Dispatches from Dufferin Street

Oh, Bulk Barn. You were so good to me. So shiny and yellow and filled with bulk items, the love of my new life. But the love affair is over.

I was merrily whirling around the store this morning, getting happier with every bag I re-filled with the staples of our lives.

Lined up to pay, feeling pleased with my shop. The cashier looked at me with disdain. “What’s this?”

“Brown sugar.”

“You can’t bring your own bags in here.”

“Really?”

“Yup. Head office policy.”

“Well, I’ve been bringing my own bags for quite a while now.”

“Head office doesn’t allow it. Contamination.”

“Seriously? Is there nothing I can do about this? I’ve really been enjoying shopping at your store – this is the reason I come here.”

“Nope. Head office rules.”

Ummmmm….. I scan the line behind me. I try to gauge Max’s mood and health (home from school with cold/stomach queasiness). I decide not to take it up a notch to save everyone a little time and embarrassment. For now.

I can’t stand “because head office says” kind of rules. She could just not worry about that particular rule, as every other cashier has done for me. I can’t stand rules that just don’t make sense. If I want to eat sugar out of my own re-used, freshly washed and dried bag, that’s up to me. I’ll take the risk of “contamination.” And I was so excited to take my soon-to-arrive organic cotton bags out there and avoid the plastic all together… sigh.

We’re not done with this one, but for now, I guess the health food store downtown gets the bulk (sorry, I couldn’t resist) of my dry goods business. Better for reducing car trips, for sure, but damn, I really liked that shiny yellow store.

On happier note, since we were out in the west end anyway, we stopped at Lush to scope out the unpackaged shampoo  and conditioner. Yesterday, I tried the second two-in-one bar I bought last week, and the results were horrific. My hair is greasy, yet completely devoid of shine (not even an oily shine!), and frizzy, all at once. So… I browsed the huge selection of shampoo/conditioner options at Lush, and they were awesome! Brought home two kinds of shampoo and one conditioner bar, which the salesperson obligingly cut fresh for me so I didn’t have to buy the one wrapped in paper.  Am off to the shower immediately, actually, to try to remove all traces of that horrid $1.98 bar, and will let you know how it goes. Anyone want two crappy shampoo/conditioner bars?!

Yum!

Originally uploaded by karchibald1

We made bread – and it is good!

 Well, now. It’s been about four weeks since we finished our No Impact Week, and my mind has been full of post-mortem analysis and thoughts on the week and how it will affect our day-to-day living. In fact, my mind has been so absorbed in the repercussions of our experiment that putting virtual pen to paper has seemed overwhelming.

I finished the week feeling great – knowing that I would never shop, eat or get from one place to another without devoting some serious thought to my methods. As days went by, though, I realized what huge changes I was hoping to make – for good, not just for seven days – and the whole thing began to feel a little daunting.

The beauty of the experiment was that it introduced one concept/challenge at at time. Now, for one week, adding one challenge per day is doable. But simply eliminating garbage, stopping driving, and turning off the electricity seems harder when it’s for longer than a few days.

I have struggled to figure out how we can realistically phase in some of the changes we tried on for a few days; incorporate them into our lives at a pace we can live with, and without feeling like any one adjustment is too overwhelming. I need things to feel simple. If I say to myself that I can never make a piece of garbage again, I’m destined to fail – too much at once. If I say to myself that this week I am going to eliminate yogurt containers from our lives by making my own yogurt – I can do that.

And in the end, I think that will be my approach. I’m absolutely committed to reducing our garbage dramatically, eating and shopping locally, and reducing our dependence on our car, I’m going to make it work. But it’s going to come in baby steps. I’m thinking I’ll tackle two challenges a week to get to these end goals, and see where we end up. I have a list already, started during our No Impact Week, of things I want to change, garbage I would like to eliminate, and bigger questions I want to find answers to.

Before diving into the challenges ahead, though, let me talk a bit about the things that have already changed around here since our No Impact Week.

Consumption

The experimental challenge was to avoid purchases that weren’t consumables (i.e. food/drink), and if those purchases had to be made, to make them secondhand purchases. This one doesn’t really change things for us much. We’re Value Village shoppers, and the lucky recipients of many hand-me-down kids’ clothes, plus our limited budget means that any potential purchase is pretty well thought out. Ran into a few snags as Hallowe’en approached – if we were a little more organized, I’m certain we could have done without buying almost everything, but we weren’t, so costume accessories and candy were bought that week. Besides that, though, I’m pretty sure that everything I’ve bought has been either food or secondhand. This one will become more of a challenge with the upcoming Christmas season, and that is on my list of things to contemplate this week.

Trash

Trash was HUGE for me. I am now utterly obsessed with garbage. It was, in fact, the trash issue that totally, completely, radically changed how I shop.

I’m embarrassed to say that after almost 10 years of living (literally) two doors down from a giant and affordable supermarket (No Frills), I had become a very lazy shopper. If I could get everything I wanted there for a reasonable price and push it home in a shopping cart – why the heck wouldn’t I do that? I could easily fit in my shopping after the kids were in bed, and avoid the hell that is taking two kids downtown to collect a week’s worth of groceries. Do I feel good about that approach? No. But, it got me through a few years of babies and toddlers with a minimum of fuss about food gathering. However, the recent closure of my neighbourhood store and No Impact Week have combined forces to make a shift in shopping necessary, and I’m ready!

Now I carry all my own bags – all the time. If I don’t have the bags, I don’t make the purchase. And, the biggest change: instead of the one-stop shop, I visit many stores, which has drastically reduced my waste. Let me tell you how.

