Taming the paper monster

I'm buried in a sea of paper. Literally. My work desk is a foot deep in marked-up papers, sign-offs, meeting notes, etc. I've yet to find a working solution. Add a kindergartener, preschooler and a college-student husband to the mix of bills, work and other "business" of home, and you'd think my home would be in a similar situation. And sure, I have a few hot spots, like our kitchen table that never seems to stay clean. But thankfully, we're starting to tame the paper monster. Slowly. Here's what's working for me:

• We reuse. Work papers get rehashed as printing paper for everything from recipes from the Internet to printouts of email receipts to word finds for my kindergartener. And the papers are stored in two locations: one for printing, and one for easy kid access. That way they're not mixed about the house.


• We recycle. We keep at least one, if not two, recycling bags in our kitchen to toss completed math papers, junk mail, newspapers, etc. When the bag's full, we drop it off at the school's paper recycling station, which helps the school as well. Since we drive our child to work anyway, we have no excuse. The cool thing? It helped the environment and raised $1300 for tuition assistance last year!


• We eliminate. I have a serious problem with lists and sticky notes and multiple calendars. This year, I stumbled on a "mom planner," which has kept my life saner and more organized than I've felt in a few years. Each weekly sheet tracks by day my activities and those for each of my family members, along with a space for lists and daily meals. Along with that, we posted a wipe-off monthly calendar and menu on our fridge, so it's easy to consult or change.

What works for you in taming the paper monster? Any other habits that can help us out?

Don't have a trashy Christmas, part 2: Reducing wrapping and shipping waste

Ninety nine percent of the trappings of Christmas end up in the landfill within six months, I read in the paper today. That's a lot of waste for one magic moment.

Lisa over at Retro Housewife Goes Green started the discussion on how we can reduce the trash in our holiday celebrations, and I'd like to offer a few more ideas that have worked for our family.

While re-thinking our gift-giving can make it more meaningful - and hopefully cut down on your holiday spend and wasted gifts - there are steps you can take to reduce the trash generated in your holiday celebrations. A lot of the trash we generate isn't even from the gifts themselves - it's from getting the gifts to the recipient.

Wrapping it up

We rely heavily on gift bags in our house. It came less from a desire to be green than the reality that I hated to trash the pretty bags after the holidays. I'll admit I love pulling out my Crown Center bags each year - it helps with a bit of the homesickness, in a strange way. But they're easy, and frankly, if the little ones break into the gifts, there's a lot less re-wrapping and re-taping needed.

Because I use bags, I also don't have to rely on bows or ribbons on my gifts, which just go in the trash anyway. If you're dead-set on using ribbons and are feeling crafty, you can find out how to make your own bows here.

Find more ideas for greener ways to wrap your gifts here.

Gifts to be shipped

As we can't be in every city for the holidays, we have to ship gifts to at least one home each season. You can be smarter in how you ship things by following these tips:

Pick flatter or modular sized gifts. Odd-shaped gifts are challenging to find packaging for and often require a larger box - meaning more freight costs and fuel to send - and extra "stuff" to pad the package.

If you must buy an odd-shaped gift (such as the guitar my sister-in-law bought my child last year), consider either padding the package with newsprint, plastic bags or leftover packaging from something received at home at work instead of buying new packing materials. In our office, we're notorious for hoarding boxes and packing materials for such occasions.

Or, buy the uniquely shaped or fragile present online and have it shipped directly from the store. It saves you the gas and hassle of trying to find appropriate shipping materials, and they typically have resources on hand to ship them effectively.

If you have several families in one city, designate a "point person" to receive and distribute the holiday gifts. Chances are they're share a celebration at some point in the Christmas season, and the gifts can be distributed at that time.

Hopefully, as Black Friday approaches, this gives you a few options to consider to make things easier on your family.

Happy holidays!

Chicken for one

Making the most out of a main dish may be easy for those of us with larger families, but when you're the head of household (and the only head), cooking conservatively gets a little more challenging.

It's all too tempting to just eat out or rely on frozen or pre-prepared meals, which are costly and generate a lot of waste. Even if you have great intentions, when you're cooking for one, it's challenging to use up everything you've purchased for the week.

This morning, my brother, a computer programmer who's never before worried about his wallet, confessed to me that he's stumped about how we can cut back on his eating expenses. He's given up routine meals out but isn't sure how to make cooking dinner efficient for a person whose definition of cooking is "putting dead meat in a pan." And, he said, it's challenging to finish up what he purchases before it goes bad.

