Fresh-Squeezed Orange Juice

My sweetie came home from the grocery store with a bag of juice oranges last evening. I immediately juiced up 2 glasses of fresh-squeezed orange juice--with pulp! A delicious (and non-alcoholic) aperitif.

Of course, fresh-squeezed orange juice meant 6 orange rinds for the compost.

Isn't this the way it goes? You buy something beautiful without thinking about the waste stream it's going to create. In the case of food, the waste stream is fairly immediate and visible. Orange rinds into the compost bin. As you already know, orange rinds do not decompose very fast. Composting citrus peels takes time and patience. Many other non-food items can take hundreds or thousands of years to compost.

Here's another opportunity to bring mindfulness to shopping. Take a moment and visualize the entire lifestream of that item. Where did it come from? And where is it going?

I use a plastic fork to eat a grab-and-go something. That takes 10 minutes. I throw the plastic fork away and it will take more than 100 years to decompose.

We say we want to save the earth, but do we act accordingly?