BLULOW (All About Living Green)

It’s been quite a few years since my kids were in diapers, but I came across this site that I’d like to share with you. It caught my eye because they offer flushable diapers.

If you can’t flush, you can put them in your compost pile because they purportedly break down in 50 to 150 days. That’s a far cry from the 500 years it takes to break down ordinary diapers. I wrote an article about them on my Tidbits & Stuff site.

Visit their website www.gdiapers.com and be sure to click on the video that gives instructions on how to flush the diaper.

I’ll have to store this one away and pull it out when I become a grandmother (hopefully I’ll remember where I stored it).

Neither, thank you. I brought my own bag.

For the heck of it I finally got around to buying one of the cloth grocery shopping bags at my local Hannaford grocery store. I was only buying a few items and I thought, why not?

Well, I think its one of the best investments I’ve made in a while. Not only did Hannaford give me the 69-cent cloth grocery bag for free with my purchase (apparently, it was free if you bought a tray of fresh fruit), I realize a 5 cents savings each and every time I use my cloth bag instead of their plastic bags. That’s 5 cents per bag used.

My local Shop Rite offers a 2-cent per bag savings. Shop Rite’s prices are usually cheaper than Hannaford’s, so I’m not complaining about the 3-cent differential. The cloth bags eventually pay for themselves.

In addition to saving money by using the cloth grocery bags, the cloth bags are larger and sturdier. You can fill them up without worrying about them breaking. No more double bagging heavy items.

To top it all off, since they fit more groceries, that means fewer trips back and forth to the car when I get home from shopping. What a win-win-win situation!

The only challenge that I have with this new-found lifestyle is remembering to bring the bags into the store (I’ve actually had a cashier wait until I ran to the car to retrieve my cloth bags).

Living green is a one decision at a time process. Sometimes the decisions are obvious and other times not.

Yesterday I ran to the grocery store to buy juice. Not only do I go through the mental gymnastics on how to buy juice that will have the least amount of impact on my pocketbook, I also have to think about the recycling and health ramifications (I remember the old days when buying juice was a mindless task, not a full fledged mental debate).

With a plastic bottle of Tropicana Twister in one hand (to the tune of $2 for less than 2 quarts) and a container of powdered juice mix in the other (to the tune of $1.69 for 8 quarts). I picked the powdered drink for a number of reasons:

1. It cost less and produced more juice (I use the term juice loosely).
2. It came in a smaller container and thus produces less waste product.
3. It contained sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup (yes, sugar is the lesser of the two evils).

So, although I was mentally exhausted, I believe that I made the best possible decision given my choices. Making green choices is not always easy.

I don’t know if it’s just me, but I’ve got to warm up to this composting process. Don’t get me wrong, I am 100% for composting, but it’s the logistics that I seem to have some issue with.

Last year I purchased a composting bin. I was very excited about composting (and still am). I put the composting bin together and placed in an area in my yard. I read the little brochure and started composting.

I added yard clippings and household wastes, mixed, stirred and added the appropriate amount of water. I was so thrilled that I was doing my part to help the environment. Everything was going swimmingly until my 8-legged friends started to spend more time at my bin than I did. Additionally, I realized that I placed the bin in an inconvenient area of the yard.

Then there was the issue of accumulating household waste in an indoor container to save for the composting bin (that stuff packs a mean punch when you take the lid off). I guess I had not thought out the process long enough, or maybe I wasn’t a dedicated as I thought I was. Composting is not for the feint of heart. You’ve got to have the right mindset.

Ashamed and upset up with my allowing my 8-legged friends to scare me away from my composting efforts, I decided to find out how could I get around it. Not wanting to give in to my immediate gratification upbringing and toss everything in the trash, I decided to analyze my logistical problems, which included but were not limited to:

1. Educating my family on what is compostable (steak bones are not)
2. Moving the compost bin to a more convenient location (I prefer the kitchen, but hubby nixed that idea).
3. Accumulating household recyclable trash
4. Those darned 8-legged friends.

As of this post, I have not resolved all of my issues. I did, however, move the composting bin a little closer to the house and now that winter is over, I’ve started to accumulate household waste again (I’m still trying to determine which container is best). As far as the spiders go, I put diatomaceous earth all around the bin to kill those that are brave enough to challenge me. I’m having another go at it.

I thought about using a worm-composting bin, but I’m not totally sold on that idea as yet (although the thought of indoor composting is sounding better each day). I’ll keep at this for a while. Who knows, maybe it’s like learning to write with your left hand (if you’re right-handed), the more you do it, the better you get.

Well here’s a new one on me. I came across a site that has
Almost Free Furniture.

Apparently you can buy and/or sell all types of gently used furniture for a fraction of the original cost.

In today’s economy where prices are rising (especially gas) and salaries are not, it makes sense to look for alternative ways to furnish your home, apartment, college dorm, etc. By the same token, instead of throwing away your gently used furniture, why not sell it? Someone else could probably use it.