May 3, 2012

Awesome Finds

There is a certain element of secondhand shopping that is more thrilling than regular shopping. Let’s call it “the hunt”.

You know, that exhilarating feeling you get when you’ve found a single useful or beautiful or perfectly fitting item in a sea of used crap? I feel like there is some kind of superior skill involved thrift storing that just doesn’t apply to browsing a mall where everything is neatly laid out for you.

There is also a compulsion after purchasing a fabulous secondhand item that makes you not only want to tell people about it, but also, absurdly, how much you paid for it. As if the fewer dollars you gave to the, no doubt non-proft, thrift store staffed by volunteers, the better you are.

I say this tongue in check of course because I myself am a fan of “the hunt”. And although I am no super shopper, I do have a few awesome thrift store finds that I feel compelled to share. True, they are all “things”, and we really are trying to rid our house of having too many “things”, but I’m pretty sure you’ll agree that they are worth keeping:

1. A winter coat. Never mind that it’s now spring; I found this back in November. At long last, my green jacket which makes me look like I borrowed a 14 year old’s wardrobe has been replaced by a proper and mature lady’s coat that amazingly had sleeves that were long enough. ($20 at Value Village)

2. A stick blender. Don’t give me flack because it’s plastic. My mom found this for $4 at the Sally Ann, and I’ve already made 3 different kinds of soup with it as well as made quick work of chopping some nuts, so I think it’s worth it.

3. And finally, whilst looking for a cardigan, I ended up finding this little beauty. I’m pretty sure I was the only one in the store who knew what it was.

It’s a bag dryer! We don’t have too many plastic bags these days, but I do have a few in circulation that I wash a lot, and this lovely dryer which I first read about on My Plastic Free Life is perfect.

Have you found any secondhand gems lately?

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Filed under consumerism, plastic bags

March 25, 2012

It Hasn’t Been That Long

I’m blatantly stealing a post from the lovely and talented Mrs. Green over at My Zero Waste (compliments help when you’re stealing content).  I couldn’t help myself; this video was a sweet reminder that in the grand scheme of things, is really hasn’t been that long since we started this whole overpackaged, mass consumer, industrialized food thing. It also makes me want to alternately sow seeds in my garden and run over to my Grandma’s house for a chat.

Whether you’re 20 or 100, I think it’s a good exercise to take five minutes to consider how food has changed in our lifetimes and what we want to be spending our money on. Unlike Mrs. Green, I can’t seem to be tech savvy enough to embed a flash video, so I’m going to have to send you over to the original website: click here to watch 100 Years of Food (it’s just 5 minutes long)

I love how she weasels a kiss out of not one, but two grocery employees (you don’t get away with that kind of request unless you’re over 100).

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Filed under video

February 16, 2012

More Things I Never Thought I Would Make: Eatmore Bars

When I was a teenager, I used to babysit for a family down the street that had a candy drawer. It was, just as it sounds, an entire drawer full of candy. After dinner, if it was a weekend, the kids could each pick one item out of the drawer. And once they went to bed I would settle on the couch with a selection of  licorice, gummy worms, and various chocolatey treats and devour them until my teeth ached.

I remember this particularly because back at my house, we definitely did not have a candy drawer. To be fair, I probably didn’t have enough self control to have a drawer of candy, and we did have a cookie jar filled with homemade goodness, but as everyone knows, cookies aren’t candy.

Whether it was the lack of a dedicated drawer or my naturally ravenous sweet tooth, I have great nostalgia for candy. Most of it centres around the following:

  1. The obvious annual Halloween bonanza.
  2. The customary giddy anticipation of corner store candy purchases where I could spend my allowance however I wanted (generally a box of nerds, a ring pop, or a lick-a-stick because they lasted the longest and I have long been a girl who values a good deal).
  3. Skittles. My Dad would occasionally come home with a coveted package of these shiny fruity wonders. I associated Skittles so closely with being a “Dad candy” that I was actually surprised years later when I realized that anyone could just walk into a grocery store and buy them.
  4. And finally, the eatmore bar. At some point in my later childhood, after she went back to work full time and we started packing our own lunches, my mom began buying bulk packs of eatmore bars. Usually we had granola bars, but when the eatmores were in the house, each of us kids were allowed half of one in our lunch. It was the ultimate treat: soft and chewy, salty sweet, peanuty goodness, and it’s something I’ve missed since we headed down the zero waste path and stopped buying things like plastic wrapped candy bars. (I told you I was nostalgic about this stuff)

Anyway, today I unexpectedly discovered that my Whitewater cookbook had a recipe for eatmore bars in it. Even after all my do-it-yourselfing it never even occurred to me that I could MAKE them. And now, after all of 5 minutes, I have a whole pan of candy bars in the house.

If only I could figure out how to make skittles, I’d be set. . .

PS-If you want to try eatmore bars for yourself, there’s a similar recipe here

5 Comments

Filed under DIY, food

February 8, 2012

What can I do? I’m only a kid!

Sometimes Grant and I get to speak to school groups. We show our film and tell a few stories and answer questions about living zero waste. And sometimes I’m stuck that we’re talking to youth who maybe don’t have a lot of control over their garbage. I mean, most of our garbage comes from food packaging, and they probably aren’t the ones buying the food in their family. I even had one girl ask me today “but what can I do?”

