I just got finished emptying the dehumidifier in my basement. It’s been so humid around here lately that dumping it has becoming a daily task. But instead of just pouring the water down the drain, I use it to water my plants. My thirsty hibiscus has been very happy about this.

In my old house, which sat on an underground spring and where the sump pump ran almost constantly, we had a “rain barrel” set up to catch the pump’s output. We would use that water to give the plants a drink, too. During drought restrictions my neighbors always wondered why my gardens looked so lush. I think some of them thought I was watering on the sly but, alas, it was all thanks to my sump pump.

I love this idea of reusing items that you might normally toss out or dump down the drain. I’m sure many people can recall their fathers storing nails, screws, and other small hardware in empty glass jars (my husband still does this), and I remember my mother turning jelly jars into cups when I was a kid. My children’s elementary school still requests coffee cans for class projects, so I stockpile them all year long, just in case. Last year, the school asked for empty film canisters. The teacher was going to use these canister to hold coins for counting lessons. With so many people using digital cameras these days, I know it wasn’t easy for the teacher to get these. (We happened to have a few lying around, left over from college photography classes!) How interesting that there are now websites selling creative school supplies, including empty film canisters!

I find myself looking around the house and wondering: what else can I put to good use in a second life instead of tossing it in the trash? I recently discovered a green living website with fun things to do with egg cartons when they’re no longer storing eggs, and I will keep some of these tips in mind if I need a makeshift ice-cube holder or packing materials.

Speaking of packing materials, now that we have a cross-cut shredder (which turns paper into unreadable confetti-like shreds), I’ve started using these mounds of paper bits when shipping items that need cushioning. Why pay for peanuts when I can get packing materials for free?

Other things we reuse in this house include plastic grocery bags and newspaper sleeves as poop bags for cleaning up after the dog, and shoeboxes for storage. I once took a water aerobics class where we used empty and cleaned-out plastic milk jugs as flotation devices and weights. Now that we have a pool, perhaps we should all start doing water aerobics with milk containers.

But what else can we do? I feel like I’m probably missing out on a whole bunch of creative ideas for reusing everyday items. Like dryer lint. There’s got to be a secondary use for this ubiquitous fluffy stuff, right?

If you’ve got suggestions, I’d love to hear them.

I was recently chatting with some friends about little things we’re all doing to go green and save money in the process. One of my friends mentioned the raging controversy over bottled water and its negative effect on the environment. We talked about the number of water bottles that end up in landfills and how the bottles themselves are a petroleum-based product–and how all of us were going to try to drink less bottled water in the future. But then someone raised an interesting point about bottled water that hit me right in the pocketbook: it is more expensive than gas.

Hard to believe but if you think about, she was right on the money. If I were to go to my local Wawa (the PA version of 7-11) and purchase the cheapest bottle of water, I’d pay about $1.29 for 16.9 ounces. Bring the container up to a gallon size (128 ounces) and do the corresponding math (thank you, algebra), and guess what? A gallon of bottled water costs $9.77. Holy cow.

It’s interesting when you take a slightly off-center look at news about how America is going green and/or ways to save money, such as the gallon of water stat above. What’s also interesting is how national companies are reacting to the greening of America.

A recent USA Today article talked about Nissan’s newest cars that have a “gas guzzling” warning light in the center of the speedometer. The idea here is to make drivers aware of their gas-guzzling driving habits by letting them know when they’re using a lead foot. Nissan says that in test drives, people ended up using 10 percent less gas in response to this warning light. Hey, it ain’t a hybrid but it’s not a bad notion either.

Here’s another example of a different way of approaching green. Earlier this year, the retailer IKEA started imposing a plastic bag tax at the checkout counter, so says TreeHugger.com. Want a telltale blue-and-yellow plastic IKEA bag to carry your purchases home in? Be prepared to pay up–a nickel for each bag. Really, that’s not much money but it might snap shoppers into realizing just how many shopping bags we use and toss each year. (A recent Fast Company blog entry estimated that number at about 100 billion, with a “B”, bags a year.)

On the flip side my local grocery store doesn’t offer enough of a financial incentive for me to reuse my plastic shopping bags–I get a whopping 15 cents credit for each bag I bring back to reuse. Whoopee. However, some retailers that collect your plastic bags for recycling are actually doing something good with them: one supermarket I know sends those used bags to the company that makes Trex decking material. (Now that’s pretty cool.)

Picking up on this reusable trend, my nearby Giant supermarket started selling green (literally) reusable bags for shoppers to use. They cost 99 cents each and look like they would hold three boxes of cereal, max. Frankly, they seem like a rip-off to me.

Instead of paying for these bags, think back to the last conference you went to or special event you attended, where you took home a canvas bag. How many of those canvas bags do you have lying around the house? A quick peek in my coat closet turned up eight of these bags. Did you ever stop to think how well these would work as reusable grocery shopping bags? Good for the environment, good for clearing clutter from you house, and, because they’re free, good for your wallet.

I’m going to put a bunch of these canvas bags in the trunk of my car so I’ll have them with me the next time I have to run to the store. You might want to try that, too.

P.S. It seems that canvas-bag chic is all the rage. Check out this USA Today article.

I was getting ready to prep a couple of day’s worth of meals when it dawned on me how easy it is to be wasteful in the kitchen and create tons of trash.

For example, I had just finished de-fatting the chicken breasts and was planning on marinating them in a zipper-top plastic bag, in prepation for some grilling tomorrow night. As I pulled open the drawer that holds all of the wraps, bags and foils we own, it struck me how much of this stuff I own and how much of it I throw in the trash after one use. I mean, when you marinate raw chicken in a plastic bag, you can exactly reuse the bag, can you. So what do you do? Throw out the bag when you’re done.

