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….
