Don’t Buy It: Toys

So, it’s Christmastime, and we’ve been inundated with catalogs designed to help the sugarplums dance in my son’s head in the costliest fashion possible. Usually, in all honesty, these catalogs make me remember being a little girl, circling practically everything in the JCPenney Wish Book. But not yesterday. I was paging through a new one from a company called Constructive Playthings, and instead of being filled with nostalgia, I was absolutely astonished that for almost every toy, I could think of a creative fellow blogger who had made exactly the same thing for less money, with more play value, than the shiny new plaything on the page.

Wanna see?

Constructive Playthings’ Dinosaur Park, $60:

vs. The Filth Wizards’ Playdough Dinosaur Island (the playdough is homemade, not commercial, and can you imagine how much more fun this would be, besides being cheaper, greener, and waaayy bigger and more elaborate?)

Constructive Playthings’ Fancy Fun Tutus ($20):

vs. Grosgrain Fabulous’s much more gorgeous and durable Midsummer Night’s Dream tutu

Constructive Playthings’ Mermaid Mountain (an incredible $70):

vs. The Filth Wizards’ Playdough Mermaid Kingdom (check out those recycled mermaid houses! download the templates to turn any dollie into a resplendent butterfly-fairy-mermaid-princess!):

Constructive Playthings’ Pop-Up Flower Tent, $45:

vs. Family Fun Magazine’s much bigger, and again more durable, Secret Playhouse:

Constructive Playthings’ Personalized Capers ($20, and it won’t make it in time for Christmas, by the way, because personalization takes longer):

vs. Floating World Views’ dead-simple, make-it-today Superhero Cape:

Constructive Playthings’ Lion Around Pillow/Blanket set ($22, and did they totally crib this from Family Fun, or what?)

vs. Family Fun’s No-Sew Fleece Lion Pillow, which they actually list as a craft so simple kids can make it themselves:

Constructive Playthings’ Tabletop Soccer Game ($35, which is pretty cheap, actually, but not as cheap as….)

The Filth Wizards’ Clothespin Foosball Table:

I could go on for hours like this, but just one more, because I can’t resist the price markup on this sucker:

Constructive Playthings’ Classic Wood Kitchen ($178, Made in Thailand):

vs. Making Do With the Not So New’s (much bigger, fancier, and more fun) Kitchen Entertainment Center ($6.22, no child labor involved):

What are you making your kids for the holidays this year?

Don’t Buy It: The Ubiquitous Swiffer

Not too long ago I needed some floor wax. I went to Target to look for some, a heavy feeling in my heart. Indeed, my premonition was correct: Target did not sell floor wax. I couldn’t, in fact, find anywhere that sold floor wax, so I didn’t wax my landlord’s floor when I moved away. In wandering through the floor-cleaning aisles, though, I was surprised to see how little was actually there. The floor-cleaning aisle is basically a giant monument to Swiffers.

Swiffers are absolutely mysterious to me: they’re full of mysterious chemicals, they are disposable and very difficult to reuse, and, most mysterious of all: people love them.

My experience with both the Swiffer duster and the Swiffer wet jet is that neither will clean a floor that’s actually dirty, although they work OK if you clean every day. (Who does that?) They’re cheap and flimsy — they don’t stand up to hard use. I don’t understand what they can do that a rag and a bucket of hot water with vinegar and soda — or a well-designed broom — can’t do just as well.

On the other hand, there are times — like when I am mopping my whole filthy basement, where my husband makes sawdust and my geriatric cat makes piss-spots across an area of concrete the size of my whole house — when I refuse to get down on my hands and knees with a rag. In such times you need a mop.

Today a made one, using materials entirely on hand, that puts a Swiffer wetjet to shame. I used this instructable.

Here’s the result:

Homemade Mop

I think it’s a fine mop; I will let you know how it works out over the long haul.

Don’t Buy It: Envelopes (and the end of No Impact Week)

Amy Karol has this terrific tutorial for making gorgeous, graphic, ordinary everyday envelopes out of whatever you have on hand. Never buy envies again.

If you were wondering about No Impact Week, we spent the rest of it living out Uncle Dave’s Grace; that is to say, we were pretty much living “in the nude, without food, in a cave.” On the weekend, we strapped our local foods in the car and hypermiled it down to Washington D.C. to participate in the International Day of Climate Action (look for Floppy in the yellow slicker) and the Poetic Art Show, a benefit for the Yellow Ribbon Fund. A good time was had by all.

Floppy prefers climate change without rain, thank you.

