The Oregonian newspaper recently published an article on how we Portlanders will soon be able to start composting our food waste in our yard debris cans, which get curbside pickup.
Portlanders will even be able to compost such food waste as bones and food soiled paper, like pizza boxes and paper towels. This is fantastic news, (especially for me) as chicken bones are one of the components of my monthly pickup that’s pretty damned foul after baking in the sun for a month.
But shouldn’t we already be composting our food scraps?
The city Metro department sells discount composters, and according to their website:
“Approximately 500 pounds of material is composted annually in each of these bins.”
Wow. I’ve been composting since 1998, which means that I’ve diverted 6000 pounds of material from the landfills and yard debris collection areas. 6000 pounds that didn’t have to get trucked away from my home. 6000 pounds of organic material that enriched the soil on my property.
It’s great that the city is setting up a convenient way for Portlanders to compost their “kitchen scraps,” and yard debris. But there’s no reason why we should send this black gold away.
The reality is that even in green-friendly Portland, Oregon, the majority of people don’t compost. And unfortunately, it takes major government intervention for significant change to occur for most. For some, it’s because apartment or condominium living is non-conducive to a compost bin. But for others, it’s due to the mindset that starting up a compost pile is a complicated and smelly endeavor. (Note — my compost bin smells just fine.)
eHow, (one of my favorite new how-to sites) has a nice simple page on setting up and maintaining a healthy compost pile, which should get even the most citified beginner on her way.
Do you compost, and was it difficult to get started? Please share your insights in the comments section below.
Katy Wolk-Stanley
“Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.”
I don’t have cable, but I keep hearing about the different hoarding shows that are on TV, like A&E’s Hoarders, which describes hoarding as:
“Compulsive hoarding is a mental disorder marked by an obsessive need to acquire and keep things, even if the items are worthless, hazardous or unsanitary.”
Luckily, Hoarders episodes are available to watch online, which I’ve only just now started browsing. These episodes are compelling, and with a goal that seems to genuinely be to help those suffering from this debilitating affliction.
The Learning Channel (TLC) even got in on the action with their Help, I’m a Hoarder special. Click here and here and here and here to watch a clip:
Hoarding is so sad, as these people are so overwhelmed and stifled by their excessive consumer goods. Hopefully, these television programs will help people to realize that they’re not alone, and inspire others to make positive life changes.
Katy Wolk-Stanley
“Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.”
The following is a reprint of a previously published post. Enjoy!
Because I do The Compact, (buy nothing new) it’s easy to narrow down my shopping opportunities.
So yes, it is at thrift stores, garage sales and other secondhand sources that I make all my purchases.
However, an important decision I’ve made, is to only buy things I actually need. I am not completely successful with this goal, but I’ve come a long way.
I don’t like a cluttered house, although I am a natural pack-rat.
It’s like I have those cliche’d mini-me’s on my shoulders tugging me this way and that:
Devil mini-me: “Ooh Katy, that is such a cool vintage clock/cheese slicer/end table/whatever, you’d be a fool to not snap that up!”
Angel Mini-me: “Don’t buy it Katy! Be strong. You know you already have more crap than you can deal with. Why buy more stuff when you can’t even figure out what to do with what you already have?”
Devil mini-me: “Don’t listen to that goody-goody! You could even sell this expensive stroller/voodoo doll/great book on eBay or craigslist.”
Angel mini-me: “Get out now Katy. Abort! Abort!”
You get the picture.
It’s just as easy to load up on the unnecessaries in life at a thrift store as it is at Walmart. For me it’s actually easier to lose the wants vs. needs battle. If you find a used whatchama-whatever, you have to pounce on it right then and there. It probably won’t wait for you to return an hour later. Whereas, a new purchase can wait be bought when it’s first seen, or even a day or two later.
I try very hard to not shop recreationally. The problem is that I do love going to thrift stores, and would happily spend my days browsing through the various Goodwills in town.
However:
Katy + thrift stores = cool junk that does nothing to support my mission for a responsibly frugal life. Junk is not a need.
Now if I could only get that angel/devil duo to work on all my other character flaws.
Katy Wolk-Stanley
“Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.”
