Once Upon a Time I Had a Blog

And I remembered to post on it. I have gotten sooooo far away from the habit of journaling my thoughts, and my intention is to return to that habit. Let's see how I do.

Got this photo here!

I've gotten a bee in my bonnet about RV living, possibly full-time. I don't know what crazy neural misfiring has taken me in this direction, but it gives me something to focus on when I need it, and something positive. At the very least I am learning about what it might be like to live in an RV full time (on paper) and have home be wherever one has parked it. And thus far my "research" has given to my wanting to at least own an RV.

In my research I have been looking at lowering one's environmental foorprint on the road, and others have found ways to make that happen. Solar panels on the roof, compost toilets, remodeling with zero VOC paints, natural fabrics, sustainable counters and flooring. Then there's the reduce/reuse/recycling while on the road: composting, saving recyclables and taking them to the proper facilities, and then there's the trash.

What to do with the trash? I found one family doing an RV tour called The Eco Womb (they bought the bus from the Janssens, which was formerly the Live Lightly Tourbus....running on veggie oil, sunflower seed countertops, no VOC paints, sustainable flooring: And they do something called Bottle Bricking. It's where you take plastic bottles and stuff them with all of the non-recyclable non-food trash until they are hard like ricks. Then they are used like bricks, to build cob benches (use bottle bricks as infrastructure, then cover with cob).

So I DO think that is an awesome and creative way to use trash and make something beautiful, and I do have a couple of things I am curious about. Plastic bottles, which are stuffed with said trash, are recyclable. Are we not then taking something from the recycling stream and putting it into the waste stream?  I love the idea, but I wonder about other ways to expand on this idea without using plastic bottles. Or does the energy used and carbon footprint of recycling said plastic bottles exceed that of landfilling them? 

It turns out that in third world countries, the answer is yes, but in first world countries where there are a plethora of recycling facilities, as long as we recycle at least half of them I believe, then recycling is the lesser footprint option. So bottle bricking is an excellent idea in third world countries. For us, we don't use plastic drinking bottles (the most commonly used bottle brick type) - we have glass water bottles and the liquids we drink are water, tea, coconut water and smoothies. So I was thinking, what plastic bottles DO we use? Supplements, for sure. Ketchup and mustard from Trader Joe's....not really much else that I can come up with. But those can all be recycled and reused. However, I do like the idea of using other trash for building materials.

And at any rate, it's definitely a good idea to really be thinking about where our waste goes instead of just "away".

what if you COULD recycle markers and pens?

We went out and bought Kiernen some new colored pencils today because recently a lot of his markers had run out. I was sort of pushing for colored pencils instead because I really didn't want to buy markers again, because they couldn't be recycled, that I knew of. All those markers - 5 hundred million a year, and that's just Crayola. What about Sharpie? What about Rose Art? The generic brands? And then what about ink pens???

While we were in the store, I noticed that Papermate is making a new line of biodegradable pens. On the box it says: "Biodegradable components are made from exclusive corn-based material." It also says they take about a year to biodegrade in the compost, and that they can in fact be composted. It's a step in the right direction in my mind - finding other solutions that allow them to continue to make their product. Here in Canada a four pack of these pens runs about $6.

When we got home, I noticed that the wood in the colored pencils we bought is not from rainforests, but in fact from reforested wood. Sustainable? I'm not really sure, but it's better than rainforest wood, which is where Kleenex gets its materials from for paper towels and toilet paper. I decided to write to Crayola and appreciate that effort, and to ask them to go even further. I asked them to find ways to make markers that were sustainable and/or biodegradable like Papermate had. I also asked them to use recycled packaging for all of their products.

Once I'd done that, I Googled "how to recycle markers" and I came upon this fantastic blog entry that led me to Terracycle. And do you know what? You CAN recycle markers, and ink pens, and sharpies, and and and! One of their projects is called the Writing Instruments Brigade. Since it is sponsored by Sharpie and Papermate, these are the only ones listed that they will take, but it seems that really they'll take them all. They even have international sites - like Canada!

The way Terracycle works is they collect trash from you, for which they pay .02 cents per item, to go towards the charity, school, or organization of your choice. So if you've got a school, you can get the whole school in on this thing. Win-win! I'm going to do this with my cohousing community - maybe some of the kids here can take it to their schools. If you're lookin g for which charity to support, Charity Navigator is a great website that rates charities on a variety of factors, and makes every charity transparent - including what their CEOs are paid.