only the jodi

No Impact Living is going to mean being conscious all the time. This is not at all like the 1960s, which trumpeted altered consciousness. And the absolute opposite of my 20s & 30s, when I made a personal choice to be as un-conscious as possible, as often as possible.

Monday’s instructions : Stop making TRASH. Reduce it. Reuse it. Recycle it. Keep a special bag at home or the office to collect trash you make by mistake or necessity throughout the week.

No Impact travel kit assembled: cloth napkin rolled around knife, fork, spoon, travel mug for hot & cold liquids, small Tupperware container in case anyone offers me food to go this week. It feels slightly batty and just a touch like I should be pushing around a shopping cart with the rest of my possessions and have plastic bags wrapped around my feet, secured with rubber bands around my ankles.

Somehow I managed to miss the last sentence in the instructions. The one that says I should still be collecting my trash in a special bag. I didn’t do that. Granted there would be very little in there. Two tea bags. A few Splenda packets. Some gum wrappers. The paper napkin I grabbed without thinking when I spilled hot tea on my nephew’s fiancee’s foot.  In my defense, the tea was in my reusable travel mug.

Back at the cousins house after the burial for the usual spread. I piled deliciousness onto the plastic bowl I’d brought (double points for reusing a Chinese take out container) and grabbed the fork I’d brought from home as well.

The bowl started conversations with people I’d never met. One woman assumed it was for portion control. I assumed she meant I was fat and promptly moved to another part of the room. My seven year old niece came up to me, head cocked, quizzical look on her face and said, “Are you taking leftovers home with you?” A reasonable question since my family is particularly fond of their “good Tupperware™”, so I bring my own containers to major holidays.

By the time coffee and cake came out I’d answered most of the questions, explained what I could about the experiment and most of the family just ascribed it to my general wackiness. In a family that includes goth boys and girls skulking around the periphery, a Pastor leading a parish of Bikers for Christ, where Ashton has two Daddies, where lies pass for love and teeth are frequently optional, I am the wacky one because I don’t want to make trash.

Okey dokey.

Today’s resistance? Handkerchiefs. Sorry, but they totally gross me out. I have no problem with a nice reduction of toilet flushing in the tradition of if it’s yellow, let it mellow. 27% of all household water consumption is from flushing the toilet. Cutting that down to only flushing at bedtime or after a poop, well, that saves a lot of water. And I’ve switched to 100% recycled paper products including tissues and toilet paper. I’ve practically eliminated the need for paper towels and paper napkins by swapping in reusable sponges and cloth napkins. But, please, don’t make me carry around a swatch of cotton caked with dried boogers. Nopes. Not even a pretty swatch of cotton.

The day ended with more driving and while I’d eliminated the trip to Manhattan, it was still Queens, Nassau, Suffolk, Nassau, Queens. Still, too much. Luckily, the TRANSPORTATION part of the change is scheduled for tomorrow, Tuesday, when I have a little more control over my schedule.

I already have my bag packed for the day : cloth napkin & utensils, travel mug, reusable container for my snacks of carrots and apples (only compostable waste), a book to read on the subway and….my Metrocard!

Day One: Sunday : Consumption

When I decided to take this challenge, I thought This is gonna be a cakewalk. I’m already moving towards a low-impact, if not a no-impact, life. Then Life got busy being life. My uncle died. Instead of my usual day to day, there’d be a wake, a funeral, lots of family, driving and food and beverages I had little control over. I figured I’m still going to give it my best shot.

The No Impact weeks starts with Sunday, and awareness of just how much CONSUMPTION I’m responsible for.

Make a list of all the stuff you “need” to buy this week: I’d made the move to eating seasonally / shopping locally months ago so this weeks list consists only of eggs, spinach, cheese. Rather than throwing out the carton from last weeks eggs, I return it to the market when I go to buy this weeks dozen fresh eggs. When I drove to the market. Ack!  I have a class starting Tuesday and I ordered the book I needed online. I suppose I could have poured through the shelves at the Strand and tried to avoid the packaging and transit impact that mailing will create, but I feel okay about that fact that I purchased used, rather than new.

I gassed up the car. The wake was out in Suffolk county. I live in Queens county, the farmers market is in Manhattan, my mother and her boo in Nassau. Using a car was unavoidable, but with three of us in the car, at the very least we were HOV worthy. Unfortunately, the driving was going to be Queens, Manhattan, Nassau, Suffolk, Nassau, Queens. That’s a lot of driving for someone who is trying to reduce her carbon impact.

I probably could have taken a subway from Queens to Manhattan, followed by the LIRR to Nassau, driven from there to Suffolk and taken the LIRR back to Queens. I could have. I didn’t. And honestly, I didn’t even entertain the thought for more than a fleeting second.

Fill an empty re-usable bag with all of your trash, recyclables, and food waste: I felt a bit like some radical unshaven hippy bringing my personal little trash bag to the wake with me, rolled up inside my purse. Honestly, though, there is surprisingly little in it. An apple core. A used tea bag. Recyclable cat food cans.

Yes, well, there wasn’t very much in it because I’d totally forgotten to include the paper plate, plastic fork and plastic cup I used at the lunch break between viewings when everyone went back to the cousins for deli sandwiches. Somehow, my front brain didn’t consider that my trash because it was created in someone else’s house? Crazy talk. My trash is my trash.

Kitty litter gets a free pass in this experiment. It doesn’t say that anyplace in the manual, and no one online has mentioned it, but as far as I’m concerned until I get a house and the cats go back to using nature’s bathroom, aka the backyard, kitty litter is a non-negotiable item. In the meantime, I use Swheat Scoop 100% natural and call it even. And I don’t even want to know what Colin Beaven and his family did about toilet paper, which I understand they did not use. For an entire year. Nope. Don’t want to know that at all.

Apparently I do want to know : From the NYTimes 3/22/07: “Nothing is a substitute for toilet paper, by the way; think of bowls of water and lots of air drying.”

Just for this week, try not to shop for new items: Yeah, well, the last six months of unemployment had already made that decision for me….