Alice, a Non-Consumer Advocate reader asked this question in the comments section of my column about Frugal Living Without Gogurt or Hamburger Helper.
“Katy, how about some meal ideas for those of us trying to cook from scratch more? I would love to hear what you make from that list of shopping! Thanks.”
I don’t have time to answer Alice’s question with the attention that it deserves, (I have to be at work in six hours and 49 minutes) but that doesn’t mean that you don’t.
What advice do you have for Alice, or anyone who is trying to learn how to cook from scratch? Please share your insights in the comments section below.
Thank you!
Katy Wolk-Stanley
“Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.”
I gave an interview today about frugality, and the reporter asked me whether I thought the current interest in frugality would last beyond the recession. I answered that although I thought some of the folks who were discovering the joys of living a rich life on little money would stick with it, that the majority of Americans would be happy to resume free spending once the economy picked up again. This answer surprised the reporter, and it stuck with me the rest of the day.
Will living through the current recession bear long lasting changes in consumer behavior long after the paychecks start rolling off the assembly line again?
Having just finished Lauren Weber’s In Cheap We Trust: A Story of Misunderstood American Virtue, I had fresh in my head how Americans have repeatedly been happy to shed the deprivation of frugality when it’s paired with poverty. Sure, there are many who continue on with a lifetime of frugal and non-wasteful lifestyles, but they are the exception rather than the rule.
But then I started to think about how the current wave of frugality is now paired with green living, which is a first. The sustainability component may be the X factor that’s been missing from other eras of American frugal living. The ingredient that keep people staying the course, even after their finances loosen up.
This wave of frugality may actually stick.
What do you think? Is your frugality here to stay? Will you start up with big spending as soon as we weather the current economic storm? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.
Katy Wolk-Stanley
“Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.”
I have a love/hate relationship with coupons. I love being able to bring my grocery bills down, but I’m unwilling to do so at the expense of the quality of food that I feed my family. And I’m not talking about national brand vs. generic, I’m talking about questionable ingredient packaged food vs. real food.
In other words, no Gogurt or Hamburger Helper, no matter how cheap.
But that doesn’t mean I’ve given up on coupons. I still clip through the Sunday paper, and am particularly enamored of the $10 off $50 Safeway coupon that runs at the beginning of the month in The Oregonian. So much so, that I redeem one at the beginning of the week, and then another at the end of the week. (That way I’m pretty much set for a month’s worth of food, except for perishables.) I also make sure to always use four coupons per trip, which is how many they’ll double.
Today I went to Safeway and bought:
- 1 box of Cheerios
- 3 boxes of Chex cereals
- 5 pounds of sugar
- 2 boxes of rotini pasta
- 2 packages of chocolate chips
- 5 pounds of flour
- Peanut butter
- A box of brownie mix
- 6 cans of El Pato chili sauce
- 1 can of El Pato salsa
- 1 package of tortillas
- 2 pounds of shredded mozarella
- 2 gallon of skim milk
- 1/2 gallon of whole milk
- Sour cream
- Cottage cheese
- 2 Blistex lip balms
- 4 loaves of bread
- 4 whole chicken breasts
- 1/2 pound of rock shrimp
- 1/4 pound of Krab meat
- 4 avocados
- 2 onions
- Broccoli
- 1 pound of deli sliced ham
- 2 bags of tortilla chips.
The total for all this food was $56.73.
And with the exception of the brownie mix, nothing was particularly packaged or junky. The tortillas chips were a special purchase for Superbowl Sunday, which is more about normally forbidden snackage than the actual football game. I still have a large amount of Granny Smith apples and oranges from another store that has better (and cheaper) produce.
I don’t spend more than a couple minutes per week clipping coupons, yet I save a ton by combining them with sale items. I could set up a pantry that would allow me to really stock up on specials deals, but have never felt like I needed one.
I shop to keep a generalized supply of ingredients in the house rather than ingredients for specific recipes. This is what works best for me. Kristen at The Frugal Girl shops for her meal plans, which keeps her organized in order to feed her family of six. Neither method is better, it’s just our own personal style.
