via recycled reusable sandwich bag » whip up.

Further to reducing plastic (bags) in 2010… These are so cute!

Here is a great idea I hadn’t considered:  getting rid of plastic via storage bins.  Well I’ll be!  And sweet How About Orange has thoughtfully compiled a list of fabric bin tutorials for me!

The first link (Sew4Home) has a bonus since it re-uses cardboard as a base.  Double re-use there if you already have the fabric on hand anyway.

Pink Penguin (ayumills) has a bonus in that the tutorial uses small scraps, quilt-like.

InANutshell is especially cute in that the boxes nest. 

Jezze‘s pattern is extremely tailored looking!  Its nice bonus is the lack of interfacing.

UrbanNestBlog is also very professional looking, and although it’s the only tutorial that calls out specifically to using cereal boxes, you can totally use the boxes in any of the other patterns as stiffener.

The pattern from Craftster.org is great with tons of pictures and has sweet handles!!

If you’ve ever thought about what it would take to get your neighborhood all thinking, or gardening, in the same direction, here is a time lapse of what what man did.

He gardened.  He asked two neighbors if he could garden in their back yards.  He got more neighbors’ yards involved.  He got use of a vacant lot.  He gifted his garden’s food, and is now formalizing that relationship with neighbors who wish to buy the food.

It’s grown and grown, and now he’s got a tidy little chunk of neighborhood producing, well, produce. It’s a great story told through color-coded maps, which of course I can’t resist.  Bonus!

Flickr Photo Download: Great Garbage Patch, via WebEcoist.

via Eco Etsy Street Team Blog.

Now, why would I want this, when there are little mesh tea balls available all over the place?  I have 2 or 3, myself.  Well, for one thing, I notice that after a while, the locking mechanism on my tea ball has stopped holding together.  Sometimes I just end up with leafy water instead of tea.

For another, the chain has come of one of my tea balls, which means I just have to drop the ball into my hot water and hope my tea cools enough for me to grab the ball out…before my tea gets too strong.

And finally, the metal tea balls I have are metal.  I’m not entirely sure what’s going on when they go into the water, but I’m thinking it’s not exactly natural.  What’s more, what happens when I want to go out into the wilderness camping but still enjoy a cup of hot tea?  I can bring tea bags, and pack them in and out, or reuse them and try to figure out how best to store a squishy wet and delicate tea bag for its next use.  Or I can bring loose tea and my mesh ball, which is terribly bulky in my space-starved backpack.

Or then I can make one of these bags from mere scraps, make a tail long enough and sturdily connected enough to not break, which won’t rust or fall apart (or I can fix it), and which takes up very very little space and won’t be paper-flimsy when it’s wet.

Seems like a win to me, if I’m already a loose-tea fan anyway.  And I am. 

]]> http://earthdaily.wordpress.com/2010/03/04/reusable-tea-bag/feed/ 0 Nim http://earthdaily.wordpress.com/2010/03/01/get-your-daily-green-on-greenies/ http://earthdaily.wordpress.com/2010/03/01/get-your-daily-green-on-greenies/#comments Mon, 01 Mar 2010 23:13:00 +0000 Nim http://earthdaily.wordpress.com/?p=115 ]]> via Practicing the Green We Preach : Tree Hugging Family – Family Life On The Green Side.

Turns out most Americans (88%) like the idea of conservation, but only just half “often” or “always” make efforts at conservation.

That’s exactly why I created this blog.  For myself, I like to remind me of easy things I can do every day to make my life a little less trashing to the planet, and maybe even make the planet a little better to live on.

After all, a little goes a long way, but we have to just do that little bit before it can add up.

via Fill Stomachs, Not Landfills | Care2 Healthy & Green Living.

This is perfect info for my Feburary reduce plastic goal of no more plastic food containers!   I really haven’t had any trouble at all with takeout containers, but I’m sure it will come up over the remaining 10 months of my plastics challenge (and beyond, of course).

Genius: reusable and easily made from scraps, recycled worn-out clothes, or anything else you can get your scissors on!  “It stays put in the coffee maker and we have no waste after composting the grounds.” No waste AND no additional cost at the supermarket?  Win-win!

See?  Environmentally-friendly practices can be downright frugal—and often free!

Using filters made from recycled papers is nice, but waste is still waste, even if it’s recycled waste.  Reducing waste and reusing items is a better option. 

via Make reusable coffee filters, from Eco Etsy.

Great! I can’t wait to try this myself.

Plastic reduction update for February: so far, so good. I haven’t relapsed on any bag usage at stores (January’s reduction item), and in fact have unearthed more canvas bags as I continue to sort and clean my home. I had leftover “milli” (vegan millet chili) for lunch today in a mason jar, not a plastic container.  Last night’s dinner leftovers were taken home in waxed paper from the restaurant, rather than a plastic box!

via DIY Eco-Friendly Laundry Detergent.

via:No Impact Man: Who do our political parties really care about?.

The blog post linked above is extremely familiar to me: it’s so frustrating to see almost nothing done on a large scale to help the environment. So much spin is put on politics. Calling coal “clean coal” by the folks who want to keep coal in production. Greenwashing products at the store so we will be more apt to buy them. Labelling “green” motivation and activists as quacks without scientific proof

It doesn’t matter.

If we want to see change, it must come from ourselves first.

That linked post?  It’s from “No Impact Man” himself. Go read his story; it’s amazing.  He changed, experimented with change, himself first.  He told his story.  And now many people hear what he did and affect some change in their own lives.  Some, like me, blog about things they change or want to change daily: all those little things add up.

They really do.

So start small, start with yourself, but just start.  Just do something.  Oh, and don’t be afraid to tell other people about it and even start a movement.  It’s ok, movements don’t have to be bad, crazy, or kooky.  Just do something.  Don’t wait for the government to make a law to force us into environmentalism.  Start on your own, now.