One/Changemaking one change at a time

Hi folks, it has been far too long. Please pardon my unanounced absense from writing posts this past month. My husband and I have been in the middle of moving, for what seems like ages. However, we are finally done minus sorting through a few remaining boxes.

This has been a big move for us on a lot of different levels; most of which I will not go into. I will tell you that the closing of this chapter of our lives does have us very appropriately and symbolically moving out of our home and living in a state of tranistion for a few months as we are between homes. Knowing that we were going to have to put most of our belongings in storage; Kendall and I took the past month to sift through ALL of our belongings. We wanted to donate and recycle as much as we could and after some research we were able to find a “home” for almost everything. We also wanted to make our move as “green” as possible.

This is some of what I found:

• Hybrid moving trucks either (a) do not exist or (b) are difficult to track down (or, possibly, (c) they are easy to find and this is just one more example of how I suck at using search engines).
  Two solutions: (1) Buy a terra pass for the moving truck you rented to offset its emissions. (2) If your vehical has low emissions, good gas mileage, and has a hitch, it might be a good idea to rent a trailer instead.
• Buy boxes from Used Carboard Boxes. When you are done, it they are still in pretty good shape, you can sell them back. They didn’t have a location near me so I wasn’t able to get boxes from them, so, I can’t give a first hand report. You can also call around to various stores and ask them to save the boxes their shipments came in. However, be picky about where you get your boxes from so that you don’t end up infesting your belongings with with cockroaches or other creepy crawlers.
• Sort through your belongings and give away or recycle what you decide not to hold on to. It takes time, but it is well worth it. Do a little research online to find a place near you to donate and recycle your things. We took a little extra time and picked a specific organization that we wanted to support and brought a truck load of goodies to Twice is Nice, part of Outreach Community Ministries, which puts the resale store profits back into the community. They even took old computers so we didn’t have to haul those to an electronic recycling center
• Finally, when doing the final cleaning of your home use environmentally friendly products.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 31st, 2006 at 1:28 pm and is filed under Environment, General, One/Change tips, Products, resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.