Keeping Your House Green Without Spending Much: Bathroom Edition

Wow, the economy is on everyone's mind these days. I know there are people out there who were previously trying to live green, but now are just trying to get by...but it is still possible to keep your house green without breaking the bank.

I thought I'd do a little overview of the rooms in my house and how we try to be green in each of them while still being frugal. Sure, I'd love to install solar panels and low flow toilets, but that's not in the budget now. Over the next couple of blogs, I'll let you know my little tricks around the house that helps my family stay green and cheap. Let's start with the bathrooms.

1) Save money while conserving water
-take a 5 minute shower (I use a kitchen timer)

-use a low flow shower head. I have one that has the long cord and puts out only 1.5 gallons per minute. I got it from Let's Go Green. They have a variety of shower heads that range from $8-$23. I also have (from the same company) sink faucet aerators on my bathroom and kitchen sinks. They are 1.5 gallon per minute as well.

-use less water to flush with. I'd love to have those fancy low flow toilets that have 2 flush levels! What we do instead is to fill up a gallon milk jug with some pebbles (just enough to prevent floating) and put it in the toilet tank. It takes up 1 gallon of space that was previously water...so 1 gallon saved with every flush.

-and the good old "turn the water off while you brush" technique

2) Reduce waste in the bathroom
- use a rechargeable razor rather than disposables. Sure, it costs a little more at first but the rechargeable razor will cost less than many disposables in the long run.

- use bar soap instead of liquid in plastic pumps. Bar soap lasts SO much longer and doesn't produce the plastic bottle waste. I do keep one ceramic bottle filled with liquid soap for when guests come (some people feel weird about using someone else's bar soap), but for everyday use, we love the bars.

-reuse one of those old pumps for shampoo. My husband is a shampoo glutton. He could easily finish off a whole bottle in a week. So I reused a pump bottle and put his shampoo in it. Two pumps of shampoo is plenty and makes the bottle of shampoo last a lot longer...meaning it saves you money and reduces the number of shampoo bottles you need to recycle. Ideally, a bar shampoo would be great...I'm still looking for one that is natural and works well on my hair.

-make sure kids in the house use a proper amount of toilet paper. I know some kids that practically use half a roll! In addition, find a brand that is made of recycled paper. Marcal is one brand that is economical.

3) Try to use environmentally friendly and healthy products. Many "everyday" products are not as green or healthy as we'd assume they'd be. Check out the Skin Deep Cosmetics database to find out how your current brands rank. I've found I really like the Kiss My Face products. Green? Yes. Cheap...well not always. The way I afford it is to keep an eye out for these products on sale or clearance and then stock up. I found Kiss My face deodorant for half price at Target and bought four. There's a Surplus Outlet near my sister's in Pennsylvania that always has green products for SUPER cheap prices.

4) Use environmentally friendly (and inexpensive) cleaning products and methods. More on that in the cleaning edition :)

Do you have any bathroom cheap and green tips? Leave a comment!

Recycling Juice Pouches and more!

I was pleasantly surprised to find out there are ways to recycle two items I previously thought had to go in the trash: cookie package wrappers and juice pouches.

Terracycle has a program where you send them your empty drink pouches (without straws and not torn) from Capri Sun or Honest Kids they will donate 2 cents per pouch to a charity of your choice. Any other brand of pouch, they'll donate 1 cent. You send them in a prepaid mailing pouch (the only drawback is you have to drop it at a UPS store or drop box).

You can do the same with Chips Ahoy or Oreo cookie wrappers.

Terracycle makes new products from these things. Looks like a win-win situation...less trash in a landfill, money goes to a charity and Terracycle continues to make and sell recycled items.

While we don't drink from drink pouches very often, I do buy them on the rare occasion (Honest Kids juice pouches just happened to be on sale this week!). So it may take me a while to get the 100 pouches needed to mail in the envelope, but that's ok. Now cookies, on the other hand...my boys LOVE their cookies. In an ideal world, I'd make homemade cookies but that's not happening any time soon. I do buy both Chips Ahoy and Oreos for them, so I know that envelope will be filled faster (it only has to have 50 wrappers).