Number one: THE BULK BARN, y’all! It’s way the hell out there in the ‘burbs, but you can buy pretty much anything there, and scoop it yourself out of a big bucket. This place is my life. I have a bag of little plastic bags, and I cart them all out there and fill them up with, well, everything: flour, sugar, nuts, dried fruit, pasta, oats, chick peas, popcorn, electric orange mac ‘n’ cheese powder – you name it, it’s there. Plus I can get the kids a reasonable treat on the way out – three or four little chocolates, rather than a big package of them. Each kid brings a bag from home, and gets to pick a treat. Total cost of said treats? Usually in the 20-cent range. Awesome. I’ve just bought some organic muslin bags that will be my new bulk food shopping bags, eliminating the need for the plastic ones in the future.

Tara Foods is my other new bulk best friend – it’s my mid-week bulk food stop, because I can walk there.

John’s Deli has the cheapest bagged organic milk in town, and while I dream of going to the glass jars, the budget just doesn’t allow right now.

The farmers’ market is my first stop after dropping off the kids on Tuesdays, and it’s very easy to avoid any excess packaging there.

I am not ready to think about giving up meat (sorry), but I’m working on figuring out what kind of meat packaging is least offensive – I’m no longer buying it wrapped in plastic on a styrofoam tray, which is good, but I’m not sure about that butcher paper – can it go in the green bin? I now buy all my meat either right from the butcher (Block and Cleaver or John’s), or from the new little local food market at Barrie and Clergy Sts., where they have lots of local and natural meats. So, I’m not eliminating that waste yet, but the beauty of shopping locally is that I know my butchers, and talk to them a few times a week, and I can see a day where they might not think I was totally off my rocker if I came in and asked them to put my roasts in my own bags/wrappers. Maybe.

OK, so that’s a lot about food for the trash category, but the truth is, they’re kind of inextricable from each other. At least at our house, a huge percentage of our waste (be it recycling or garbage) was coming from food.

Besides changing my shopping stops, my need to reduce garbage has inspired me to figure out how to eliminate certain items that we’re always throwing away. I think this is likely to be the focus of my challenges for the next few weeks or months.

So far, the big culprits in our recycling are yogurt containers. I buy the big ones at the store and dole them into snack-sized portions for lunches, but still. I’m throwing away a lot of plastic containers. Certainly, they can be re-used or recycled, but I don’t like storing food in plastic, and recycling is obviously not the ideal answer – why not get rid of them altogether? So, last week, I made yogurt. I surfed around, found a recipe that didn’t involve any fancy machinery or thermometers, and with a total of five minutes of cooking and six hours of letting the soon-to-be-yogurt sit around – I had yogurt. Smooth, thick, mild and delicious yogurt. Done. It’s stored in a nice little glass container in my fridge, and I can now use the first batch to start future batches. Awesome.

I also ran out of conditioner last week, and couldn’t bring myself to buy another plastic bottle of it. This, so far, is an unpleasant experiment. I have used conditioner every day for about 20 years, I think, and I like it. I like being able to easily run a brush through my hair after the shower, and I like not having crazy static hair all winter. But, I’m in this to get rid of the waste, so this week, I’m sampling two different bars of what look like soap that profess to be both shampoo and conditioner. The first one is a lovely looking and smelling bar from Prince Edward County that leaves my hair knotty and lustre-less, but I’ve done some reading on the “no ‘poo movement” (I kid you not), and one thing I gather is that moving away from commercial shampoos requires a bit of a transition period for your hair and scalp. I don’t think this one is the answer, but I’ll try it for a while and see how it goes. Luckily it’s hat season, so I can hopefully go about my experiments freely while covering up any unpleasant results when I leave the house.

Transportation

This one is hard for me. I despise the morning scramble to get the kids to school, and have two kids with vastly different abilities and desires to walk or bike to school. One only wants to bike. The other thinks he does, but within a couple blocks, doesn’t, in fact want to bike, so I’m left hunched over, pushing a four-year-old-sized bike, while trying to supervise the one remaining cyclist, juggle a backpack or two, and encourage the walker to keep pace with us. Simple (ish) solution: get second attachment thingy for the trailer-bike, so I can attach Leo’s little one-wheeled bike onto the back of mine. Justification for not doing this: it seems hard to find one for our brand of trailer-bike. We could, I suppose, move the attachment back and forth from Matt’s bike to mine, but it seems a pain. I think the bottom line is, I’m not actually super-confident about pulling that thing (plus kid) behind me, so I’m shunting this change to the bottom of the priority list. We’ll revisit.

Food

Much of this was addressed above, and there are many aspects I’m looking forward to delving into more deeply over the coming months. We’re buying most, if not all, of our produce and meat from Ontario. Things we miss: lettuce and avocadoes. I did slip and buy organic bananas last week, but it was a one-off deal. Obviously local produce is harder and harder to come by as we move into winter, but I’m still getting Ontario parsnips, carrots, turnips and apples once or twice a week. (Our new favourite side dish is roasted potatoes, carrots, squash, parsnips and garlic with rosemary, sea salt and olive oil.)

I’m not going whole-hog on this project – we’ve still got flour, olive oil and all kinds of other things that we use a lot that are not locally sourced, and I don’t know if I can live without guacamole for the rest of my life. But, it is on the agenda, and I’m excited to learn more and make some more adjustments to all the food we eat.

Energy

This was one of my favourite parts of No Impact Week, and we haven’t revisited it yet. We talked about having a day a week or month where we shut everything down, but we haven’t done so at this point. It is also on the list of things to consider in the future.

Water

Not an area we devoted too much time or effort to during our experimental week, but still on the list.

Giving Back

This was, I think, a really cool part of the experiment – remembering that it’s not just about changing our own little lives in our own little home, but that we need to contribute to the world outside our doors as well. As Christmas approaches, I always remind myself that it’s important to me that our family contribute something to our community, be that time, goods, money… something. It’s important to me that our kids feel they’re part of a larger community than our home, and that we all need to contribute to create that community.