No Impact Week Day 4: Local Foods Only, Please

In contrast to the transportation challenge, eating local is easy for us. We live in an agricultural community, and we’ve been CSA members for 11 years, across two states. Most of our diet is local anyway, but we *tried* to eat exclusively local today. We weren’t perfectly successful, but I think we came close.

For breakfast, we ate homemade No Knead Bread made with Sir Galahad King Arthur Flour, toasted, with Franklin Heyburn’s Vermont honey. Now, I think of King Arthur Flour as being local because the employee-owned company is headquartered in Norwich, VT, which is about 10 minutes away from my house. However, looking closely at their website, I see that at least their home-use flour is made from hard red winter wheat grown in Kansas. We don’t use the home use flour — we buy our flour in 50 pound bakery bags, and unless we’re feeling flush enough to buy the organic, we usually buy their Sir Galahad variety (it’s the cheapest — about 40 cents a pound). But it’s all hard red winter wheat, which I gather isn’t grown around here. Well, I don’t feel bad. King Arthur Flour is good stuff. If you call KAF flour local, the only non-local part of breakfast was my tea and the salt in my bread. (I should have skipped the tea, but I forgot.) And the salt may have been local — I see there are salt manufacturers in Portsmouth NH.

For lunch, I had what I always have — leftovers, consumed at my desk. In this case, it was a salad made with lettuce and carrots from Cedar Circle Farm, our CSA, croutons made from homemade bread sauteed in Cabot butter, local eggs, and a salad dressing made from local yogurt,the aforementioned honey, local maple syrup, and other (non-local) ingredients. The non-local components of the salad included mustard and milk (originally powdered) in the salad dressing, ginger chips and raisins in the salad. Then in addition to the salad, I had a Cedar Circle Farm butternut squash roasted with a filling made out of more homemade bread, local goat cheese, farm garlic, and (non local) olive oil and nutmeg.

Dinner was homemade bread again and squash soup made with Cedar Circle squash, local potatoes, farm carrots and turnips, and organic but non-local frozen corn, as well as non-local spices. My husband drank local beer, but my son and I had non-local tea sweetened with homemade grenadine made out of non-local Pom juice and non-local sugar.

I tried to use the carbon diet calculator, but it doesn’t account for the locality or organicness of the ingredients, nor does it have everything, so I have no idea what the numbers mean. Still, I think we did OK, which maybe offsets how much we suck at the transportation issue. I again did not arise early enough to catch my morning bus, and after work, I went to my son’s school open house. My husband picked me up for that, since they had to drive anyway, and his school is about a mile from my work. I offered to walk, but my husband said he was out burning up the atmosphere anyway.

Trash wise I did fine — I think the only trash I generated today was my dental floss. And I haven’t purchased anything since the week began except a cheap hotel room in DC, after my couchsurfing request didn’t work out. I would like to have stayed at a green hotel, like the Kimpton chain, but I couldn’t justify the expense. Tomorrow is energy day. I have no idea how that will go.

No Impact Week Day 3: Transportation

Today was the No Impact Challenge I’d been dreading. No Impact Transportation Day.

Now, just because I live in a rural area doesn’t mean I don’t have access to public transit. I’m embarrassed to say that my options for low-impact transportation are overall excellent, and the failure to use them is thus all mine. There is a free, convenient, congenial bus that goes down the highway about a quarter mile from my house. If I ride it in the morning, it picks me up at my mailbox a little after seven, and drops me off at work 20 minutes later — as quickly as the trip can be made by car. There’s an express bus at 5:10 in the evening, which gets me home about 5:45.

I enjoy both the ride and the walk that bookends it. Tonight, walking home along the gorgeous rail trail that leads to my house, I watched the sun sinking over the lake and the fall colors. I saw a pheasant, sitting angrily and uncomfortably high up in a tree, squawking at our neighbor’s cat Midnight, who was sitting on the road stalking her. It couldn’t have been a more wonderful slice of country life. Besides, riding a bus in a little town is a uniquely communal experience. Everyone knows everyone, everyone works in the same place and lives in the same place and rides in the same seat every day.  The gossip is brisk, and the driver is roundly teased for any errors in driving. She’s always ready with a sharp riposte, and she remembers where everyone gets off, so there’s no need of the bell. It’s adorable.

But besides all that, I don’t even drive. My poor husband has to drop me off at work on days I don’t bus it, and he has to pick me up — double the driving for a single errand. I should be on that bus every single day.

And yet I almost never am. I dreaded today, and I didn’t even do all that well at it: I took the evening bus home today, but I missed the morning bus and my husband had to drive me.

What’s wrong with me?!?

