wrapped ham sandwich. There are three sizes in a set: small, medium, and large. The medium wraps a sandwich very nicely:

The small wraps up cookies, fruit slices, hard boiled eggs…

These apple slices are not so neatly wrapped but they dropped on the floor and did not open or spill out.

The large wrap will cover a pie or a casserole dish. Maybe vegetables, like celery or cucumbers? I haven’t experimented with that yet. But I do have a brick of parmesan cheese wrapped up in the fridge.

After using, they might need to be washed depending what food you’ve wrapped. I usually just brush off cookie crumbs, but I wash the larger ones with cool water and mild soap using a sponge. The wraps are very waterproof and water beads up on them. I usually hang them to dry, but they can easily be dried with a towel.

I’ve used them for two weeks and I’m sold. They are made of cotton and coated with waxes to make them stick to themselves or a dish. If you have trouble getting them to stick (I didn’t) here is a video made by Etee Shop that might help. (Etee is an acronym for Everything Touches Everything Else.) I don’t know how long the stickiness will last, but they are recyclable when they can’t be used as a food wrap any longer.

And just so you know, I’m not getting any material benefit from saying how much I love these cool food wraps. The bright colors make me smile early in the morning. And I’m also smiling because I don’t have to spend time untangling plastic wrap any longer…