Party like its Earth Day

I consider myself to be a pretty environmentally conscious person — I bring my own reusable grocery bags when I shop, I recycle all our bottles and cans and magazines and junk mail and school papers, and I read the news online rather than buying a newspaper. I even had a compost bin going for a while.  We have switched all our lights to those weird squiggly light bulbs. I had Birkenstocks for years. I worked for an environmental advocacy group in college. My daughter had an Earth Day birthday party a few years ago. But, as with everything else, I’m sure I could be doing more.

A few months ago, I saw the documentary No Impact Man, which is about a family who decides to live (in New York City) without making any environmental impact for a year. This means no electricity, no food that is not grown or produced locally, no paper products (including toilet paper) no cleaning products, no coffee, and composting everything. Now I had a compost bin for a while, and it is pretty gross. I mean, I felt all virtuous for scraping all my veggie scraps and apple peels and eggshells into a bin so they could happily decompose into super-duper fertilizer, but the reality is that it STINKS. Really stinks. Like sewage. Like sewage full of bugs. The No Impact family did this in their little 9th floor, un-air conditioned  apartment in the middle of the summer. Yuck.

I also came across this family who produces virtually no trash at all. These guys are pretty amazing in how they have figured out how to live without bringing any packaging or wasteful products into their home. I suppose I could bring my own containers to the market and buy everything in bulk, but do I? No. What happens at Christmas? Or kids birthdays? Most kids’ toys have an awful lot of packaging, which is really bad, but can you really stop all that stuff from coming into your house?

I often seem to hang onto items I don’t need (and am plagued by green guilt) because I know I shouldn’t just throw them away — and maybe they can even be recycled — but it means extra steps to  send them somewhere to be recycled.  My kids’ school holds recycling drives a few times a year where people can bring in electronics and soft goods like linens and stuffed animals that would otherwise end up in a landfill. This is a great program and has definitely helped us thin out the computer graveyard in our attic. At the same time, the school uses disposable Styrofoam lunch trays in the cafeteria that all go in the trash. That is hundreds of trays every single day. Ugh.

Is there more I could do? Sure. I am pretty good about reusing what I can and recycling as much as possible. I cook a lot of things from scratch and we don’t buy a lot of prepared foods. I try to buy organic. Sometimes.

Maybe May will be 30 days of giving away things I don’t use anymore, 30 days of vegetarianism, or 30 days of no toilet paper. Ok probably not that … but there is definitely more I can do.