Steps Toward Green

There have been some little ways in which our household has slowly become more Earth-conscious recently, and I'm really excited about this!  I've never considered myself much of a tree-hugger personality, but something about... age?  having kids?... has made it a little nearer and dearer to my heart.  And so this is what we've done:

Switched Elijah to cloth diapers even at night - this was something I'd been hesitant to do since we'd tried that in the beginning and the diaper wasn't absorbent enough, and yet I knew so many other people had found a way to make it work and I wanted to as well.  After doing some research, I decided to buy a wool diaper cover that absorbs (yes, absorbs) moisture and use that at night.  Ironically, Elijah has stopped wetting at night and wakes up dry so it's become a non-issue.

Cloth, Cloth, Cloth! - We bought a giant pack of paper towels when we moved here, but they have sat almost untouched as we rely almost exclusively on cloth in the kitchen.  I have a drawer filled with various cloths and rags, and stock the bathrooms as well, so that it's not tempting to just swipe a couple paper towels to clean things up.  We have only cloth napkins, and I use cloth wipes (just cut-up flannel blankets) for Elijah.  In fact, I'm starting to use them myself if you know what I'm saying.  (Don't worry, I still hang TP so if you visit you will not be subjected to my ways.)

Cleaners - I make our household cleaners (and toothpaste, and shampoo), and it's basically just different ratios of baking soda, vinegar and water (and coconut oil in the toothpaste).  I haven't done laundry detergent yet, but once we use up what we have I'm going to use use soap nuts.  Yes, soap nuts.   This week I went through the house and gathered all the random cleaning products we had, put them in a box and deposited them all over the garden - JUST KIDDING - I got rid of them on Freecycle where, hopefully, they will be put to good use.

Composting - Ok... Admittedly we're not doing this yet (which felt so weird when we first moved from Sweden), but I just borrowed a book about composting from someone that promised to give me some of her worms if I decide to go the vermiculture route, and the previous owners left us with a big, round, tumbler thingy in which to compost as well.  It's my hope to get this up and running in the next couple of weeks.  Once I do, our trash output will decrease significantly.  Right now we put out 1 - 1 1/2 bags weekly, and I'm pretty sure food scraps make up about half of this (this comes almost exclusively from the large amounts of produce we eat, as opposed to throwing out food we don't want/eat in time).  In the future I'm excited to think about reducing our trash output even further.

What about you - Any green ways you've incorporated into your lifestyle that you'd like to share?