simple | sustainable | lifestyle
Hannah’s House, a local faith-based recovery program had their Freedom Walk yesterday to help raise money for their very effective program.
You can visit their website to learn more about the work they do, but I just wanted to post how I’m personally glad they also care about our environment. The walk ended with food and snacks and as you can see by the enclosed photo, they separated compost, trash and recyclables. Kudos to Hannah’s House for caring for people and for our world.
My wife, Brenda, was looking through a magazine and came across an article on back to school stuff. Now, just a reminder, our kids are adults and out on their own; that’s why we’re wanting to downsize our house.
But this article intrigued her. It talked about a software program called EcoFont that saves 25% on the ink needed to print text. Some time ago, I talked about going paperless as much as possible. But sometimes, you do have to print. And when you do, this may be a great option. EcoFont leaves small voids in the text that don’t get filled with ink. This, in turn, saves the amount of ink you use (greener, because you’re consuming less and that saves all along the way from manufacture to product to disposal) and it saves you money.
You can download a basic font for free at their site. I did and printed out various sizes of text, from 10pt to 64pt just to see how it looked. And it looked fine for your basic text sizes (10pt and 12pt). At 14pt, you can start to see the holes and, as you can see from my picture with this post, at 64pt, it becomes a decorative font.
But most of our printing is text, and most is usually around 12pt font and this is where it shines. Based in the Netherlands, the software doesn’t appear to yet be available in the US. And it currently is only for Windows based computers running MS Office. So being a Mac guy, I’m a little disappointed. But they SAY, they’re working on other versions.
So, EcoFont, I’m waiting with anticipation! I just printed a sustainability report for a client and it was 20 copies with 24 pages, so it would have been nice to be able to print in a more responsible manner.
A couple of weeks ago, Mutual of Omaha came through Eugene. Someone from their organization had wandered across our website and contacted me about recording my “aha moment”. I thought, “why not?”
So, on a warm, sunny August day, in an Airstream trailer in downtown Eugene, I spent a few minutes chatting with Jessica Henry and recording a snippet of what started stirring in me in late 2008. It was that “stirring” that led to the beginning of thesimpleHOUSE and our whole concept. You can watch my aha moment at
Let me know what you think. I’m usually fairly calm in front of people, but found myself a bit nervous with lights, camera and microphone. It was still a great experience, though and I’m glad I did it. It’s always good to tell your story and fremind yourself just what it was that brought you to the point you’re at.
Gardening Eden, by Michael Abbaté is a book about creation care that, as the tag line says “will change your faith, your life, and our world.”
I was first introduced to Mike’s book by my son-in-law, who had climbed Mt. Hood with him. He told me a friend of his had this book coming out that he thought I’d enjoy. As one who has had a long-standing desire to care for creation, and one who has also had a long-standing faith, I was intrigued. I have read several books that combine the viewpoints of faith and environmentalism. Some have been kind of thick and academic, some spiritually “glossy” with little how-to substance.
What I appreciate about Mike’s book is it is written in a very conversational way. I’ve tried to keep this website written that way, because you are much more likely to actually read it if it’s not dry. I want you to read my posts and not doze off half way through. And Mike’s book does just that. It is an easy read, but not without substance. He arranges the book into two sections: “The Garden State”, where he sets the ground-work of where we’re at and kind of how we got here and “Becoming a Gardener”, where he gives some clear, distinct ways we can better care for this creation we have been entrusted with.
My favorite part of The Garden State can be summed up in two quotes from the book. “Gardening Eden was not Adam’s punishment; it was his purpose.” And, “God gives us this universe freely, wanting us to discover the joys of responsible stewardship, of moderation, and the freedom that comes with self-discipline and caring for a flock, of not squandering resources. And by doing these things, God tells us, we’ll better understand and appreciate Him.”
In Becoming a Gardener, Mike gives us 50 Gardening Tips on how we can better tend this garden we’ve been entrusted with. Food, Energy, Transportation, Home and General categories cover the 50 tips, many of which are very easy for us to do, we just often haven’t yet developed that habit. Mike gets us to stop and think a moment and in that, maybe shift our habits just a bit, and in doing so, we become a better gardener.
Through all this, and after I had read the book, I have had the opportunity to meet Mike and his wife Vicki. And I can tell you, they live these principles out. They truly practice what they preach. That’s refreshing. Thanks, Mike, for a good read.