Safeway is not actually the cheapest grocery game in town, as Portland is home to Winco, which is even more affordable. However, the nearest store is pretty far from my house, and in a sketchy area of town. (I have witnessed illegal activity in the parking lot.)
People complain about the increased prices of foods, but I’ve found that I’m still able to buy huge amounts for very little. And most importantly, I’m able to do so without buying weird food just because they feature prominently in the coupon circulars.
Are you able to balance healthy eating with coupons? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.
Katy Wolk-Stanley
“Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.”
I wrote a few days back about how my wallet from 1983 was anonymously mailed to my father’s house. It was a time capsule of my 15 year old self, and contained $6.05 of post-1983 currency, which I wanted to spend on something special. I asked you, the readers for advice on how this money should be spent.
Advice ran the gamut from complete and utter teenage splurges to helping those in need. Here are a few of your suggestions:
- “I would go buy some blue mascara and a couple of 99 cent music downloads for, say, Abba or Night Ranger, lol.”
- “I would buy something for the family to enjoy that a 15 yo would like. A half gallon of ice cream with hot fudge sauce or butterscotch sauce, jimmies (or sprinkles), real whipped cream, etc. then have an ice cream party in rememberence of your teen years!”
- “Send it to Haiti…it might just make some teenage Haitian girl’s day!”
- “I think you should go to the thrift store and see what you can find for $6.05 and share with us what you bought.”
I went with suggestion number four and took my cash to one of my favorite Goodwill stores. And you know what I found? Exactly the type of baskets with white fabric liners that I’ve been keeping an eye out for! Exactly. Each was marked at $2.99, so this spent the $6 perfectly. However, I was able to talk the checker down a dollar as one of the liners was slightly stained, (which easily washed out.) This left me with enough money for:
A jumbo sized Snickers bar, which was my favorite treat when I was fifteen. (Luckily I danced for three hours per day plus theater classes!) I haven’t bought the candy yet, but I will savor every bite, and maybe even listen to a little Men at Work.
She just smiled and gave me a Vegemite sandwich!
Thank you to everyone for your great (and humorous) suggestions. I wanted to do something my 42-year-old self really liked, while indulging my 15-year-old alter ego. Although I loved the idea of the blue mascara, I just couldn’t waste my money on something so useless, and as kind hearted as the Haiti idea was, I just gave money to Mercy Corp.
Katy Wolk-Stanley
“Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without”
My monthly garbage pickup was today, which meant that yesterday was clean out the fridge day. Yes, I compost and work to minimize my family’s food waste, but there’s always something that slips through the cracks. This month was two tubs half-eaten cottage cheese, some Trader Joe’s hummus, (how did that happen? I love their hummus!) and some food my sister brought down from Seattle and then abandoned in my refrigerator.
But the refrigerator was not the only food storage to receive the food waste warden treatment, as I had a new pretty vintage glass storage jar that was aching to be filled with oatmeal.(Yes, I anthropomorphize storage containers. You got a problem with that?) And in that way where the flutter of a butterfly’s wings enacts change across the world, I completely cleaned and organized my kitchen cupboards today.
I pulled everything from my cupboards, (wiping down that greasy dust down that can only be found in kitchens) and transformed what had degenerated into a hodge-podge of food stuff into a thing of beauty.
Most notable were five containers of empty/almost empty Hershey’s unsweetened cocoa and four ziploc bags half-filled with stale/rancid taco shells. The Hershey’s chocolate I can understand, as I use the recipes for chocolate cake and frosting that’s printed on the box, but the taco shells? Sigh . . . . We can never eat all the tacos shells in the box, so I duly put them into a Ziploc bag like the responsible non-consumer that I am. Then when we’re having tacos two months later, the saved shells are stale and unappealing so I open up a new box and continue the cycle. But I apparently never cull the old ones out.
Luckily, the Hershey’s containers were recyclable and the taco shells were crushed and added to the compost, so no real garbage was created in today’s organizing spree.
The only super gross discovery was a paper bags full of dog biscuits that I had bought for the pup who volunteers for the read to the dogs program at the library. These bone shaped atrocities were swarming with bugs and had the consistency of swiss cheese. Gag, gag, gag.
