Intentional Living
We affirm and support the interdependent web of all life.
— Unitarian Universalist Association, Seventh Principle.
For many of us, the path to practicing intentional living began with recycling. Forty years ago, the only people who talked about conserving resources were people who were “poor”, or feared becoming poor — or were urging us all to live in the woods and eat nuts. Today it’s a rare home that does not have bins to hold aluminum cans and paper, to be picked up weekly by an invisible fairy and taken away, presumably to be processed and reborn as a Starbucks cup or cat food container.
But “recycling”, we soon realized, involves more than paper and metal and green curbside bins. It’s the beginning of a state of mind and a relationship to the earth. Soon we were donating our old Nikes to Value Village — and then buying our jeans there, too. We started carrying canvas totes to the co–op instead of using their paper bags to carry our purchases home. We stopped washing our cars in our driveways and took them to the car wash, where the graywater could be treated before it was given back to the planet. We saved all the discarded paper spewed out by our inkjet printers, and made notepads out of them — and then recycled them after both sides had been used.
The ideas below will help you recycle, use up, or even “do without” — all in an effort to conserve resources and reduce the impact of landfills on our environment.
- Shopping bags — bring your own fabric tote to the grocery store — or re–use paper bags.Wash out plastic bags and use ’em again, for any one of a million things.
- Kitchen containers — wash and re–use those yogurt and cottage cheese containers.Better yet: buy food in bulk and bypass as much packaging as you can.(The food is healthier, too!)
- Use unbleached coffee filters.
- Use washable rags and sponges instead of paper towels.
- Does your company’s building have recycling bins? Use them! If not, you can start a recycling program for your own company — even your own building! — by calling Fibres or similar businesses who will provide you with a bin and pick them up periodically, in most cases at no cost to you.
- Need that address from that website? Directions? Don’t print out the web page — make a note on a scratch pad and save pages of paper.
- Recycle those used–up inkjet printer cartridges and other computer components.
- Do we need to mention patchwork quilting — the greatest American recycling program of all?
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