Colin often talks on his blog about how many of us are consuming as consolation prizes in the rat race — as ways to take solace in the fact that we’re working as hard as we can, and harder. I identify with this. I do good work, and I’m proud of what I do, and there are a lot of people who would love my job and love to trade places with me. But I work many — sometimes most — days from 8 in the morning until well after 7 at night, and I’m tired.

To ride the morning bus — there is only one that will get me to work on time — I have to get up 20 minutes earlier than my six year old son. On days I don’t ride the bus, I get to cuddle with my son for 20 minutes. And sometimes that’s the only 20 minutes I see him all day. Getting up in time to catch the bus is too big a trade off — it’s too much to give up. In the evening, I love to ride the bus, but there are only two buses that go to my area after five — and none after six. I’m rarely able to leave my job before six.

I’ll try again, of course, to get up in time tomorrow. But riding home tonight, staring out the window at the New England fall colors, I felt dispirited with the idea of personal no-impact. I’m the sole income earner in my family, I’m not a big consumer, I have the best of intentions — and yet I’m seduced by things like “mortgage” and “college fund” and “having enough so I don’t starve when I’m old and alone” that I work a life that isn’t — and can’t be — sustainable. Not for the planet, and sometimes not even for my family and me. The change is imperative — if we don’t find a way as a culture to stop making trash, to stop buying, to take the bus, to eat local, to use a minimum of energy and water — we won’t have anywhere left to live, on a timeframe with urgency expressed in months or years, not decades. And yet, as individuals, we’re caught in cultural and economic forces powerful enough that even determined people, who care about the planet and want to do better, who are trying hard just for one week as an experiment — find it too costly even just to take the morning bus.

No Impact Week Day 2: Trash Day

So, today’s No Impact Week assignment was simple: Go forth and make no trash.

Simple, but not easy. Now I should say we do not, as a household, make much trash. We live in a rural area, and so any trash we make, we have to take to the dump ourselves. We see, and smell, what happens to that trash. We have to pay, by the pound, for every bag we dump. If everyone in America had to deal with their trash as directly as we do, I suspect we’d have very little trash problem.

Still, though, we generate plenty of garbage. Yesterday, to prepare, the manual asked us to keep all of our trash in a single receptacle, for sorting later. Here’s what went into it yesterday:

• A used tissue (first thing Sunday morning, I got up and blew my nose before I knew what had happened. Damn!)
• Two used maxipads and the wax paper backings and plastic packets associated with them
• Two sheets of clear vinyl that had come off the corners of a mirror we had purchased a long time ago. To the mirror’s credit, these two small corners were its only packaging — at least, the only packaging that made it to us. I pulled these sheets out and am keeping them to make something out of.
• Dental floss
• Used q-tips
• Used up tape from a child’s supposedly “no impact” art project
• Empty plastic/metal packages that contained the cat’s special kidney diet cat food
• A plastic ziploc bag the cat barfed on — We just decided to wash it in ultra hot water and keep it after all. Now none of you will ever accept a ziploc bag from me, right?
• An ice cream container would have gone into it, except I upcycled it into a seriously gorgeous royal purple gift box that I’d be genuinely proud to give anyone. Go me!

So today our objective was to add no more trash to this pile. It was hard, and we weren’t totally successful. In the morning, I flossed my teeth (my dentist insists). I can’t think of a good substitute — would buying dental picks and picking my teeth instead work as well, do you think? Any dental hygienists in the crowd to advise me?

I skipped the q-tips, which was a hard personal sacrifice, I tell you.

I folded up a rag in my pants for the maxi pad, and this worked just fine. Another wonderful illustration of marketing-invented need. I didn’t bleed all over, and I suppose the only innovation I might make to make this into a permanent change would be to add some velcro strips to some undies and some rags to keep me from dumping the rag in the can. But that’s a nicety, not a necessity. I’m left wondering why I ever used those disposable diapers for women, anyway!

In the morning, anticipating my usual sources of trash at work, I brought along a dry erase board eraser (I don’t have one, and am ashamed to admit that hitherto I was using Kleenex culled from virgin forests in insane quantities to wipe my whiteboard) and several rags to work. A rag to be a maxi pad, a rag to be a napkin for my lunch, and a rag for a hankie. Then I got to work and promptly sneezed, grabbing a Kleenex instead of my rag! Phooey!

I made a lot of paper recycling, and I brought home my apple core for our compost pile, but otherwise I didn’t make any more trash at work.

At school, Floppy used his t-shirt for his napkin at lunch (and was thrilled to do so, I might add). Otherwise, he said, he forgot all about it and threw away two paper towels and a milk carton with abandon. He recycled his paper.

