Recommitting to The Compact and to Decluttering

Here I am again!

I am going to post these thing separately for ease of searching them out later.  10 years ago in January of 2007 I heard about The Compact, a group of people in San Francisco who made a commitment to not buying anything new for the calendar year.  I signed up on the yahoo group (there are still about 10,000 people participating in that group) and started and education.  Boy, did I learn a LOT!  There are so many ways to look around and find a used item or make do or borrow or barter or any number of ways to do something other than just buy a new whatever-it-is.

What goes hand in hand with not buying new things is taking really good care of your old things. Also, I found a TON of ways to do the environmental thing rather than the easy things.  Such as:

*Use cloth napkins rather than buying and throwing away paper ones. I guarantee you have cloth napkins, or bandanas, or wash cloths or and old table cloth that has a hole/stain in it that you could cut up and hem and make napkins.  I have not bought a single paper napkin in 10 years.  I haven't bought any new cloth napkins either.  I already had some and I have found some in estate sales and added to the pile.  Just a few extra napkins added to a load of laundry will cost you no more in water, soap or electricity.  Plus they are much nicer.

*Recycle everything that you don't compost.  Buy foods with as little packaging as possible.  When you buy food with no packaging you are automatically buying your food as close to its natural form as you can get it.  That means you aren't buying crap for your body, either!  Yay!  I have been known to dig through the garbage and move things to the recycle bin or to the compost bucket.

Here's a short list of things that I throw in the compost bucket, things that no longer go in my trash:
Toilet paper cores, Paper towel cores, used tissues, shredded paper, dead plants, flowers, coffee grounds, tea bags, egg shells, tamale husks.

Now, picture your trash can and take all those items and compost them.  Then start looking for things to recycle, like oatmeal boxes, glass bottles, plastic bottles.  If you get those things out of the trash, look how small your trash pile is now!  It's awesome.

Anyhoo, I have back-slid quite a ways from my Compacty ways and I am now publicly making a recommitment to get back in to that.  I will post here regularly (not exactly sure how often) and see what I am adding to my list.

In addition to getting Compacty, I found a decluttering challenge called JanuaryCure 2018. Go here to see what is happening with that one.  I signed up for it and today's challenge is to clean out a drawer.  Any drawer.  Freezer drawer, desk drawer, junk drawer, dresser drawer, any drawer. Dump it out, see what you can throw away, recycle, put in its rightful place, clean the drawer inside and then neatly put in the contents that need to live there.  I will be doing that here in just a bit as soon as I select which of my cluttered drawers deserves the honor of being the first one decluttered!

Let me know if you are interested in either getting Compacty in your ways or in decluttering your way through 2018.  I would love to hear from you.