We had a short talk about what he likes, doesn't like and is scared to cook. In the end, we decided he wouldn't be too chicken to cook with chicken.

His meal base? A rotisserie chicken from the grocery. Nothing fancy, and it conserves the heat that would go to roasting a chicken on his own. As we're able to stretch a rotiserrie chicken to three or four meals, I figure he could be set for a week.

Meal 1: Enjoy hot rotisserie chicken with sides of his choice.

Fast meals with leftover chicken can include:

• Chicken fried rice. (Stir-fry with cooked rice, a bit of peanut oil, soy sauce and desired veggies. We use green onions liberally.)
• Chicken tacos or quesadillas. (If you buy the flour tortillas, you get soft tacos and quesadillas out of your effort.)
• Sandwiches - hot or cold. Fix how you like.
• Hot chicken sandwiches. My mother used to rely on leftovers with a can of cream of mushroom soup with leftover chicken, pork or steak, served over bread. Not fancy, but it was always cleaned up.
• A casserole or simple rice or pasta dish with leftover chicken tossed in. (Not comfortable with cooking? Simply stretch out one of those boxed rice side dishes with meat or veggies.)
• Chicken Caesar salad (or other salad of your choice.)

Getting tired of poultry? Is it approaching day four in the fridge? Just shred the leftovers and toss it into the freezer for future use on a lazy day.

Yes, they're not fancy meals, and probably something you've already considered. But keep in mind that at 7 at night, fast makes sense.

Cutting out the CD habit

CDs are a fact of life in my world. As a Web person, I routinely get submissions of photos and other multimedia (even Word files) on a CD-ROM, particularly since my employer is paranoid about zip files.

While we can download music, watch movies online and store photos on Web sites, we just can't break the cycle of saving data, software and just plain "stuff" onto CD-ROMs.

According to Douglas Karr, who writes a marketing technology blog I read:

According the EPA’s poster, Lifecycle of a CD, 5.5 million CDs, their packaging and
millions of other music CDs are tossed each year without recycling. CDs and DVDs
are made from Aluminum, Gold, Dyes, various other materials - but most of all
Polycarbonate and Lacquer. Polycarbonate and Lacquer are generated directly from
crude oil.

The stats continue, every month 100,000 pounds of CDs and DVDs go obsolete as well. There’s no efficient means of recycling the materials either!

According to the Oil Industry itself, about 1.1 gallons of every barrel (42 gallons) of oil goes to petrochemicals.

So obviously the problem is not just the discs themselves but the habit we've caused. A few days ago I wrote about what you can do about those old CDs. But what can you do to break the cycle and keep new CDs from entering your life?

• Research to see whether the software is available as a download instead of purchasing a copy on CD. Even better, consider using Web-hosted software such as Google Documents instead of purchasing a copy of Microsoft Word.
• Consider "on-demand" movies or viewing them through online services.
• Karr writes: "Switch from backing up and transporting data on CDs and DVDs to USB Drives. USB drives hold more data and are portable, faster, and don’t wear out...Buy yourself a large portable drive for backing up your work and transporting it back and forth to work."
• And, for the diehards, Karr suggests eliminating your CD or DVD drives the next time you upgrade your computer.

Have we forgotten the first R?

Reduce, reuse, recycle. I heard this so much growing up. Now it's all about the latter two - and "reduce" seems to be forgotten.

This week, we took our recycling to the curb, and once again the containers threatened to overflow out out of the green box. And each week I briefly wonder whether I should call waste management and beg for an extra container. After all, I'm resorting to traveling elsewhere to drop off my papers. We have too much stuff, even with making about half of our baby's food, those little jars still add up.

The reality is if we just shift our consumption a bit, we might have less to worry about.

Many containers can be bought in bulk, meaning less plastic or cardboard waste overall. Those okastic containers for butter or other things can find a second, temporary life as food storage (before my husband tires of the overflow in the cabinet.)

The key though is reducing what we do bring in. Less prepackaged foods and more produce and home cooking. Cut out the daily newspaper (not sure how we acquired it anywau), and let magazines expire. Buying secondhand kids clothes that are only worn for a few months, anyway. Hiding the paper towels and reaching for cloth kitchen towels and rags.

Eco'burban recently wrote:

...we realized we were recycling too much. Why have a bin full of empty glass
iced tea bottles, plastic milk jugs and aluminum cans when you could make your
own tea or lemonade and have your milk delivered to your doorstep in returnable
glass bottles?

So...are you recycling too much?