Here working at home, Jeremy threw away a tissue (he also forgot!) and a cat food container. He had to buy catfood today, and we’ve decided the cat also gets the food-buying exception to nonconsumption. He asked at the vet if the food came in any more environmentally friendly containers. The answer is no. However, some vets here carry other brands of prescription kidney disease cat food that come in cans, so we may try to switch.

At the end of the day, I pulled a string off of the rag that was destined for my pants, and then went, hell! What do I do with this? But we decided to put it with the garden things, for tying up next summer’s tomatoes.

So that was our trash for today. We reduced somewhat, but we certainly didn’t eliminate. And we were struck by how angry we were at our trash, and also how automatic it has become to generate the stuff — so automatic we don’t use alternatives even if they are literally in hand.

No Impact Week Day 1: What We Did on No-Consumption Day

The Halloween costume, however, was yesterday. Today I began the day throwing things out — I threw a tissue into the trash after blowing my nose, and threw out a maxipad (if that’s TMI, too bad). I was already failing at “no trash” and it wasn’t even six in the morning! Add hankies and reusable maxipads to my to-make list for the day.

Later in the week we’ll officially switch over to local foods, but mostly we’re already there. Floppy made us  local eggs scrambled in local butter with salt and pepper. (He’d never made eggs before. He stood in the kitchen and hollered into the bedroom: “I know what to do; you pound the eggs on the bowl, right?” Then we heard…. “Oh, that’s not good, but at least I got the egg part in the bowl.” We were dying.)

We did some picking up in the morning and did some laundry with our homemade laundry detergent. We had a fire — necessary to keep warm in our energy-inefficient house — but it still bothers me. We looked for couchsurfing possibilities online and made our list for the week.

We had homemade potstickers for lunch, with local King Arthur Flour for the wrappers and lots of vegetables from our CSA for the filling. We also had BLTs made with local bacon, our own No Knead Bread, and the very last garden tomato.

I also had the last of a container of (not local) Ice Cream, and felt angry: Here was this big paper container to throw away. It was a nice container — a round paper cylinder with a lid, sturdy and suitable for …. well, surely something more than ice cream. So I washed it and covered it with tissue paper, using the same decoupage technique I used on the costume button. I’m not sure what I will do with it (Christmas present container), but at least it’s no longer in the trash.

While I was decoupaging, I listened to Reverend Billy’s Hour of Power. Floppy and Dad raked leaves and visited with the neighbors. As I type, I’m listening to Colin Beavan, Wood Turner of Climate Counts, and Matthew Palevsky and Catherine Someone? from Huffington Post discuss No Impact Week live; they plan to have more such discussions tomorrow.

For dinner we’re having homemade pineapple pizza (mostly organic, but not mostly local) and we’ll make candles, do some embroidery, and/or do some cleaning. (Oh, and about the hankies and maxipads? I stuck a clean terry cloth rag in my pants, and a clean cotton rag in my pocket;  I’ll let you know how it works out, but for now I’m glad for a simple solution.)

No Impact Week Day 1: A No-Impact Halloween Costume

The other tasks, besides making a list, that the No Impact Week handbook suggested focused on observing your trash and not shopping.Yesterday, as I was thinking about beginning this project, I already found myself considering all the useless things that pass into and out of my house and my hands every day, all the things I buy that I don’t really need.

But besides that, it’s getting to be Halloween, and my 6-year-old son needed a costume. He wanted to be Robin, as in Batman-and. We usually make his costumes, and yet yesterday I found myself being even more hardcore about not buying anything new to make his costume. Here’s what we came up with:

Robin saves the global climate!

The mask is a modified printable Mardi Gras mask that I printed out on black paper, which was then glue-sticked down onto a pasta box backing. I used some silver elastic leftover from Christmas to tie it on his head.

The cape is Floppy’s rain slicker with the sleeves and hood tucked in and snapped at the top snap. He wore green pajama pants and a green polo shirt he already had, as well as a pair of green handknit slippers our friend Jana made him for Christmas one year.

The vest is made out of cardboard covered with taped-down red fabric. The fabric is on its third or fourth upcycle — originally our friend Jeremy bought a huge quantity of red polyester on sale for a Twin Peaks party (back when Twin Peaks was still on the air). It went through a second life as a bedouin tent for my Arabian Nights 30th birthday party (six years ago). It’s third life was as a curtain at our house in Riva. Now it’s in its fourth life as Robin.