I also gleaned and organized my medication and tea cupboards. I found Beano that expired in 1998 as well as some very old dinosaur vitamins that I had bought for my then preschoolers that had been deemed “yucky.” Since they had expired in 2003, I poured them into a baggie to take to the pharmacy for responsible disposal.
My kitchen cupboards are now so beautiful that I kept the doors open for most of the day, and actually considered having my tea while seated in front of them. (I don’t have cable TV, so my entertainment needs are simple.)
I now feel like I have a clean slate in the food waste department, and that warden lady can chill out for another month or so.
How are you doing with your food waste? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.
Katy Wolk-Stanley
“Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.”
It’s time again for Non-Consumer Mish-Mash, where I write a little bit about this and a little bit about that.
Simple Living Network Newsletter
I’ve had a number of columns reprinted in the Simple Living Network Newsletter, which has been great, because their readership is my target audience. The January-February online issue is currently running my column titled, “Green Purchasing — What is Best?” I highly recommend this newsletter which always has a number of interesting and thought provoking pieces. Be sure to check it out!
My Achilles Heel
I am normally quite immune to the advertising circulars that weigh down my Sunday newspaper.
Target? Pass. Kmart? Don’t even think about it!
But today’s paper included a glossy ad for Tuesday Morning, which is a store I had never given a thought towards in the past. But today’s ad caught my eye and pulled me in. The products that were making my heart go pitter-pat were coordinating fabric lined basket in pretty black and white toile patterns.
Like a fashionable girl who thinks that the right pair of boots will solve all of life’s problems, I think that the right organizing system will raise me to the level of those Stepford wives whose homes are always tidy, organized and whose children get along at all times and wolf down their broccoli. This line of thinking is called a “slippery slope” according to the Logic class I took in college, but that doesn’t mean I can’t subscribe to it now.
Of course, I did not go buy a cartload of organizing baskets today, but I did have a hard time recycling that one circular. It was so pretty, and I know there were no children in the ad, but if there had been, their baskets would have been full of broccoli.
Frugality Run Amuck
Inspired by the father of In Cheap We Trust’s Lauren Weber’s habit of reusing his tea bags 10 or 11 times, I decided that if he could be using his tea bags so many times, surely I could reuse mine at least once!
I tried this for a few days, and had a number of cups of tea where I momentarily forgot my experiment, and was baffled as to why my tea tasted like crap.
“What the #@** is wrong with my tea?!”
I came to the conclusion that I love my tea, was very particular about my tea, and tea was very important to me. Tea is a huge part of my daily routines and that while I make many frugal sacrifices, reusing tea bags was not going to be one of them.
Simple living and frugality are about saving money on the things that don’t matter so that it’s available for the things that do. And tea? It matters!
Compost Critter
I was innocently going about my chores this afternoon, and had taken a container of food scraps to the compost bin on the side of the house and got a startling surprise when a small mouse came to the surface of the bin. It’s not that I’m scared of mice, but it wasn’t what I was expecting to see and made a noise that was far from the “Eek!” of 1950’s cartoons. (Picture Linda Blair in The Exorcist.)
The mouse itself was brown with big black eyes and looked quite content. I quickly replaced the lid and skedaddled back into the house. A quick Google search brought up issues of pathogens in mouse dung, so I will have to deal with this. Hopefully by turning it more often (making it less inhospitable) and nothing much more extreme. I have been composting for 12 years, and this was a first.
Any ideas?
Katy Wolk-Stanley
“Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.”
I have a confession to make — I am a terrible procrastinator. When I visited my sister in Seattle last year and discovered the “Photo Booth” function on her computer, I remember saying to myself, “Boy, I’m sure glad I don’t have this function on my computer, or I’d never get anything done.”
Well, my husband bought a webcam for our computer and guess what popped up? Yup, it’s Photo booth, in its full glory.
So I may not have written a column today, so instead I present to you:
and
and
I may be 42 years old, but I often act my shoe size, which is ten. Simple living? I say silly living!
Gotta work on that procrastination thing.
Katy Wolk-Stanley
“Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.”