What Next?

This week, my goal is to change our consumption of bread products (and the packaging that ensues). We eat a lot of bagels, a lot of bagel bags end up in the recycling. Today, I’m in the midst of Project Bake Your Own Bread. I don’t know why, but baking bread scares me. I don’t actually know if I’ve ever tried before, but my gut tells me I’ve tried and failed miserably. However, I’m conquering the fear and am on Day Two of the process. Tomorrow is baking day – I’ll keep you posted! If the kids like the bread, maybe we can make the switch from bagels to bread.

The List

Here’s a kind of haphazard list so far of the things I want to look at – I think everything on it right now is waste and/or food-related… it’s not an organized or comprehensive list, it will morph as challenges come and go.

Cheese wrappers

The butcher sells from a giant block, I am sure I can bring my own wrapping. The kids, though, are used to eating a lot of cheese, because I usually buy it in big, cheap slabs from the big stores. This will be a challenge either financially, or in terms of changing the kids’ eating habits.

Butter foil

We love butter. I don’t think I can buy unwrapped butter anywhere.

Butcher paper

See above – can this be recycled/composted? Does anyone take their own bag to the butcher and ask them to toss a roast in there?

Tofu wrappers

Have to add the Asian Market to my once/twice a week stops to get bulk tofu.

Herbs

I’m guessing I just have to stick with dried herbs for the winter, because while I’ve become accustomed to buying fresh herbs all year round, they’re always wrapped in plastic. I wonder if I can grow some indoors over the cold, dark winter months?

Tampons and pads

I think I’ll make the switch I swore I’d never make. Just ran out, and the thought of buying another giant cardboard box full of paper products designed to be thrown out makes me a little nauseous. Diva Cup, here I come.

Green vegetables

Can we go all winter without them? Really? It’s so ingrained in my mind that we need a green vegetable with every meal, I’m not confident just rashly eliminating them. Next year, we’ll get on the food preserving train in good time, and freeze/can a lot more. But this year, our grand total of preserved green vegetables is one jar of pickled beans. I guess I can find some frozen, but don’t know if they’ll be local – I’ve been frustrated to find that of all the frozen berries available at the health food store, only two – blueberries and Saskatoon berries – are from Canada. It would be so nice to be able to buy frozen produce from the area, for those of us who didn’t get it together to freeze them ourselves.

Receipts

EVIL! I thought it was crazy when I read that Vanessa Farquharson (I think) had actually asked cashiers to turn off the receipt-printer for her purchases. I still don’t know if I have the guts to create that kind of line-up or stress at a store, but I throw out SO many receipts! I’m stockpiling them right now, using their backs one by one for shopping lists, and waiting for a creative re-use to come to mind.

Soy milk

I’m going to try to make it – oh, yes, I am. Stay tuned.

Saran wrap

I don’t think this will be too hard, although Matt is a bit of a plastic wrap lover. But he has professed a willingness to change. (Let me say here that while I may not understand his prolific use of saran wrap, Matt is, overall, a friend to the landfills – I am certainly the chief garbage creator in this house. Although, is that mostly by virtue of me being the shopper and cook? Hmmm…)

Wrapping Up (finally!)

I’m hoping that continuing to post here will help keep me motivated; I found, much to my surprise, that I really looked forward to writing at the end of each day during our No Impact Week, and that process was helpful to me as I waded through my thoughts that week. So, I hope to be posting regularly again, maybe once or twice a week to add new challenges and document our successes and failures with each one we take on.

Hallowe’en 2009

Originally uploaded by karchibald1

Four for four – YEAH!

(Derby girl, Robin Hood, Hunchback of Notre Dame, vampirate)

Eco-Sabbath

Steps to take today 

• stop everything. At the end of the day don’t track your impact! Because this is your day to relax, reflect, and unplug, don’t worry about sharing your experience with the rest of us. Keep this one for yourself.

• turn off the faucet, run the water gently when needed, soak the dishes, sponge-bathe

• power down

• eat food from within Ontario

• don’t drive

• stop making trash

• don’t buy anything new 

7:28 am, 11°C outside, 17.5°C inside

Leo and I are just enjoying the early-morning candlelight, talking about No Impact week. I asked him what he liked most about the week: reducing garbage, eating local food, etc. 

LEO: Eating local food. Especially that bread.

KATE: What did you learn this week? What did you think about?

LEO: I thought about that soup we had with that bread, and I want some RIGHT NOW. 

End of day report

12 noon, 13°C outside, 18°C inside 

We enjoyed another quiet evening last night, reading by candlelight, and an early bedtime, which was a treat we don’t enjoy often enough. It’s so quiet in the house with no power – there is nothing humming, beeping, flashing… even with the at times outrageous volume of our sons, it feels peaceful, silent, calm… 

I walked down to the LCBO after Leo went to bed to pick up some wine and beer for the weekend, a trip I would rarely take on foot in the evening. It was awesome, and I hope I remember after a few days “off-plan” that it didn’t really add too much time to my trip, and added a whole lot of enjoyment. Walking down just made the whole trip seem less rushed, less urgent, less of a chore. The walk was super-nice, I took my time and browsed in the store at things I might not have glanced at if I was in the car and in rush-mode, and I meandered home, finding the wind and sprinkling rain not at all unpleasant. In hindsight, just the act of taking the car somewhere to “save time” creates, or at least heightens, that feeling of urgency and haste, which so much of the time is just unnecessary. So what if I get home 10 minutes later with the bottle of wine? So what if we start the DVD 20 minutes later? I can use that time to be outside, see people, look at and think carefully about what I’m doing on my errands. This feels like a big realization, but yet something small I can change almost every day to enhance my quality of life considerably. 

