Baby Steps Toward Sustainability

It's been a rough couple of weeks around here.  Massive weather swings and strong storms have taken me out much of the time with pain, and all three kids have been sick but all with different things.  This has definitely messed up my plans for spring so far, that's for sure. 

Spring has been a bit slow to come this year, and we're all getting grumpy about it.  Then again, I remind myself of how things were when I was a kid, and March definitely was not a true spring month.  More like a late, grumpy winter spitting snow and ice at random.  Same with April.

Instead of working in the yard (which has only finally lost the last bit of snow yesterday), I've turned my attention to indoor issues with sustainability as well as more detailed garden planning.  One of the things that has been bothering me is the paper trash.

Recently, my husband and I decided to add in paper trash to the composter (our large, used turning bin that really does a nice job).  I'd been reading up on Pinterest on what can go into a composter from household trash, and it's a lot. Way more than we'd been saving.  So, I put bags in the bathroom, bedrooms, and next to the kitchen trash with signs saying what to put in there.  While getting the kids to put the paper trash in the compost bags is hit or miss, Robert and I have been getting much better at it.  In doing so, he and I have been floored at just how much of our trash is compostable and how much waste we have been producing.  And here we'd been happy that we'd cut down on our waste...  Seriously, it's rather something to go through a trash bag and pull out everything that you can put in the composter instead.  For the bathroom trash, it's about half.  Half!  It's amazing how much kleenex we've gone through this winter alone.

So, after seeing how many cotton rounds I was going through, I ran across a pattern for something similar on Pinterest.  I made one, and in a quick trial for my homemade toner (witch hazel tincture using lemon balm and some other herbs with a dash of tea tree oil), I was really impressed with how well it worked. 

So, this weekend when the pain was bad but okay enough for fairly mindless work, I made ten of these to use instead of cotton rounds.  I also used this from Pinterest as a base idea to make my own makeup remover solution from my lemon balm witch hazel tincture and got reusable microfiber rounds from Dollar Tree.

A trial of that tonight showed it to be quite the success!  Moreover, the round washed right out in the sink with a bit of soap, so that's drying in the used wipes bin.

With my son having a GI virus this weekend, the homemade antiseptic solution and reusable wipes (like these only blue, and I cut them down into fourths) have been getting quite the workout.  I have found that the solution really does dry out my hands quite a bit, so next time, I'm using gloves.  Still, it's nice knowing that the alcohol in the solution kills whatever has gotten him sick so the rest of us don't get it.

Eventually, I will need to replace the microfiber and synthetic cloths with all cotton in order to eliminate the microfiber waste in the water and all, but this is a first step, a baby step.  Next, I need to make more handkerchiefs for everyone, though the used kleenexes will definitely be put to use in the composter.

While the paper waste is something the worms like, it isn't good for us to use so much of it.  Paper towels, kleenex, paper napkins, cotton rounds, and q-tips alone filled two paper grocery bags for the composter today, and that's just in the last few weeks.  So much waste, and this is an area we can cut down in.  Now if I can just get the gardens planned out and start working in those to get them ready for planting...