I’ve been thinking about it. And I think there are lots of things you can do to reduce waste even if you’re under 19. Here are some ideas to get you started. You don’t have to do everything; just start with what works for you!

  1. Carry a stainless steel water bottle and vow never to buy bottled water again.
  2. Bring your reusable container and cutlery everywhere! (start at your cafeteria)
  3. Ask for experiences as gifts (think birthday presents like movie or concert tickets, playland or fun park passes, a massage, a hiking trip, skiing, etc)
  4. Buy clothes that are secondhand or have a clothing swap with your friends. Donate clothes that you’ve outgrown to charity (organizations like Big Brothers will even pick them up from your house)
  5. Look on your municipal website to see what can be easily recycled where you live. Then talk to your family and set up recycling bins in a convenient place in your home.
  6. Focus on one thing. Pick one thing that you can live without (plastic bags, paper napkins, disposable cutlery) and start avoiding it today. Once it becomes easy, then add something else.
  7. If you pack your own lunch, try to make it zero waste by eating whole fruits and packing food in reusable containers. Try making some of your favorite packaged food from scratch (eg. granola bars)
  8. If you’re a female, try reusable feminine hygiene like a menstrual cup or cloth pads.

At School:

1. Start Composting (this is a big one, so do it as a group, and talk to your administration and teachers to get help if you implement).

  • The Students at Windermere Secondary in Vancouver have a large composter and even have a Zero Waste Committee. Check it out here.

2. Make recycling at school easier.

  • The shop students at Charles Tupper Secondary in Vancouver made attractive wooden recycling bins with three compartments to have in school hallways.
  • Homma Elementary in Richmond has great posters reminding people to recycle and compost.

3. Try your own challenge.

  • The students at UBC Commerce Environment Club decided to carry all their garbage with them for a week to draw attention to how much they produced. They said it automatically made them make better packaging choices.

3. Do something at school to draw attention to garbage.

  •  The students at Fraser Heights Secondary School in Surrey made a Christmas Tree out of reused pop cans

4. Start a Campaign or a Petition

  • When she was just 16 Michelle Arsenault of Dryden, Ontario started the website http://www.onelessplasticbag.ca/ to help her community reduce plastic bag use.
  • UBC Students got a waterbottle refill station installed to help people cut down on buying plastic water bottles.

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Filed under Around the house, interactions

January 16, 2012

Hot Chocolatey Goodness

I haven’t made hot chocolate in a long time. Sure, I’ve had it at cafes (I’m a pretty big fan of rich chocolatey goodness), but I haven’t made it in my own house.

The last time I bought a canister of hot chocolate was something like 3 years ago when we started the zero waste thing, and I’m embarassed to admit it, but it never crossed my mind that you could make hot chocolate without hot chocolate mix, so I’ve done without ever since.

Until yesterday. Yesterdayday it snowed, and then the sun came out, and it became just the sort of gorgeous wintery day that beckons to you to grab a book, curl up at the window seat, and sip hot chocolate. And then it hit me. I had cocoa, I had sugar, I had milk; by golly, I could make hot chocolate.

Of course, after my “breakthrough”, I checked online and found out that I was far from the only one who had ever done this. Obviously people used to make it before Carnation and Nestle stepped in with pre-packaged mixes. In truth, just about everything we buy at the store can be made from scratch. Well, maybe not Kraft Singles, but you know what I mean.

What’s something that you used to purchase before realizing it was nearly as easy to make it yourself?

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Filed under DIY, Uncategorized

December 8, 2011

Simplicity and Slippers

Somewhere on the road to zero waste, I became a bit of a hoarder. I don’t mean a hoarder of garbage, I just meant that I don’t throw things out if I think they “might” be useful, and I definitely don’t throw them out if they’re in perfectly good condition.

Take, for example, my slippers. I have 5 of them. All in very good condition. All very cozy and comfortable. Some high cut, some low cut, some hand knitted, some store bought, some with padded soles, some not. The thing is that I don’t have a single matching pair.

And I can’t throw them out because they are perfectly good slippers. And I can’t donate them to charity, because who’s going to buy a single slipper at a thrift store? So I’m stuck wearing random pairs of slippers, refusing to get rid of any of the 5 lest its partner show up (it has been known to happen).

It gets worse. This problem extends to socks too. I have a bag of over 50 mismatched socks. Good socks. $15 smart wool socks, and ski socks, and socks that still have lots of life left in them of only they could find a mate.  Before you interrupt, yes, occasionally I wear mismatched socks. In fact, those who knew me when I was a kid know that for about 12 years, I exclusively wore mismatched socks (but that’s another story altogether. And those socks weren’t mismatched, they were the same socks, just in different colours), but at the office, mismatched socks don’t cut it. And, call me a princess, but I just like the feeling of wearing two matching items on my feet.

I don’t have the answer here; I think I’m just realizing that it’s hard to “minimize” and “live simply” when you can’t get rid of something as simple as a slipper. . . . . anyone else have a bag of orphan socks laying around?

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Filed under Around the house, consumerism