We used the stove top for maybe 10 minutes this morning, and the coffeemaker for about 5. Matt and Leo cycled down to the market for apples and fresh cinnamon buns for breakfast – lovely! While the boys made apple crisp for our trip, I went for a run through the gorgeous leaves strewn about the sidewalks of downtown, and just lapped up the weather and the scenery of the city. I got rained on a bit, but it was pretty refreshing, to be honest (especially since I haven’t showered in a couple days!), and the colourful leaves against the grey sky – wow. So nice. I did take a super-fast shower and despite a pang of regret at using some extra water, I feel a like a million bucks now. Imagine Monday, when I can do laundry – I’ll feel like a movie star! 

We’ve adjusted our schedule again somewhat, since it’s pretty yucky outside, and no-one – even our intrepid team leader – wants to go outside and pick up garbage today. The forecast looks a little more promising tomorrow, and my mom came up with the idea of cleaning up the garbage on the road at the end of their driveway. So, today will be about taking stock of what we’ve done, and tomorrow about doing something outside of our own home to make a difference. 

Now Matt’s out getting his exercise before we hit the road, and then we’re off for a tour of the eastern-region grandparents. I don’t imagine I’ll be able to resist checking in later today, but I can’t imagine we’ll have anything No Impact-worthy to report. In fact, I imagine the rest of the weekend will be pretty high-impact. 

Even though I’ve been aware this trip was coming, and have been totally OK with going off-program for the weekend, I’m feeling sad that our week is coming to an abrupt end. Maybe we’ll do Sunday night bedtime by candlelight when we get home, just to end the week on a note that fits with what we’ve been doing, and finish it all together, at home. Yeah. I like that. 

I’ll do the final round-up posts and thoughts tomorrow night when we get home – I feel like the time we’ll have on the road today and tomorrow can provide some great time for family discussion about what we’ve all gotten out of the week. 

Garbage

• 2 plastic apple bags (1 reusable, 1 recyclable)

• 2 pieces of waxed paper trash found in garden

• cores from 8-10 apples for apple crisp

• 2 candy wrappers from yesterday

• 1 lollipop stick

• 1 piece of cardboard from Tootsie Roll

• 1 foil eyeball wrapper

• l plastic candy wrapper

• 1 piece of saran wrap

• 1 coffee filter and grounds

• 1 cardboard cracker box

• 2 plastic/foil bubble wrappers from antihistamine

• 1 soy milk carton

• 1 plastic bag from cracker box (non-recyclable) 

For our final day, we’re sorting through the week’s trash to see what is recyclable, compostable and what goes straight to the dump. 

The whole week (Sunday to Saturday) yielded one plastic shopping bag of garbage and recycling, and 1 large ziploc bag of compost. 

The shopping bag full of garbage breaks down into about 60% recyclables, and 40% garbage, so just under half a grocery bag of garbage all week – that’s not bad for a family of four! 

Purchases 

• $11.60, market for local apples and fresh-made cinnamon buns

• $20, gas for trip 

Tomorrow

Giving Back

 Energy

 Steps to take today

• turn off the faucet, run the water gently when needed, soak the dishes, sponge-bathe

• power down

• eat food from within Ontario

• don’t drive

• stop making trash

• don’t buy anything new 

End of day report

8:02 pm, 4°C outside, 18.5°C inside

I think water reduction has been one of the least difficult challenges for us – I do think we’re pretty conscious of our water use. We turn it off while brushing teeth, we don’t run it if we’re not actively using it, we don’t water lawns, wash cars, etc.

Things I do miss: washing machine and dishwasher. Whether or not the dishwasher uses more or less water than hand-washing, it also uses electricity, so it’s turned off for the rest of the week. Once I did notice I was running the water a little too long while washing vegetables, and I think we should do that thing with the pop bottle in the back of the toilet, but generally I don’t think we struggled with this one too much. 

Another whole day with very minimal electricity was a bit of a challenge, but the novelty is still fun. I think we used less today than yesterday: I turned on the burner for about five minutes this morning to warm some milk for coffee, we plugged in the coffeemaker for the few minutes it took to brew coffee, and I may have had the burners on for 15 minutes heating up lunch. We didn’t use any electricity making supper, just chopping and slicing. I made tea this morning, and couldn’t decide between boiling water on the stove or using the electric kettle – used the kettle. 

I have a good list now of things I want to research more after the week is over and I have more computer time back! Find a definitive answer on beer bottles, kettle vs. stovetop, find out where our bulk bagels come from, dishwasher vs. hand-washing… there are more… I’m going to compile all of them at the end of the week and embark on a fact-finding mission.

The kids are still hangin’ in there like champs. We went over to our friends’ house this afternoon, and they did manage to get some TV time in, which made them pretty happy. After a brief moment of not wanting to leave that playdate, we made it home without any fuss or renewal of pleas for TV time. Funny how warm we all felt at someone else’s house – Leo was all rosy-cheeked as we left. I don’t think we’re noticing feeling too cold at home, but a rise of a degree or two made us all nice and toasty. 

Tomorrow morning – another morning of no power, am hoping we can continue the path of reasonably pleasant playtime by candlelight without a massive hue and cry over the lack of terrible TV shows to watch. Our hope is that it’s not pouring rain – our no-impact week is scheduled to end with a contribution to the earth, and we’re thinking of a small-scale garbage pick-up somewhere in the neighbourhood, then a walk or bike to the market to pick up some fresh produce. Then we’ll cram in Sunday’s activities, since we’re heading out of town in the afternoon, but Sunday mostly consists of continuing what we’re doing with some reflection on what we’ll all take away from the week. 

I’m kind of bummed, honestly, that we’re going to miss out on the last 24 hours, I feel like we all take away so much each day, and doing without various things becomes easier and easier every day.

