Project Green: July

We're going green, but change takes time!  The Hubs and I are challenging ourselves to make our household and lifestyle more environmentally friendly by taking on one green project each month.  In June, I made my own laundry detergent.  Here's what we tackled in July.

July presented some challenges to our aspirations of becoming greener.  First, we bought a kit to convert our standard toilets to dual-flush and then discovered that we'd need an additional attachment since our toilets are on the older side.  All told, it would have put us out a couple hundred dollars, and considering that we are hoping to move from our little apartment to a house in the next six months to a year, we didn't think spending that much money was warranted.  Especially since a small part of the impetus behind going green was also saving some green!  Maybe once we have saved up some cash with all this green-ness, we'll invest in some more expensive projects.

Next, after several weeks of using our home-made laundry detergent with no problems, we had a bit of a washer debaucle.  Water started spewing out of the detergent drawer.  Word to the wise:  break up the clumps in your home-made liquid laundry detergent as small as you can get them.  Otherwise, they will clog the hole where the water rushes in and you will end up with water-logged floorboards!

Okay, enough with the negativity.  After casting around for a project to tackle in July, we finally settled on... (drumroll, please)...

worm composting!!!

We live in a small apartment with a decent-sized patio and shared courtyard, so we needed a solution for a small urban space.  The Hubs found a course subsidized by the City of Vancouver that supplied all the materials and taught worm composting basics in a couple of hours.  The whole shebang cost just $25!  We have to take 'er easy on the worms at first so as not to overwhelm (ie. kill) the little suckers.  A litre of waste is the weekly limit for the first four weeks.  After that, we can up the ante a little.  I'm pretty sure we will only be able to compost a fraction of our food waste, but it's a decent start.  I'll keep you posted as to how it turns out.

*If you have any suggestions for future green projects for us to try or would like to share something you've done in the interest of going green, please share!