01.17.2016

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Before I went zero waste, I used to buy anything bottled, use sponges in the sink, bought spices packaged in plastic bags and also in glass jars, and the worst culprit of all was that I bought packaged foods.

Kitchen Now:

1. Whole Foods Market: Bulk balsamic vinegar, Bragg’s Liquid Amnios, raw honey, candy, oats, black beans, whole wheat flour, cane sugar, cranberries, spices and coffee.
2. Philz Coffee: Loose leaf green tea and chamomile tea (and coffee if I want Philz coffee each morning)
3. Kitchen Items: 3 pots & pans, 1 grill, 1 set of basic flatware, 1 set of basic kitchen utensils, 1 hand held mixer, 2 silicone bakeware pans, 1 dinnerware set, 1 set of mixing bowls, 1 set of Pyrex storage containers
4.  Dining: Cloth napkins and kitchen towels, Tea infusers, re-useable wine corks, wind-up flash light and I now compost everything
5. Recyclable products: Soups, baking soda, and occasionally wine

Living Room Now:

1. Giant/small towels as floor mats and door mats, I hate that the rubber backing on standard door mats falls apart after exposure to weathering.
2. I buy digital books or I check out books from the library (Fortunately I bought an iPad when I started grad school so it came in handy)
3. I use an indoor air filtering plant to liven up the space as well as making it functional as well.
4. I limit the amount of batteries I need/use. I replaced my flashlight with a wind up flashlight and in total I have 3 items that uses batteries. In addition to that, I limit the size of batteries to AAA or AA (it’s really not necessary to have a library of them and it makes attaining them harder when traveling).
5. Christmas bag: Flour sack towels (28″x 29″) and bandannas for wrapping gifts. If you wrap gifts using basic box wrapping techniques and then tuck the ends within the folds, you can always secure the wrapping. Or check out Furoshiki and check out the techniques they list and their products they have available.
   1. Here are some examples from the website:

Office Now:

1. I use refillable ball point pens and lead and replace them in my pen/pencil unit
2. Due to my profession, moving away from rendering materials is quite difficult so I do use colored pencils and a lead holder as well as a Faber-Castell kneaded eraser. (The kneaded eraser doesn’t slough off eraser bits)
3. I used to keep my work saved on re-writable CDs but now I have a 1 TB external hard drive. I also utilize my emails and use my clouds to store data.
4. I use a stapleless stapler so now I don’t buy staples for refilling and it’s very efficient
5. I’ve opted out of junk mail as much as I can but some mail still gets through, when it does, I use the back of the one sided pages as scratch paper (I can’t remember when the last time I bought paper).
6. Recyclable products: Envelopes, stamps and Christmas cards… There are still items I value and I can’t seem to stray from and hand writing is one of them. I value a hand written letter, the ink/lead on paper denotes a moment in time- a moment in time when the writer touched the document as well as the receiver.

This is an over all view of what my life inventory looks like now. It makes life a lot easier when I have less to worry about. Majority of my time, I think I’d prefer eating food or going on an adventure. Once I got rid of a lot of my items, I noticed that I sleep better now, my stress level seems to lessen because there’s less upkeep with my life. It’s strange how when I used to think of hanging out with my friends meant that we would go shopping (and not window shopping), and now that shopping really isn’t a part of my life- I had to search to find what to replace it with. Even if I had the choice to document my life in photographs, I think there’s still a pressure to do so- sometimes, the memories are enough to take away from that experience.