You have to start somewhere

Every little bit counts. For a few weeks now I've been trying to go much greener than what my family was already doing. Okay we recycle, make efforts to reduce our packaging (buy bulk where possible, eat in restaurants with real cutlery, use cloth bags, travel mugs, reusable stainless steel water bottles), we buy local and mostly local organic, we shop at the farmer's market, buy bulk from local farmers, use our compost bin, try to economize car trips etc etc. In fact we do WAY more than most (okay EVERYONE) we know. BUT still it has been NOT good enough and for awhile now (2 years!!) I've been wanting to do better. I've been plotting the bread making, and yogurt making, and okay yes owning our own chickens / goats to somehow rid ourselves of our last vestiges of packaging. More on this later.

OKAY anyway to make a long story short... I decided we would do better and well we're trying to finally go ZERO packaging.

It is definitely harder than one thinks. For instance tonight we ate out at our local chinese food restaurant - I removed the paper placemats (the glass tables seemed clean enough!) and passed them back to the waitress. Nothing I could do about paper napkins... I still haven't gotten organized enough to carry our own ready supply of cloth napkins (we use them at home!). Oops the waitress brought straws in our water!!! I make a mental note to remember this the next time we go to this restaurant. Okay so TWO strikes (paper napkins and straws). BUT here is where we scored - we used ZERO paper placemates, I used some of my baby's cloth wipes to avoid asking for more napkins (Geez... guess these could have been our napkins!.... but somehow... using something normally destined for my son's behind does not feel appetizingly acceptable as dinner napkins!)okay back to where we scored, I used 2 jam jars that my daughter and I had used earlier in the day for our soup at lunch to store the leftovers in, and we declined the plastic wrapped fortune cookies. And I declined the disposable chopsticks and used real cutlery instead. Not perfect but HEY we saved two sets of chopsticks, 3 mats, plastic packaging and the containers for leftovers. Pretty good I guess. But it is amazing to think of how much packaging we generate without even giving it any thought. Oh yeah... the 2 waitresses looked at me like they thought I was CRAZY! And all I could think was I'm not the crazy one here... you guys are the crazy ones for not seeing we have a problem - using Earth's ressources for the convenience of a few seconds for things that will end up in a landfill for hundreds of years! And, that somehow what we consider normal and okay is so very wrong and backward!