This whole program was exciting to me and I've signed up for it. Have any of you participated in this?

Classes on being green

The local community college in my county just published their fall courses. I always read the course offerings because they have so many classes and lectures that are non-credit courses that are inexpensive and meant to enrich the community.

They have fun kids classes like robotics, theatre and kids cooking, but what really interested me were their "green courses". This fall they are offering 1 session classes in Greening Your Home and Really Recycling. While the Greening Your Home sounds interesting, I don't think they'd have any information I haven't already read online or in books. I am interested, though, in the recycling class because they are going to tell about the "behind the scenes" part of recycling...what happens to your recycling after it is picked up curbside. Best part- it costs $19.

What about your local community colleges? What kind of cheap and green offerings do they have? You might be pleasantly surprised!

A Trashy Post

Catchy title, eh? Sorry, though, this is just a G-rated post about my garbage. I've been very conscious of our trash production since the Enviromom challenge of 1 can a month. After one week...well so far we have about 1/4 can filled! Could it be we might succeed? I'm excited about my trash (or lack thereof). Yay!

And I found out today that my trash collectors now take recyclables 1-7 !!! Woo-hoo! Previously, they had taken 1-3 only.

I think our compost container is helping. We haven't gotten worms yet but we're composting without for now. I read that I should have used a dark container (not clear) because it works better away from light, but since I had already drilled the holes in it, we just decided to keep it under the deck where it's dark.

So the plastic recycling goes in the recycling bin, paper in the paper bin, food scraps (like banana peels and eggshells) go to the compost bin and what's left for our monthly trash challenge is pretty much just stuff like granola bar wrappers and milk cartons.

This really gives me a sense of accomplishment...When we save electricity, a smaller bill is great, don't get me wrong, but actually seeing a physical difference in our trash is pretty cool, and not as hard as I thought!

Recycling CFL bulbs at Home Depot

One of the first thing I did to save energy and money was to switch over to CFL bulbs. I was skeptical because years ago, when dating my husband, he had an apartment with those bulbs that the landlord said had to be used. They saved money, but eww...they gave off a purply light that was just horrible.

Today's CFL's are great though. The light looks like any other bulb's light. They take a minute or so to warm up to their full power, but I've gotten used to that. The only drawback I see to these bulbs is the disposal of them. Since they have a small amount of mercury in them, it's important to dispose of them safely for people and the environment.

Today's New York Times reports that Home Depot is now accepting bulbs for recycling. And, according to the NYT, 75% of homes in the US are within 10 miles of a Home Depot, so disposal of these bulbs should be easy for most people. Thanks, Home Depot!

"Reduce", recycle's less popular friend

We hear "reduce, re-use and recycle" a lot. By far, the most popular of these three guys is recycle. Why? I'm guessing that it's because it's the easiest.

Re-using takes some creativity...what am I going to do with the stack of 32oz yogurt containers that are coded #5... so far I can't find ANYONE to recycle these guys.

In my region, only plastics numbered 1, 2 and 3's can be recycled. I guess they could be used for some kind of storage if I was into beading or something...and they're too small for my son's Legos...

So while I haven't found out what to do with the stack of yogurt containers I have, I did figure out a way to stop accumulating them...REDUCE!!! So no more buying those containers of yogurt. Instead, I bought a yogurt maker. If that works out, it'll be 2 less containers a week (wow...that's over 100 a year...just for my family!) And the bonus...it's cheaper!

And while we're reducing our use of products using non or hard to recycle containers, we're going to ditch the tub butter (also the #5 packaging). Instead, back to stick margarine.

And even recyclable stuff...well it takes energy to recycle. We're going to switch over to shampoo in bar format...no more bottles to recycle after we finish our "pumpable shampoo"! I'll let you know how the bar shampoo works out.

Having all those yogurt containers piled up definitely made me realize recycling isn't the real solution...reducing my purchasing of this kind of packaging.

How do you REDUCE?