I added two new categories to the links section a few days ago. The first one (yeah I know it’s last in the list alphabetically but I added it first) is “ReduceReuseRecycle!” which looks a bit odd but it was the only way the phrase would fit on one line. I was looking for a title that would describe what the category was intended to hold, and that commonly used phrase popped into my head. I don’t know if I had ever stopped to think about what it means before this… it fits well with the first three links I have added:
Reduce - as in reduce your impact on the planet. One good way to do this is to buy used items whenever it is feasible to do so rather than be a part of the treadmill of consumption, and by purchasing used items you are also saving on packaging material (a lot of which just isn’t recyclable) as a bonus. One great way to do this is craigslist. Think of it as a searchable version of that little community bulletin board you used to see in the entrance of stores, with pictures in most cases! There are local lists for most cities. Craigslist is awesome!
Reuse - lets face it, there are some things that aren’t really worth money any more, or at least not worth the bother of trying to sell them. You just want them gone — but that doesn’t mean they have to go in the trash. That’s where Freecycle comes in; the Freecycle network is a collection of online groups, by area or city, where people can post things they have to give away, or things they are looking for. It keeps those items serving a useful purpose and out of the landfill. One person’s trash really is another person’s treasure sometimes, and we’ve had just as much fun giving things away as getting them! It makes you happy to see something that you no longer have a use for make someone else really happy; our favorite freecycle experience so far was probably the little girl that was ecstatic over my rubber spider collection. (Well, getting the rubber spider collection out of the house was probably a cause for celebration for Joy, in itself)
Recycle - sometimes there just isn’t a way to reuse something but a lot of things can at least be recycled, and one of the best resources for finding out what can be recycled is Earth911. Besides the things you would normally think of as recyclable, like cans and bottles, did you know you could also recycle CDs? Batteries? Through this web site I found a way to recycle the giant mounds of polystyrene foam from my computer installs. There are also links for composting and buying items made of recycled materials. I’ll be posting more recycling links as time goes on but Earth 911 is kind of a master list where you can find most of the others.
I wasn’t sure what to call the second category we added, so I just called it ‘Futurewatch’. This is a collection of the blogs and other sites we regularly read discussing climate change, peak oil, recycling, sustainability, and other topics that impact the world. The news links in our ‘Feed Your Brain’ section have some overlap on that, but this new section contains mostly viewpoints from individuals… Joy found most of them. We’ve got a tab in our iGoogle where we’ve added RSS feeds for each one so we can see when there’s new stuff without having to go to each one and check. We have learned so much in the past year or so, and the links in this section are where we learned some of the most valuable things.
Anyway, I just wanted to point out the new content since it might not have been noticable; our links section is a few screen-scrolls down on the blog (you can also just click ‘Links’ at the top right, for the complete list on a page by itself). I also wanted to explain what the new categories are. We hope others find these links as useful as they have been for us!
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