Green Living
fireytiger
member
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Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
New around these parts...
in Green Living
Hi all! I found this page while playing around on The Knot (where i'm a pretty regular poster), and thought i'd drop in! Me and my FH are both pretty interested in greener living, and we've made a few strides here and there. Just a few things that we already do; we avoid leaving the thermostat going or leaving lights on whenever possible. We use eco-friendly laundry detergent in a high efficiency washer and dryer. Whenever we do buy things that are meant to be disposable like our water bottles, we usually clean and reuse them for a long time, sometimes several months. And the only reason we buy those, is because our workplace is strict about what drinks we can have and in what containers, so we can't use a normal re-usable water bottle because they don't allow it. We actually dropped down to a one car household recently, both to save money and also to cut down on gas usage. Recycling doesn't seem to be something we can effectively do to my dismay, because we live in an apartment and there is no convenient place that we can take our recyclables to anywhere nearby. 
But I'm hoping that I can get some new ideas that FH and I can use in our home! 
But I'm hoping that I can get some new ideas that FH and I can use in our home! 
Re: New around these parts...
We dont have any recyclying at my apartment either, but I live in a college town so theres lots of recycling bins near campus! Most easily at the stadium! I realize, not everyone lives in a college town, but don't give up, be creative! <except my young roommate bought 4 clunky plastic bins from walmart to store the recyclables in...wouldnt be my first choice, but it happens!>
And about reusing water bottles... I always did/do too, but Ive been trying to read up on my personal greening, and it seems that it may not be the best thing to do! That it doesn't take long at all to possibly leach chemicals...a step Im going to try and avoid now. Aaaand try to get my husband to switch to a reusable bottle, but thats another topic! haha
Yeah, we probably wouldn't do it if we had any other choice, unfortunately our workplace is very strict. I don't know what difference they think there is between water in a plastic bottle, and water in a reusable thermos or something, (other than the chemicals contained in it
) but they don't allow any drinks in "non-approved containers", which includes reusable mugs and such. It's strange.
Although I'm very happy, today I discovered reuseit.com from another poster, and bought a bunch of their clearance shopping tote bags. So today FH and I took ALL of our millions of plastic grocery bags and put them in the plastic bag recycle bin at Target. My corner next to the microwave is much cleaner now, and the cats are happy with the newfound space, so it's a win-win all around!
Ive been eyeing up reusable lunch-storage stuff from there (I get my shopping bags on clearance wherever I am...$0.50 heyy! haha) once I save some $$$
another place I'd like to recommend is: http://www.preserveproducts.com/
there's not too much but its made from recycled #5 plastic. I 'donate' all my #5 stuff to them, so I hope it does well :-) if you search around the site...you can see if you can buy their products in local stores as well (it looks like target and many 'natural' type stores are on the list!)
That is a very strange work rule. Have you considered approaching management about "greening" up the company? Maybe it's because I'm in SF, but our company has been very receptive and allowed a couple of employees to start the "Green Team." They even gave out ceramic company mugs to everyone for use at our desks and started a composting program. I've sent in suggestions about not using triclosan soaps at our sinks anymore along with articles regarding the environmental impacts of those products on water ecosystems, and they promised to consider switching when the current supply runs out.
Perhaps you could approach the people in charge with info on the dangers of reusing plastic bottles and offer some safer, more sustainable alternatives for consideration and inclusion in the policy?
Maybe you could also talk to your city manager about when you might see more recycling facilities and/or pickup in your area. They recently started picking up recycling in my parents' rural GA community, so more and more places are doing it. They might start looking into it if people start asking.
One area I've come a long way in is making my own cleaners. There are lots of people on here with good recipes for laundry soaps, cleaning solutions, etc. I'm down to 4 or 5 safe ingredients to clean almost everything in my house. All of them are just as good as commercial cleaners. Some I like even better than the commercial stuff I used to use.
Well, our workplace seems to THINK they're "green", but they're honestly not. Suggestions for how to make the place better for the environment, usually get ignored. Whenever it's brought up, their response usually is "But we stopped making printouts of important papers that you might need!" (yeah, and instead e-mail them via a system that you can't print from and automatically deletes all e-mails after 3 days...) and "but we put a recycle bin for soda cans in the lunchroom!" It's annoying.
Their policy on drinks used to be that you could bring in reusable bottles, thermoses, etc. as long as they could be sealed. Then they decided that they didn't want that to be the policy anymore because there were too many "issues", and that there were only two acceptable drink containers options. One, you could pay $10 for one of their cheap crappy plastic coffee mugs, that tend to leak and spill down your front when you try to get a drink. Or, you could use a regular plastic water bottle that you might get out of a vending machine. I tried to tolerate the coffee mug for awhile but finally I just couldn't stand it anymore, it's literally a piece of junk. So, it's water bottles for me.
I will look into seeing if I can talk to the city and make a request for more recycling areas. It's ridiculous, I know where all the city dumps are in the area, but I can't find a recycling center that's not at least 20 miles away. Kinda defeats the purpose of recycling if I'm burning through almost a gallon and a half of gas round trip each time to do it.
Then again, this is the city that's set up in a way that practically requires a car to really get anywhere, refuses to set up a functional public transportation system, and then charges people hundreds of dollars in property taxes to own vehicles that they're forced to have. :P So we'll see.