I asked Floppy to color in a shoelace left over from a pair of his shoes that came with two sets of laces — he turned it from white to yellow with a Crayola marker, and then we laced it through the vest. He has a set of belts that go with detachable animal tails, but he had taken a scissors to the yellow lion belt. So I stapled that to the cardboard vest, and covered the middle hole for the tail with the lid of a tiny jelly jar that I had decoupaged with yellow tissue. Finally, some double stick tape and printed out photoshopped black-and-yellow R badges complete the look. I was pleased to be able to make such a cool costume with no purchases at all, although on halloween itself we will probably add red leggings borrowed from his pajamas for warmth, and perhaps some green Robin rubber gloves from the dollar store.

No Impact Week Day 1: Reducing Consumption by Making a List

So Chez Don’t Buy It is doing Colin Beavan’s No Impact Week Experiment, and the very first day’s task is a topic near and dear to our hearts: stopping consumption, or, not buying it.

His suggested tasks for today were these:

1. Type up a list of all the stuff you “need” to buy this week. Delete the items that you can live without for the week. For the rest of the items, figure out if you can purchase them second-hand, borrow them, or make them yourself.
2. Put an empty re-usable bag in a private place at home. Throughout the day, fill it up with all of your trash, recyclables, and food waste. If you’re out of the house, carry your trash home with you. Make sure that nobody else’s trash gets in there but your own. This will help you get ready for Monday’s challenge.
3. Just for this week, try not to shop for new items. Will you find something better to do with your time and money? Could you use this time to spend with friends instead?

In this post, I’ll be considering just that first task.

Our initial list of items we planned to buy this week included mostly items for a weekend trip next weekend to DC:

• a hotel room in Washington D.C. for the weekend
• gas for the car to get around town here and down and back to DC
• metro cards in DC
• meals in DC and during the trip
• scotch and chapbooks at the Poetic Art benefit we’ll be attending in DC
• fillings for my teeth at the dentist
• an oil change
• candles for our pumpkins

We had trouble figuring out how to get rid of most of these things.

Couch-surfing is the low-impact way of staying in another city, but I had already asked (on facebook) if any of my friends felt like putting us up in DC. No volunteers there. (Do we have rotten friends, or *are we* rotten friends? The world may never know.) Still, today I created a profile on couchsurfing.org, paid $25 to have my identity validated, volunteered our guest room to all comers, and sent a couch-borrowing request to the wonderful couple who hosted 16 strangers for Obama’s inauguration. It’s awful short notice, and I suspect that we’ll end up in a hotel room as it is, but I did try to avoid buying hotel accomodations.

It looks like taking our car, a Prius, is actually the most environmentally friendly way of getting all of us from NH to DC, although since there are three of us rather than four, taking a bus might be a little bit better. Similarly, once in DC, we’ll maximize walking and use public transit when we can’t walk.

We’ll skip the souvenirs at the benefit in honor of the week, and I’ll be cancelling my dentist’s appointment anyway, since it conflicts with the trip. We’ll also make and bring a cooler full of food to minimize meals out. The candles I’m planning to make later today from materials we’ve saved.

The oil change is tougher: to do an oil change at home, we’d have to buy materials, and I’m not clear that it’s any more environmentally friendly to DIY in this case. Any thoughts?

Don’t Buy It Reader Question

So Unclutterer suggested that maybe I would like Alice.com, which is a new dry goods retailer. It sounded good — free shipping of your non-perishable grocery needs, lower prices than Costco. So I started to make an account.

First of all, they make you choose little avatars to represent your family — you, your spouse,  your kids. But wait, how did they know I was white? And married to a white man? They must be psychic!

Or, you know, it could be that they have the same obnoxious little group of avatars for everyone. Way with the assumptions, marketing department. Hope there are enough cute little matching families around to sustain your business model, but, as Liss would say, Wev.

Since I do have the matchy-matchy little family for the avatars, I turned a blind eye — for the moment — and clicked to the next page, which is a list of suggested items you may buy regularly, from say, bar soap to coffee to detergent. You can check off the things you use. This was the part that stopped me dead. I looked over the list — it has about 60 items on it — and realized our family only ever buys 9 things on this list, and half of those we only buy rarely. There are only five things on this list of 60 household staples that my household actually buys regularly.

(Bar soap, dental floss, maxipads, TP, and dish soap, if you were wondering.)

Recently this blog has had more readers, thanks to a nice review on MSN Money. So I figured it was time for a delurking question. If you’ve clicked over here to read this blog from MSN money, or somewhere else on the web, I’d be completely thrilled and grateful if you would tell me: Which of these staples do you find essential? Are there any that you’ve found ways to “don’t buy it”? (Especially the ones that are still on my list?) And are there any of them that you’d like to stop buying, but can’t imagine how you’d ever live without?

I’m hoping I can learn from you, we can learn from each other, and if there’s anything we’ve managed not to buy that you see as essential, you can expect to see that in a new blog post soon!