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?

Trash Diary

I'm keeping a Trash Diary this week as an assignment for a class on Earth Sila--acting ethically toward the earth. The Trash Diary is a way to become more mindful of just how much trash i'm creating here.

My sweetie is the recycler. (Thank goodness!) We line up our bags and bins--2 feedbags for recycled paper, a box for the newspaper, 1 feedbag for glass, cans, and plastic, 1 bin for the returnable bottles (in Vermont, most bottles have a 5-cent return).

I have one bag for which i am entirely responsible--all the plastic and paper containers that can be re-used to pot up plants. For example, hummus containers, yogurt containers, take-away containers. Right now, that bag is filled to overflowing. It's time for me to sort through it, stack up the containers, and then store them in the potting shed until spring.

It's time for me to take a look at how much packaging comes into this house under the disguise of food and leaves in its ugly form as trash.

Reduce. Re-use. Recycle.

At a backyard party last evening, Jackie told me that she collects the used plastic knives from such events and uses them as plant markers. "I try to reuse them," she said, "so that they don't go straight to the dump."

My own version is that i re-use plastic containers of all sorts to pot up plants to give away--cherry tomato containers (after i cut off the lid), strawberry boxes, Chinese take-out boxes, hummus containers, blueberry pressed-cardboard containers, yogurt single-serving containers.

"Reduce. Re-use. Recycle." is one motto of the Voluntary Simplicity movement. When we voluntarily simplify our lives, we are practicing renunciation, and that is very counter-cultural to our consumer society.

We consider the impact of buying more plastic and try to re-use the plastic that already cycles through our lives in such great quantity.

Renunciation is a factor of awakening. Let's wake up to the impact we have on the life around us.