So last time I talked about phone books. Today I’d like to talk about junk mail. No one gets junk mail do we? Oh, really? You do?
Our recycle bin at home is dominated by the junk mail that comes to us in the snail mail. I think that’s the dominant form of paper we recycle. Some, we don’t even open or look at. It simply goes from mail box to recycle bin to making more junk mail.
It’s even worse at my office; and with the economy the way it is, it seems to have ramped up. We get some of the trade magazines for free. And we get eight copies– one for each staff. Sometimes two or three per staff if they have multiple spellings of our names. One trade company I know was sending us 10 copies. I contacted them, said we really only need one (it’s still a good publication), they said they would get it down to one. We’re still getting 10 and it’s been over a year. Maybe I should publish their name here…
There is a company I discovered a few years ago and I will publish their name here. I discovered them when I was getting 3 copies a month of an Eddie Bauer mailing advertisement (when there isn’t an Eddie Bauer store within 100 miles of my home). It’s called Catalog Choice (http://www.catalogchoice.org/). It’s free and it works. Think of the number of trees and water used simply to make and print the paper junk mail is sent to us on.
Like I mentioned with the phone books last time, it’s a way to opt-out of catalogues you don’t want to get. Or multiple catalogues to one address. It’s easy to use. And, since I originally joined, they have added an opt-in for electronic catalogs called iCatalog. The way it works is retailers really do want to target their mail ads. We really only want to get what we want to get. Catalog Choice puts that together in a database and viola! less junk mail. Retailers are happy, I’m happy, it’s a win win.
And, with diligence, it has made a difference. Our home junk mail has been probably cut 60 to 70%. Not all retailers participate, but many do. And there are more and more each month. Check it out; it’s a way to more the “halve” your junk mail.
But a lot of the world doesn’t have access to good, clean water. So why should I care? I should care because there is only so much water in the world. And being less wasteful is always a good thing. Americans use, on average almost 70 gallons of water per day per person. That’s a huge amount of water. And if we simply installed more water efficient fixtures and regularly checked for leaks, we could reduce that by about 35% to about 45 gallons per day. Not quite “half”, but darn close.
We have cotton cleaning towels and we have an old spray bottle we’ve reused and filled with our vinegar solution. This works on bathroom and kitchen sinks, countertops, mirrors, pretty much everything. For scrubbing and more difficult areas (like our stainless steel sinks), we use baking soda and a little water, make a paste, get an old toothbrush and we’re set.
In addition to the thirty second rule, we went through our house and replaced quite a few of our light bulbs with CFLs (compact fluorescents) ad some LED (light emitting diodes). We started with the exterior porch lights. This was because we leave our porch lights on all night for security. And, since we live in a house that sits on a corner, with three bollard lights, two porch lights and four “over the door” lights, we had some serious wattage going on.
My wife and I started being more diligent in turning off lights around our house. Since we currently have gas heat, most of our electric bills are lights and appliances. In just being careful: turning off lights when we’re not in the room, not turning on lights if we don’t need them (our house has wonderful natural light in most every room), and those sorts of things, we have been able to reduce our annual electric bills every year for the last three years. That’s pretty good.
I remember when I would go to the grocery store and the clerk would ask “paper or plastic?” We typically would say “paper” because it was easier to recycle. Our garbage company picks up recycles, but doesn’t do plastic bags. And we’d always forget to take our plastic bags back to the store. So they’d pile up in our recycle drawer. Paper was easier, but that bothered us, too.
So a few years ago, my wife and I decided to invest in durable, canvas bags. We bought four like the one pictured here from ECObags. They are durable, socially responsible canvas bags. About $9 each. And we love them! When we bought ours, they had a logo on the side that said “neither”. I liked that.
We’ve found it rare when four bags aren’t enough for our shopping. And we can pack them with heavy stuff and they hold up really well. The straps are sturdy and I’m amazed at the stuff we can load in them. Almost heavier than we can lift sometimes — really.
Plastic bags are convenient and cheap. But cheap isn’t always good. Worldwide, we consume and discard between 500 billion and 1 trillion plastic bags. That’s about 1 million EVERY MINUTE! About 380 billion are in the US alone, 100 billion of those are grocery bags, costing retailers $4 billion annually.
We’ve found our bags useful for carrying all sorts of things around, not just our groceries. And even after three years, they’re still going strong.