Day14-Nov 5

One other experiment i've thought about doing is recycling paper. I mentioned in one of my past journal entries how much paper i waste, and how little attention i pay to the amount of paper i use which end up creating huges amount of waste. I already started recycling cans and plastic bottles a few weeks ago so that doesn't really count for my project, but i found a really interesting video[1] that basically mentioned 7 things you can do to be more eco-friendly and one of the things was recycling as much paper as we can. And when i saw it i realized that i use so much paper, and i never recycle it. For example, my printer doesn’t have the option of printing double-sided so every time i do want to print something double sided i have to go print one page, turn it around, print it again and so one. As you can see, this takes a lot of time specially when I’m printing a 20 or 30-page document, so when I’m in a hurry, which is most of the time, i don’t print it double sided which is extremely wasteful. But i will try from now on to print things double sided, and not just printing them, when i have no more use for these documents i'll keep them and print on the other side. I'm calculating that this would reduce my consumption of paper by half.

And i won't only do this with printing paper, i'm also going to try to minimize my consumption of napkins and paper towels. Today i realized that i use so many napkins a day, and most of the time i've never actually used them. For example, today i was having lunch and i took a napkin to the table, and although i didn’t really use it, i ended up throwing it away. And now that i think about it i do this every day, and even more with paper towels: every time I’m cooking i make a huge mess on my cabinets, but i clean it right away so i technically use a whole square of paper towel to clean one little mess. And if i spill something 5 times while I’m cooking, and i cook and actually meal at least 5 times a week, then that means I’m using 25 squares of paper towels a week. 25 squares of paper towels that aren't even used completely because cleaning up a little spilled oil doesn't really take a whole square. So I’m thinking i can reduce my usage of paper towels by half by simply cleaning everything after I’m done cooking, not every time i make a mess. This means that i will use a whole square of paper towel before throwing it out, and might only use 1 or 2 every time i cook instead of using 5. So yeah, i think this will be one of my experiments, and i'll let you know how it goes.













[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iKqrYLESH8