WEEK 5 - WASTE

I started the fast this week not having a clue what I would be fasting from.  This chapter of the book was tricky for me.  I don't really feel like we waste much around here.  When she gave her suggestions of what we could change, here was the list:

Garden
Compost
Conserve water or energy
Recycle
Drive only one car
Shop thrift or second hand

On that list we all ready do everything but drive one car.  We live 10  miles outside of town.   With 4 kids in different activities, I just didn't see how we could function  with only one car. With Trevor needing to be at work at 7am,  I would have to wake all of the children up and take Trevor to work.   I choose letting everyone sleep and still using two cars. 

The other thing on the list that we have tried before and quit was recycling.  We do not have curb side recycling here.  We would sort and haul all of our recycling to town.  One day Trevor watched the guy pick up the recycling.  He pulled out a couple of things and dumped the rest into the trash dumpster.  That was the end of our recycling! 

I basically looked at this week as an experiment.  I decided to try recycling again to see if it really did make a difference in our trash.  Um - it didn't!  Here is a picture of our cardboard and plastic at the end of the week.

The closest place that recycles plastic is an hour away.  Here is a For Real moment - I took those 11 pieces of plastic at the end of the week and put them in my trash can.  Did I feel guilt?  Nope   The biggest issue of the week was re-training my kids to not throw stuff away.   It was a stressful week.  I also do not have a place to store our recycling.  The kitchen was full of boxes all week - which stressed me out!  We can recycle cardboard in town.  We are now breaking down the boxes and recycling them.

I did realize two things this week.

1.  Due to the pigs I had become a slacker on my composting.  We are back to throwing all our plant based food waste in the garden.

2.  We also get a ton of junk mail.   I logged onto www.dmachoice.org and took our name off the marketing list.  I need to contact the credit bureaus and get the credit card offers to stop. 

I didn't walk away from this week changed at all.  Just a healthy dose of keep up the good work!