I’m starting to think about, really, what we’ll all be left with after this week is over, and if and when another “experiment” like this would be helpful. Could we go whole hog one day a week? Once a month? I don’t know, but I do know that getting through all the challenges of this week has really made it clear how much more our one little family can do to leave less of a mark on this earth. 

I’m not out to convert others to do what we do, or to become “difficult” in any way: I’m not going to refuse a drink at a restaurant because they’ve used electricity to chill it, I’m not going to tell my kids they can’t watch too much TV or create waste at someone else’s house, and I’m not going to turn my nose up at food or drink that is served to me because it’s not from somewhere close by. All I really want to do is make sure that the four of us, every day, are living as thoughtfully as we possibly can and that our usual household practises don’t create excess waste, be it wasted energy, trash, money, water, gas… anything. 

Really, could it be as simple as that? Don’t waste stuff! I think it just might be. 

Meals, drinks, snacks

Coffee (fair trade, organic, ordered in bulk, 10 pounds at a time. Not locally grown, and shipped from Uxbridge)

Milk (organic, from Guelph, Ontario, in reusable bags)

Soy milk (organic, “prepared” in Quebec)

Water (filtered at the tap) 

Breakfast: fresh local bread with unlocal PB&J 

Snacks: cookies (homemade, non-local ingredients), apples (Ontario) 

Lunch: quesadillas (Ontario cheese, tortillas made by Weston), leftover soup 

Supper: A finger-food picnic in the living room by candlelight: carrots from down the road, crackers (random crackers we had in the pantry), Ontario cheese, summer sausage from Kitchener, homemade tofu spread, Ontario apples, homemade red pepper jelly and dill pickles. 

Garbage

• 1 piece of saran wrap (insidious…)

• 1 cheese wrapper

• 4 apple cores

• 1 coffee filter and grounds 

Purchases 

• $40.70, local beer/wine for home and hosts this weekend – this feels like an insane splurge after this week of almost no spending – exciting!

Tomorrow

Giving Back and Eco-Sabbath (compressed since we have to go out of town tomorrow)

End of day report

8:44 pm, 4°C outside, 20°C inside

A good day, after the fire incident. The kids were surprisingly stoic about getting home in the rain after school, and we had an awesome supper and play by candlelight. Matt read stories, and now they’re both in bed. Max is still vying for TV time, but the parents are about to play a board game and come up with some captivating activities we can substitute for TV.

So, we had a few “cheats” that will likely continue through the rest of the week: we used the stovetop – probably 40 minutes today, the computer for about 15 minutes this morning, and 15 this evening (even this much use is an embarrassing reduction for me – it’s hard!), and the coffeemaker. I did forget to add the milk frother (battery-operated), and it’s out of commission so far, but I miss it….

A couple times I really wanted to cheat but didn’t: I drank a cold cup of coffee earlier since the microwave’s off, I had to defrost some frozen berries quickly for lunches, and managed to do so by using a burner I had just turned off – very crafty!

Despite his rocky start to energy day, Leo was very supportive: when I was boiling some water on the stove, the burner was clunking a lot, and he said, “Maybe it’s saying ‘turn me off, it’s energy day!!’”

Now for a board game and debate over whether beer bottles actually constitute garbage – I guess they are kind of a step up from recycling since they’re returned for deposit? But they’re just recycled by the beer store, right? I’m not actually saving any energy by taking them back to the store rather than putting them in my blue box? Sure, I get cash back, but in terms of environmental impact, is it the same difference? Would really like a beer, though, I’ll tell you that.

Meals, drinks, snacks

Coffee (fair trade, organic, ordered in bulk, 10 pounds at a time. Not locally grown, and shipped from Uxbridge)

Milk (organic, from Guelph, Ontario, in reusable bags)

Soy milk (organic, “prepared” in Quebec)

Water (filtered at the tap)

Breakfast: fresh local bread with unlocal PB&J, homemade granola (non-local ingredients) with soy milk

Snacks: cookies (homemade, non-local ingredients), apples (Ontario), frozen berries/mangoes (definitely not local)

Lunch: quesadillas (Ontario cheese, tortillas made by Weston)

Supper: vegetable soup (stock made from vegetable peels and ends from the freezer, then added local leeks, carrots, potatoes), sausage made in Kingston from Ontario pork, Ontario potatoes, salad

Garbage

• 1 coffee cup that the server used to fill my refillable mug – argh! I got tiny tears in my eyes (I’m not even joking) when I realized what she had done. She thought I was out of my mind because I insisted on taking home the cup for my garbage collection.

• 4 apple cores

• 1 coffee filter and grounds 

Purchases 

• $10.77, local food from local deli

 Tomorrow

Water

Energy

Steps to take today

• assess current energy consumption habits. Walk from room to room in your home. List everything in each room that uses energy to operate (i.e., electricity, oil, gas, batteries). Put a star next to any item that you would ordinarily use in the remaining four days of your No Impact Experiment. Next to each starred item, indicate if you are going to ELIMINATE or MITIGATE your usage of that item.
• Unplug! Turn it off. Power down. Go off the grid. For the truly adventurous, turn off your electricity completely and see what happens
• eat food from within Ontario
• don’t drive
• stop making trash
• don’t buy anything new

10:49 am, 10°C outside, 19.5°C inside

Lights turned on this morning? Zero.

Children set on fire this morning? One.

Let me explain. We were sitting around the kitchen table by candlelight in a charming family tableau. It was just as we had pictured, quiet moments spent together, doing things we enjoy and engaging in meaningful conversation. Really. Max was reading a book, Leo was playing with Tinkertoys, Matt was getting breakfast, and I was making school lunches. Leo was bent right over his toys, trying to get the pieces together, when WHOOSH! His hair caught on fire. I’m not talking some smoky smoldering, I’m talking a flame that had to be extinguished by whacking him on the head a few times. Luckily, his head was not burned, just some minor singeing, and I must say the smell of burning hair nicely masked the smell of the cigarettes from next door. And thank heavens for all of us, Leo is nothing if not a good sport. He was a little surprised by the whole thing, but quickly broke into gales of laughter at his adventure. Matt and I will be a little more vigilant from now on.

