All blog posts tagged with packaging
Commitments update
When we ended the 40 Days of Earth Day experiment of collecting all of our food packaging for 46 days, I made the following commitments:
- I will bake my own cookies, muffins and other sweets.
- I will switch to whole-bean coffee in my drip machine (instead of using my Senseo on a daily basis).
- I will …
More important than being Earth-friendly
My husband just got back into town yesterday. He missed most of the 40 Days of Earth Day project. He missed loading all the food packaging into recycling bags. He missed counting the most prevalent items.
I was making a grocery list today, and he asked if (Senseo) coffee pods were on the list. I ans…
40 Days of Earth Day: Photos and Tally
Here are all the photos from our 40 Days of Earth Day experiment. Easier to see the progression like this.
2 days
3 days
3 days (tub)
4 days
8 days
11 days
16 days
23 days
25 days
28 days
30 days
33 days
35 days
39 days
40 days
46 days
While putting everything in recycling bags (5…
40 Days of Earth Day: The End
This is the end.
We collected our food packaging for 46 days, surpassing our goal of 40 days. We started on Sunday, April 18 and stopped on Wednesday, June 2.
We are a 40-year-old mom, a 42-year-old dad, a 15-year-old girl, a 14-year-old girl, and a 3-year-old boy.
I (Kelly) work from home and eat …
40 Days of Earth Day: Day 40
We made it.
Actually, we're not quite done. It has indeed been 40 days. We've met our goal. But my husband was out of town most of May, and recycling night isn't for another week. So we're going to continue a bit this next week.
Honestly, I had considered taking it out as long as the oil eruption c…
40 Days of Earth Day: Day 39
My tub runneth over.
We've had a couple of items fall out of the tub, and we've had to do some balancing to get everything to stay in.
I personally added only two items to the tub today, mostly because I had leftovers for lunch and made ratatouille with pasta for dinner. The items I contributed we…
40 Days of Earth Day: Day 36
Four days to go.
No spillage yet, but I feel like we're close.
My husband has been home only 4 1/2 days this month so far. I hate to think how much more stuff we'd have in the tub if he had been home more. He's not the worst of us. But he does make quite a contribution to the tub. Perhaps this wasn…
40 Days of Earth Day: Day 36
Only 4 days left.
Thank goodness, because the tub is about to overflow.
I've got to go to the grocery this afternoon. Ugh. It feels really bad to continue buying the same way just for the sake of this experiment. But we haven't fully decided yet what changes we'll make after finishing on Thursday. …
40 Days of Earth Day: Day 34
We're almost at the point of overflowing.
We are having to be more careful about how we place things on the heap. Yeah, we're no longer technically putting things in the tub. They're going on top of the heap. You can see the pile sort of angling back toward the wall.
So a few things that I'm thinki…
40 Days of Earth Day: Day 31
It's been a full month now.
And we've got 10 days left.
I am so appreciative of the comments I received in my "Day 29" post a few days ago and in my Facebook 40 Days of Earth Day photo album. I think they were the absolution I was looking for! (Or maybe I should call the minister at my Unitarian ch…
40 Days of Earth Day: Day 29
A few additions but not a whole lot of difference from three days ago.
We've been collecting food packaging for a full four weeks now. I am appalled and embarrassed, and yet I sort of expected it to be worse by this point.
I know that our little experiment is having a positive impact on us. We are …
40 Days of Earth Day: Day 26
Another day, another penguin. Er, package.
Actually, another several packages. But, like I mentioned last time, it's almost imperceptible.
I think that's how it happens in the world at large, too. We notice it at first. We see it's a problem. We're not quite sure what to do about it. It continues…
40 Days of Earth Day: Day 24
More than half-way done.
One of my son's favorite books is 365 Penguins by Jean-Luc Fromental, illustrated by Joelle Jolivet. For an entire year, the family in the book receives one penguin a day. At one point, they realize that "Once you've reached the point of no return, one penguin more or one …
40 Days of Earth Day: Day 16
After a bit more than two weeks, here's where we are.
I'm not even sure what to say about it now. We're all feeling a bit about the whole thing. I can't wait to load it all up into recycling bags!
My husband wants to go ahead and start storing the packaging in recycling bags now. But I think it wil…
40 Days of Earth Day: Day 12
Just a quick photo update.
It's looking bad.
The Biblical 40 days in the wilderness is full of suffering. So I suppose it only makes sense that doing this experiment is causing me some unhappiness, stress, guilt and unease. Hopefully I come out at the other end more enlightened.
40 Days of Earth Day: Day 9
So we've been collecting food packaging for the past 8 days. My husband still doesn't think this looks too bad for a family of 5.
It is true that every single item is recyclable. But not every item is made of recycled materials. And I just don't know how I could reuse most of this.
Cookie boxes? …
40 Days of Earth Day: Day 5
I'm thinking that I am going to be really embarrassed by the time this exercise is done. No. I'm going to be really embarrassed well before it's done.
I'm already embarrassed. I could make lots of rationalizations and excuses, and they would all be valid. These mostly consist of two teenage daught…
40 days of Earth Day: Day 4
I left the packaging out on the kitchen counter overnight, took another picture this morning, then threw it all into the bathtub in the spare bathroom.
Not too much worse than yesterday. And everything is recyclable. No styrofoam yet.
Looks a lot more manageable and not as bad in the tub. But …
40 days of Earth Day: Day 3
It's only day 3, and I'm already appalled.
My husband thinks it's not that bad for 5 people. But he wasn't here to contribute during those two days. So it's really just 4 people.
Now, in our defense, we didn't buy all of this in the past 2 days. Most of it we already had and just happened to finish…
40 days of Earth Day
This year is the 40th anniversary of Earth Day. And I'm 40. So I'm going to recognize and celebrate Earth Day for 40 days this year. Actually, I got the idea and motivation from the Unitarian Universalists' 40/40/40 plan: 40th anniversary, 40 members of a congregation, 40 days. Since I don't have a…
This work by Kelly Eckert is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
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