Sunday, January 11, 2015

January Environmental Overhaul and Updates

Since my last post I moved from my rural overgrown house down in the Milwaukee watershed to a nice suburban house in the Lower Fox watershed.  This has some great aspects and some not-quite-as-great aspects.  The bad news is that I no longer have ample access to wild plants and insects, not like I did down by Milwaukee.  But on the bright side, my roommate (and landlord) is really into efficiency and sustainability, so as far as my intended overhaul of environmental habits I already am off to a good start just by being here and with the person I'm here with (the house has solar panels for electricity, he replaced most of the light bulbs with LED bulbs, most of the appliances are very efficient, most of the cleaning products are environmentally friendly, and any recycling that isn't taken by the city he takes to get recycled elsewhere).

In addition to more sustainable factors just living where I now live, there are some behavior changes I've been able to make now that I'm not constantly surrounded by my parents.  More of my food is organic, although not as much as I hope for in the future (I'm currently on unemployment, at least until my recruiter finds me a job *crosses fingers, lights candle*).  I don't drive very far, but that's more incidental than anything, on account of having nowhere I need to go daily and living within five minutes of everywhere I do go.  I've also rejoined Care2, which is its own pile of fun I'll probably write about at length.

There are some things I still sorely need to improve on, and things I'm not doing terribly with that still could use some improvement.  Like I said above, once I can afford it I'd like to really focus on home-cooked, organic, paleo food.  I'm doing much better than most people, but I should have the potential to do much better.  I also need to flat out eat less food (both for environmental and for health reasons; weight aside I have very addictive eating habits that cause me a lot of pain).  Although I'm a big advocate of paleo and primal diets, I want to cut my animal product intake down by a large degree.  I hope to eat beef infrequently enough to get virtually all of it grassfed.  I've been doing "Meatless Mondays."

Probably partially because of the unemployment issue (meaning I have a lot of time on my hands) I've been looking into more obscure things that are recyclable so I know where to take things when it comes up.  A lot of the work is done for me because of our household method of taking anything with a number that our recycling center won't take to be recycled elsewhere, but a lot of stuff is recyclable that doesn't have a number (like cigarette butts, pens, plastic films, etc.).  So I'm gradually learning these locations.  I did find a place to have my old eyeglasses recycled, so I'll be doing that soon.

We've also been abundant in plastic grocery bags that need to be brought to the recycling bin, which reminds me I am looking for ways to remember to use my abundant cloth bags that I've accumulated from conferences.  I'm also looking to replace plastic produce bags with cloth bags (something like these, maybe).  They used to sell them at stores around here but stopped for some reason, not sure why.

Anyway it's getting late.  I'll be going more into detail with planning for this stuff after I get a good night's sleep.