Energy reduction/elimination is harder than I thought. For one, thing, I shouldn’t even be on the computer, really, but it was log on for a few minutes of quick typing or waste paper transcribing things to type in later. We do have the choice to eliminate or reduce use, so I’m afraid I’m not going whole hog on the computer.

Last night Max and I came up with a pretty detailed list of all the energy-suckers in each room. We’re still not 100% cool with the elimination of the TV (when I said how happy I was that this week made us more considerate of the earth, Max said, “Yeah, well what about being more considerate of your CHILDREN?”), but it’s happening. It’s really only going to be an issue Friday night (traditionally Friday Family Fun Night when we all watch a movie together) and Saturday and Sunday mornings. We can hack it. Matt and I will pry ourselves out of bed and do something fun… maybe a walk to the market, hot-tub at the Radisson, buy a local treat at the Goat kind a morning… it’ll be good.

I’m writing a lot about our week, so we’re not going to eliminate the computer altogether, but will power it down and turn off the power bar when I’m not doing No Impact Week “business.” That will be horribly difficult for me, actually – I live online, I love my laptop and cruising around cyberspace when the kids are in school or bed.

Fridge and deep-freezer are staying on, although Vanessa Farquharson did do a pretty good job convincing me we could live without them. Right now, they’re jam-packed with food, and we can’t eat all the perishables within the next few days.

Coffeemaker likely falls into the same category as computer – absolutely essential, but we’ll unplug it when we’re not using it this week.

Dishwasher – hmmm. When we got the dishwasher, we hemmed and hawed about whether it did, as people tend to say, waste less water than washing by hand. I still don’t know the answer there, but it obviously uses electricity to run. The fact that I despise our dishwasher, and the cruddy job it does as washing our dishes, means that it might not be hard to switch to hand-washing for a few days, anyway. We’ll still be using the hot water, but less electricity.

Just back from my stroll to John’s Deli, where I found some lovely organic, local squash and garlic, and picked up some made-in-store sausages for supper. I think I’ll roast some potatoes and squash, and we have a salad in the fridge we need to use up, and the kids and I can have sausage while our resident vegetarian can enjoy last night’s soup again.

I am loving the shop-as-I-need it lifestyle, walking to different stores every morning to pick up just a few things for that evening’s meal. I think I could get used to that rhythm. OK, I’d better sign off for now, it’s been the 10 minutes I allotted myself to have the computer on. I’ll post this part of the day now, and then add to it at the end of the day when I give myself another 10 minutes to write. If you’re lookin’ for me – call me, don’t email!

The list (E=eliminate, M=mitigate)

Porch

• light (E)

Front hall

• light (E)

Living room

• two lamps (E)
• TV (E)
• DVD player (E)
• PS2 (E)

Dining room

• light (E)
• computer (M)
• stereo (E)

Kitchen

• pendant lights (E)
• main light (E)
• under-cabinet lights (E)
• stove lights (E)
• pantry light (E)
• fridge (M)
• coffee maker (M)
• stove/oven (M)
• radio (E)
• microwave (E)
• dishwasher ?

Back room

• light (E)
• deep freezer (M)
• furnace (E)
• hot water tank (M)

Leo’s room

• light (E)
• moon light (E)
• nightlight (E)
• clock radio (E)
• light saber (E)

Max’s room

• light (E)
• clock radio (E)

Kate and Matt’s room

• light (E)
• two lamps (E)
• two clock radios (E)

Bathroom

• light (E)
• shower light and fan (E)
• washer (E)
• dryer (E)
• clock radio (E)

Upstairs

• hall light (E)

Food

 Steps to take today

• eat food from within Ontario

• don’t drive

• stop making trash

• don’t buy anything new

11:55 am, 10°C outside, 19.5°C inside

Besides my eensy-weensy hangover, which may be caused by exhaustion more than alcohol, I enter Day Four feeling wonderful. The step-by-step introduction of challenges is really working for me, just tackling one thing each day, yet carrying it over to the next day when we add something new.

I feel much more thoughtful this week about every single thing I consume, and that consideration is certainly something that I will take forward after this week. I now look at every single thing I am considering buying, and think: Do I need this? Could I make it myself or get it secondhand? Could I find it somewhere without any packaging? If I must buy something in packaging, can I re-purpose the package? Where did it come from?

A few days ago, I would have said I thought about all those things a fair bit, and I did, in a broad kind of way. However, once I started applying those questions to everything – no exceptions, no, “well, it’s TOOTHPASTE, I need it!” – it all changed. By considering those basic questions as many as hundreds of times each day, I know that every the product I consume is one that I’ve really, *really* thought about. Does that mean every thing I ever buy will be fairly traded, local, healthy, free of packaging, and secondhand? Nope. Does it mean that I’ll do everything in my power to make as many purchases as possible that are lower-impact? Absolutely.

Hearing how excited Max was when I told him the house only created three pieces of non-recyclable/compostable garbage yesterday, and seeing how happy Leo was that we brought our own bag for a cinnamon bun today so we didn’t have to waste one… well, that’s some pretty awesome icing on the proverbial cake. The concepts are simple, really; the kids have zero difficulty understanding why we’re asking the questions we are, and honestly, if I’ve encouraged them to think a little bit about what they eat, wear, play with and how we get around, then that’s a great accomplishment.

End of day report

6:27am, 10°C outside, 21°C inside (yes!!)

