Comments on: the project

By: Julien

Julien — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 00:02:59 +0000

I did my program in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada. It’s a six months program called Katimavik and the theme of my group was “Ecocitizenship and Active Living”. It was indeed a life changing experience. I’m now trying to get my family to reduce their ecological footprint by doing lots of simple but important things. Hopefully this will make a difference!

By: Jen CleanBin

Jen CleanBin — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 21:16:05 +0000

Thanks for your feedback. We feel the same way. We still have a long way to go to reduce our footprint, but waste is a good start. Where did you do your eco volunteer program? It sounds like it was a life changing experience.

By: Julien

Julien — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 00:27:59 +0000

I’m 19, planning to live a sustainable life for myself, the society and future generations. I just did a six months eco volunteer program and learned a ton of stuff that I didn’t know. People are not even aware of their ecological footprint and think everything is fine because the truth is not seen. Grant and Jen, I admire your courage and encourage you to always try to produce less waste. The challenge you just took probably changed your life in many ways and I feel inspired and happy to learn that people actually do CARE about environment. I don’t want my kids to live in a landfill.

By: Tamara Ramirez

Tamara Ramirez — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 17:22:30 +0000

Thank you so much for your response, Jen — especially since I know you’re incredibly busy with the film! Congratulations! Can’t wait to see it!

How great that you’ve been able to meet your readers – and the writers of blogs you read – in person! What you said about meeting readers who you didn’t know before were readers while touring the movie really struck me. There were – and are, I’m sure – so many people in the world who are inspired by your blog and who feel connected to you and your story, but whom you’d never met or heard from before.

It’s funny – even though we readers of our blog have the ability to reply to a post that moves us, it sounds like, in your experience, that doesn’t always happen as often as I would have guessed. There are all these “silent” fans out there. They’re moved by what you’re writing but without your knowing about it. At least, not until you meet them in the world outside the blogosphere.

I guess, in that way, blogging is still sort of like traditional publishing in that lots of people can read your work but you only get to hear back from a handful of them — in that case, through letters/emails or meetings at lectures or book tours, in this case, through blog comments and a film tour!. Your film tours are offering so many great opportunities for those personal connections! That’s fantastic – but it makes me wonder why more of those readers didn’t just contact you earlier through your blog.

I wish I could attend a screening and chat with you in person; there’s certainly something special about a face to face conversation that isn’t the same online. And yet, I suppose the opposite is true too. Here we are, chatting online for all the world to see about your experiences with the blog. It would be hard for that kind of “public” conversation to happen anywhere else but the blog.

Thanks again for helping me learn from your experiences, Jen! Your comments above gave me a lot to think about!

By: Make memories, not garbage, this Christmas « Green Ideas by Carl Duivenvoorden

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 22:28:23 +0000

[...] The Clean Bin Project is a wonderful initiative by three young Canadians to try to produce zero trash for a year. Their website has many litterless gift ideas for the holidays, such as: [...]

By: Jen CleanBin

Jen CleanBin — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 04:11:42 +0000

Hi Tamara,
I’d say that this blog started off more about recording my own experiences and has now become about sharing ideas with a community of readers. Once the year long project ended, I felt that we had a “system” in place, so zero waste became normal and, for lack of a better word, almost “easy”. I stopped writing 3 days and week and went down to about once a week (or even less these days). A secondary reason for this shift is that Grant and I decided to share our story through both facebook and a documentary movie, so a lot of our attention turned towards those avenues of communication. I used to spend my lunch breaks writing blog posts and reading others’ blogs, but now I spend them promoting the film and answering emails.

I’m not to big on readership statistics, but I’m pretty sure my first readers were people I knew personally (aka my mom), followed by other people who blog about zero waste. I was truly surprised when we started touring the movie how many people “came out of the woodwork” who had been reading the blog and really connected with us as people. I shouldn’t have been surprised, because I feel that way about other people’s blogs, but it was pretty cool to be on the receiving end of that.

I have way more ideas for posts than I ever get around to. I try to keep it fun and short (ish) and to include a photo. Compared to facebook and twitter, I get to say a lot more, so posts are like the “long form” version of what I’m up to.

Finally, I most appreciate the wonderful people I’ve met through blogging – both people whose blogs I read, and people who read my blog, both in person meetings, and online connections. I hope my blog gives people ideas for zero waste and inspires them to try something new -like I did when I started writing a blog

Jen