I feel like no matter what else we do to go green over at Erwin House, the single most important change we need to make is to reduce our waste. You wouldn’t believe how much trash we produce on a weekly basis. Our trash pickup occurs every Thursday morning, and the family joke is that the trash can is full again by Sunday night. But it isn’t actually funny.
Recently, the city council announced their new zero-waste plan, a 32-year strategy to reduce to zero the amount of garbage sent to landfills by reusing, recycling and composting materials instead. They are starting with improvements to the recycling program.

The City of Austin’s Solid Waste Services Department plans to unveil a new program this year that will expand what Austinites can recycle and eliminate the need to sort recycling into multiple bins.
The new program, set to begin in October and be rolled out over three months, replaces the familiar blue bins with 90-gallon carts that can be filled with new items, such as brown medicine bottles and cereal boxes, along with the cans, bottles, jars, paper and cardboard that are currently accepted.

I love the idea that my recycling can would actually be larger than my garbage can, and I’ve been keeping a close eye on our trash to try to figure out whether this new system might actually work.

Our number one waste material is paperboard–you know, the boxes that cereal and snacks come in, the 6-pack cartons, the excess packaging that surrounds our toiletries and new shoes and toys. Our city doesn’t recycle paperboard, and the local Ecology Action station downtown was so overloaded with the stuff that they asked me to just throw it in the landfill, thanks anyway.

Under the new system, recycling collection will occur once every two weeks, instead of weekly, which is expected to lead to savings on gasoline and reduce harmful emissions. Also, rather than workers lifting recycling bins manually, newly outfitted trucks will pick up the carts and dump the recycling inside.

I’m setting two ongoing goals for myself:
1. To keep track of what we throw away most at any time (currently paperboard), and
2. To focus for the next 30 days on trying to creatively reduce, reuse or recylce that particular type of trash (by purchasing in bulk instead of in boxes, for example).
With paperboard, I already know that recycling isn’t the optimal option… yet. And I’m not the creative type who saves toilet paper rolls to make into crafty little projects. The truth about crafty little projects around our house is that they end up cluttering toy bins or activity drawers or the floor and then they end up in the trash! The truth about paperboard is that we simply need to bring less of it into our home.
One small step I began to take last December: leaving the packaging at the store. It drove me nuts how much paperboard waste we ended up with after Christmas morning 2006. I decided I was going to unwrap everything in the parking lot, fill the bags back up with the waste, and take it back into the store for the store to deal with (and many thanks to the folks at Target who were very willing to take the trash).
I think the next step is to try to avoid packaging whenever possible. I’ll try to let you know how it goes.

Austin uses wind generators to provide clean energy to 55,000 Austin residences. Today, Erwin House became one of them.
This is a HUGE deal to me. I’ve tried three other times over the years to sign up for this program, but I’ve never been able to get online on time. The seats are gone in seconds. This time, we just plain got lucky.
I wish I could say it would help us save those pennies for the solar installation, but the truth is that this good deed will cost us almost twice per kWh compared to coal ($0.055 instead of $0.0325). Thank goodness for that handy dandy tax rebate ;-P

I miss my house now that I am spending long hours at the new office, and as life at Crestview Doors hits a new groove I find myself ready to focus some energy on the house once again. We have a lot of little projects left to do, and a few big ones. We still haven’t finished the concrete block wall under the deck, for example, and I really want to re-paint and decorate the kids’ bathroom.
But my main goal at Erwin House this year is to go green. We tried to incorporate many green intentions during the remodel. We recycled our old windows (good for landfills, bad for energy efficiency). We chose bamboo floors for the kitchen and dining (good for the earth, bad for an area that is wet a lot and sees a great deal of traffic). We went from having no insulation to full insulation (great for energy efficiency; even though we more than doubled our square footage, our energy bill hasn’t budged a penny… except that first month when the doors were open all the time, ha ha!). We angled the roof for solar panels and made room for a 500-gallon rainwater tank (and now we just have to install them!).
It is time to go the extra mile. My eldest’s school has gone green this year, and it seems like we should be walking the walk at home too. We’re starting with something really quite simple: a shower timer. I admit it, we are hot water hogs. We designed the house such that all of the water facilities are centrally located. The bathroom and kitchen share a wall downstairs, and the two upstairs bathrooms and laundry are all directly above the water heater. This has reduced the amount of time it takes to get hot water, and the fancy shower temperature gauges make it easy to get the temp and pressure just right. Unfortunately, it means we spend a lot of time basking in the flow.
It seems fitting to start the new year with a daily reminder of our commitment to using less of the earth’s precious resources. Won’t hurt our pocketbooks a bit either I plan to put those saved pennies straight towards the solar panel fund!
I haven’t yet picked our next step, but I’m contemplating buying a composter since our “pile” isn’t exactly composting much of anything. What are you doing to go green this year?