Our local supper was 75% successful – Leo, Matt and I loved our roasted vegetable soup with toast fingers, Max was a fan of the toast, but not the soup. We had decided on shopping for food grown in Ontario for the rest of the week, and if I’d given this a little more thought in advance, we could have had a more tantalizing, complex meal, for sure. Tomorrow is market day, as well as as a school day for both kids, so I hope that I can pop down there to pick up some supplies for our meals for the next few days. I think I’ll spend this evening browsing cookbooks for inspiration. I am definitely in a rut of meals – I have my standards that we all love, but none of them are focused on local ingredients, and obviously, the whole local thing gets a little more challenging the further we get into autumn. I hope that tomorrow, we can pull off something we all love from local ingredients.

Oh. Except we’re not supposed to use electricity tomorrow. Yeah. Huh. I guess we could BBQ, except I’m embarrassed to admit that I don’t actually know how the BBQ works and Matt won’t be home until after supper. OK, this is going to be harder than I thought, and the thought of eating a cold meal in a cold, dark house is not really doing it for me right now.

Well, crap. Googling raw food has thus far not inspired a lot of excitement. I think this challenge would work best for me if started on a summer weekend. All the recipes I have found involve a bunch of shopping for things we don’t have on hand, and a reasonable amount of prep work. I’m game for giving it a shot, but I don’t think I have the time or emotional fortitude to spend the three hours I have to myself tomorrow biking around town to pick up ingredients, then morphing them into something healthful and beautiful that my children won’t eat. I found a great-looking recipe for a burrito kind of thing, but almost none of the ingredients would be available in season here right now. Maybe we’ll stick with local and just try to minimize the amount of stove cooking we do, I don’t know… Or… cheese and crackers for supper? I do have some kielbassa in my fridge, as well as some summer sausage from the Mennonites in St. Jacob’s, Ontario. We could have a cold platter of finger foods from the fridge and pantry… maybe that’s the answer for tomorrow. Then we only have Friday to get through before the weekend where other people will feed us.

Speaking of which, there’s some cheatin’ on my mind. Matt’s parents are about to embark on a southern trip for the fall/winter, so weeks ago we made plans to go visit them in Brockville on Saturday, and my mom invited us to her place outside of Gananoque for a Hallowe’en candy-making party on Sunday. None of these things are really changeable, and forking over cash for four bus tickets is just not going to happen. So, we’re going to drive. Although we are adjusting our plans to minimize driving: we normally would come home from Brockville on Saturday night, and then head out to Gan on Sunday afternoon, allowing for a quiet morning at home. But our plan now is to sleep over in Brockville and go directly to Gananoque on Sunday morning, cutting the driving time by about an hour. That’s something, right?

Meals, drinks, snacks

Coffee (fair trade, organic, ordered in bulk, 10 pounds at a time. Not locally grown, and shipped from Uxbridge)

Milk (organic, from Guelph, Ontario, in reusable bags)

Soy milk (organic, “prepared” in Quebec)

Water (filtered at the tap)

Breakfast: bagels (don’t know where they’re made – bought in bulk at No Frills) with butter (Ontario) and honey (Ontario); homemade granola (non-local ingredients) with soy milk

Snacks: cookies (homemade, non-local ingredients), apples (Ontario), frozen berries/mangoes (definitely not local)

Lunch: Leftover mac and cheese from last night (local milk, cheese and butter, not sure on the flour or pasta)

Supper: vegetable soup (stock made from vegetable peels and ends from the freezer, then added local leeks, carrots, potatoes), local bread, butter and parmesan cheese (probably not local)

(I must add to this that while there is a bunch of stuff here that doesn’t fit our local requirement, I do have a house full of food that was already here, which I’m certainly not going to turf in order to go buy more local supplies. So, even the things here that aren’t super-local could be more so in future.) 

Garbage

• 1 piece of saran wrap

• 1 Qtip

• 1 gum package

• 1 piece of gum

• 1 soy milk container

• vegetable scraps from making stock

• 2 coffee filters and grounds

• 1 granola bar wrapper from a snack Max was given at school (he ‘fessed up to this as soon as he got home!)

Purchases

• $1.70, cinnamon bun

• $10.90, local produce at health-food store

Tomorrow

Energy

Transportation

 Steps to take today

• throughout the day, keep a list of everything you eat, where you eat and where you purchase your food

• don’t drive

• stop making trash

• don’t buy anything new

11:04 am, 14°C outside, 19°C inside

Whose damn idea was this, anyway?! I just schlepped 38 pounds of groceries home on foot, and have the sweat and sore arms to prove it (plus, I weighed the bags when I got home). The walk was pretty horrid, but honestly, besides that, my outing was a resounding success.

The whole family biked to school this morning, which worked well. Matt pulled Leo on the trailer bike, which I was already reluctant to attach to my own bike, but my heels have dug in even further since Leo FELL OFF the damn thing in the middle of a busy intersection the other day. (A fall most likely precipitated by some “fancy move” he was executing on the bike, like hanging off one handlebar or balancing on the seat – I kid you not.) Anyway, he was fine, and we’re hoping maybe rattled enough to be a little more careful in future. Probably not, though.

From the school drop, I walked downtown with my reusable bags filled with reusable bags and containers, telling my 13-year-old self to suck it up and figure out how to refill containers at the natural food store. I clenched my jaw, and in I went. Now, I shop there sometimes, but not often enough, really, and generally think of it as overpriced. But, today, when price was not my only consideration, when I was actually trying to eliminate all packaging – this was the place to go.

