Or, how anal and tight-arsed I can be.

Everyone knows about my Divacup. If you use tampons and have a strong stomach, make tampon tea and pour it on the garden. At least it’s some form of recycling! BTW, when I tried to find a link to tampon tea (I found the tip in one of my gardening books), the Google results were downright odd: from drinking the tea, to how to improve your plant’s aura, to odd sex-sounding topics (I wasn’t curious enough to check).

We also have a worm farm. No more guilt trip from throwing away fruit & veg that we forget to eat! If you have a smaller home, try a Bokashi bucket.

More about worm farming, Part 3:

  1. A useful collection of articles.
  2. Appropedia summary of typical designs and common problems.
  3. (read part one & two)

Guerilla recycling – I reuse my envelopes by:

  1. Using them as notepaper. Their thickness makes them the ideal shopping list. Write on them and throw them in your bag, it won’t get lost.
  2. After they are all scribbled on, I cut the corners and use them as bookmarks. Especially handy in cookbooks or reference books when you can scribble little notes in the corner. Doesn’t hurt the book and makes recipes very easy to find. Especially if you colour code them with a highlighter.
  3. THEN (and only then) they are dumped in our recycling bin. By this point, they’ve been used 3 times.

Other great ideas:

  1. Turning off the lights and assorted power points (obsessively). If you think it’s a waste of time, read this mental_floss article on power vampires.
  2. Using grey water on our garden. I try to time my laundry and showers for the hot days so that I can water the same evening. We rarely end up using mains water for our plants.
  3. Op shop shopping. Buying used rescues products from becoming landfill and spreads the environmental cost of manufacture and freight. Almost all of my clothing is from op shops. Once I’m done with my clothes I pass them on to a friend or sell it on eBay, recycling them once again.

Links and thinks:

  1. Being Skeptical of Green – New York Times
  2. With big biz jumping on the green bandwagon, should activists cheer or jeer?
  3. Living beyond our means | Guardian Unlimited
  4. Going green means forever | Herald Sun– interesting, read comments.
  5. Lifehacker green links