First stop, milk. We’ve been going through it in ridiculous quantities since my new best friend the milk frother came into my life. The milk frother was an attempt to stop buying 1L cartons of cream – both expensive and over-packaged ($3.19/L). Very successful… the frothy goodness makes me forget I’m not getting maximum creaminess in the coffee. But now instead of going through a 2L carton of milk every three weeks or so, we were going through them every few days. This will not do – I could see a garbage bag bursting with 2L milk cartons by the end of the week, and No Impact Man quietly shaking his head behind me. Not to mention, if our milk consumption is increasing, so is my concern over the crap in non-organic milk. So, I figured if anywhere is going to have an answer for me, it’s the health food store. First choice, glass bottles of milk, returnable so the farmers/milk people can reuse them. There they were: beautiful, smooth glass bottles of organic milk. I cradled one in my hands, and oh my, it was nice. That’s what I want! Perfect! Except, um, they were $6.49. For one litre of milk. $2 of that is a deposit, but still, I’d be paying $4.49 – not that far off the price of a 2L carton at No Frills. So, twice the price. Not cool for this budget, even if it is saving the earth and our family’s health. However, just below the gorgeous glass bottles were bags of milk – 4L of organic milk for $9.70 or $2.43/L. Cheaper than cream, comparable to non-organic milk in a carton, and each bag can easily be washed and re-purposed when emptied. (Let me just say, this right here is the most challenging part of this week so far. I HATE washing ziploc bags or old milk bags. Hate it. Hate doing it, hate it when they don’t get super-clean, hate having them hanging all over the kitchen to dry, hate the little spots that form during the stupidly long drying process, hate using them if they’re not totally clean, hate using the milk bags because they’re ugly and the plastic is too thick, and…Catch my drift? But. I’m doin’ it.) OK, that’s enough on milk – I think we have our solution here.

Next, I needed some pasta. No problem! Filled up an old resealable tortilla bag with whole wheat macaroni for thee bucks. Awesome. Comparable to the normal grocery store.

Honey: filled up my old honey squeeze jar for about $2 more per litre, but the honey is local and unpasteurized, plus I didn’t have to buy a new jar with the honey.

Also picked up some coconut, quinoa, black beans and chick peas, all in my own bags, all for way cheaper than buying pre-bagged or canned at the store.

I did have to use three spice bags from the store, but I’ll rinse ‘em (argh) and take ‘em back to refill.

The one place I struck out was tofu. I thought I remembered big vats of tofu there that one could scoop into containers, but these were not to be found. I did find some organic tofu that only came in one layer of plastic wrap, so that’s what I went with. The plastic is different than the stuff at the grocery store, and I’m hoping I can recycle it. It was a little more expensive than at No Frills, but fits my lower-waste needs for this week. I think I can do better, though, will investigate further.

Grand total: $45.55, and the only things that will end up in the recycling/garbage are two tofu wrappers. Oh, and, I guess, my receipts – I wanted the store receipt to do my dorky price-checking and comparisons, and I think if I hadn’t taken the Interac one, they still would have printed it and thrown it out. However, I think I can keep them and use the backs for little notes, or as bookmarks or something crafty like that. Not too shabby overall, for my first foray into package-less shopping. I will definitely be frequenting the health food store more often now that I know it’s not crazy-expensive and nobody looks at me weird when I pull out and refill all my wrinkly old bags.

Quick jaunt to the video store to return a DVD, picked up some cash at the bank, then bought some apples at the farmers’ market before heading home. I’m pretty sure my walk home eliminated the need for me to go to my weight-lifting class at lunch, saving me the quandry of how to get to the gym at Loblaws without a car.

Next challenges of the day: plan and create a waste-free supper that we can eat in a very short window between (walking) trips. Have to pick up kids at 3:30, get Max to piano at 4, home at 4:30, eat, then back to school for a meeting at 5:30, then head home close to 7 to get kids to bed on time for the sitter. That’s a lot of walking for my kids, and a lot of places we have to be in a short period of time. This is my worst case scenario: dragging unwilling children to places I have to get to on time. I despise being late, and as anyone with children knows, trying to rush them is generally ineffective if not downright counterproductive. This will be hard. I will take solace in the fact that the sitter is coming so Matt and I can go out to see some live music, and drink beer by the pitcher so we don’t create any empty bottles tonight!

Also, I need to create some kind of home-made air freshener to negate the stench of cigarette smoke seeping through the wall from our new neighbours. Ick.

The damn mail just threw our success with garbage right out the window – the kids each have a subscription or two to magazines, and today each kid got one, this month, conveniently wrapped in plastic so they could include some extra paper junk in there. We’ll pull it all out when they get home and see what we can do about that.

End of day report

12:51 am, 10°C outside, 20°C inside

We did good today! The kids were freakin’ awesome walking and biking to and from school a bunch of times.

Had a little unanticipated slip-up in th garbage department when we went out to a live show tonight. We carefully ordered draft beer to avoid producing bottle waste, but our water came with straws, and the nachos came on a sheet of paper with two disposable plastic cups of dipping sauces. Damn. Didn’t see that coming. Matt got it together by the end of the night to request water, no straw, but I must say, I felt kind of defeated, carrying my oily garbage home from the bar. Besides that, though – wonderful to have a night out and see some great music!

Meals, drinks, snacks

Coffee, soy milk, water

Breakfast: bagels with butter and honey; homemade granola with yogurt (Leo), soy (Matt) and cow (Kate) milk.

Snacks: cookies, apples, frozen berries/mangoes

Lunch: quesadillas (kids), bagel with tofu spread (Matt),

Supper: home-made mac and cheese, salad

Late-night menu: nachos!

Garbage

(I realize I totally forgot to document compost yesterday – oops! There wasn’t much, though, a couple coffee filters and grinds, and a few bits of Leo’s lunch he couldn’t finish)

• 2 coffee filters and grinds

• 1 lettuce-bottom

• 2 dryer sheets

• 1 cheese wrapper

• 1 greasy package of paper and cups of sour cream/salsa from our yummy nachos

• 3 straws

• 2 plastic bags and 2 flyers from kids’ magazines

Purchases

• $45.55, groceries

• $6.50, apples

• $20, pitcher of beer

Tomorrow

Food