Same thing is true with the paper towels you use to wipe down the kitchen counter. We all know that raw chicken contains salmonella and cleaning a surface after dealing with raw chicken is critical. But how many paper towels did I use to clean up this mess? Gee, that roll of paper towels is looking noticeable smaller than it was just 15 minutes ago.

Suddenly, my radar was primed to pick up everything around my 10 X 12 kitchen that creates waste. I’ve got paper napkins, paper plates, plastic flatware, paper towels, baggies galore and more. Now, it would be wasteful and a stupid financial move to dump all of this stuff, just because I was to reduce my reliance on these disposable items. But at the same time, they don’t have to be my go-to product when cooking and cleaning up.

So that chicken I’ve got to marinate? I took out a ceramic dish with a top that my mother-in-law had handed down to me, and that’s where I marinated the meat. After I’m ready to cook it, I can put the dish in the dishwasher.

As far as wiping down the counters, I can use a clean sponge–then pop that in the dishwasher, too, to sanitize it. Or I can invest in some microfiber dish cloths that I can use and wash and use and wash again.

I’m wondering what else I’ve got hanging around the kitchen that ends up as waste and that maybe I want not to be using anymore. I’ll keep you posted.

Our school district recently published the upcoming lunch menu for September, when school starts, including the price for lunch–nearly $3. A carton of chocolate milk? 75 cents. I know that I’m dating myself when I say this, but I can remember spending 75 cents for an entire hot lunch meal and 25 cents for a carton of chocolate milk. (Chocolate milk was considered to be an upgrade over basic white milk, which cost only 15 cents.)

Last year the school district debuted a prepaid plan, whereby parents can put money into their kids’ lunch money account, and all the kids needed to do to buy lunch was make their selections and then tell the cashier their user ID–thankfully not their Social Security number. Then like Big Brother himself–or should I say Big Mother–the school would email your kid’s statement at the end of the month to show you what she bought when and how much she spent.

It’s eye-opening to get to spy on your kids’ food choices this way, especially when you can uncover one child’s Little Debbie snack cake obsession (at a buck a pop) or you other child’s habit of saying “Popsicles on me,” and then proceeding to buy 10 of her little friends dessert. No wonder my kids were each blowing through so much lunch money month.

Well, the jig is up, now that they know I can spy on their food choices and because of our new-found budget. Also, a few years ago, I worked as a recess volunteer at the elementary school, and I was appalled at how much food the kids threw away each day. I don’t even want to see what a week’s trash heap looks like.

This year, I figure, if my kids don’t buy lunch and I pack their lunches in as little disposable packaging as possible, then we’ll be saving money and my kids won’t be contributing too much garbage to the school district’s trash kitty.

I’ve already talked about our desire to do away with store-bought, bottled water and use reusable bottles for drinks instead. Those reusable bottles will definitely be in my daughters’ lunch boxes.

I’m hoping that as soon as I start packing lunches in two weeks, my older daughter will stay true to her expressed desire to take grilled chicken and romaine lettuce for lunch (man, she really is becoming a teen if she wants to bring salad for lunch! And to think just a few years ago I had to bribe her or trick her into eating anything green!). We can pack salad in reusable Tupperware containers. My younger daughter? Well, she would just assume buy salad bar at school so maybe I can convince her that we can have as good of a salad bar at home, where it’s all you can eat (and pack) and free.

Now about the school’s trash: perhaps it’s time to put them in touch with a food-for-the-poor organization like Philabundance and see if I can’t convince the science teachers to get the kids and cafeteria workers to start composting food scraps. I’ll bet these measures could easily cut their garbage output in half.

If you’ve been reading this blog, you know how important it is to me to be able to recycle as much as possible at home. Ideally, I would like to be able to recycle when I’m on the road, too–which I am a lot, either traveling with my family or doing media tours to promote my books.

What surprises me is how un-recycle friendly many cities are. For example, during a recent trip to Chicago, I held onto a glass iced tea bottle for blocks and blocks, hoping I might see a telltale blue or green glass recycling bin somewhere on Michigan Avenue. I never found one (my hotel room didn’t have any recycling options either), so eventually, I had to toss the bottle into the regular trash. At least the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA), which runs the Windy City’s subways, has gone the green route, sort of: a press release on the CTA website, touting its green initiatives, says that there are 250 newspaper recycling bins in CTA stations. That sounds great, until you realize that there are 144 CTA train stations, meaning there are fewer than two recycling bins per station. By comparison, when I exit commuter trains at New York City’s Penn Station, I pass at least two newspaper recycling bins per platform.

At least one U.S. city has the right idea: Seattle, Washington, has pledged to recycled 60 percent of its waste, and to reach that goal, there are now 800 recycling bins in Seattle public places and near public-use trash cans. Other cities should share Seattle’s goals.

Maybe one way to get more U.S. residents to recycle is to give them a financial incentive to do so–by passing bottle bills in all states. (Currently, only 11 states require deposits on bottles and cans.) Interestingly, a recent article in the New York Times showed that recycling efforts in these are significantly higher than in states without bottle bills.)

When I lived in New York, I would get five cents for every soda can or bottle I returned to the grocery store. That was almost as good as finding spare change under the couch cushions.

In Maine where my mom lives, she can get five cents for plastic water bottles that are returned. The best, though, was when I was a Michigan resident: folks there get a whopping 10 cents to bring bottles back.

For a funny look at how much bottle deposits inspire people to recycle, check out “The Bottle Deposit,” a long-ago Seinfeld episode, when Kramer schemes to double his bottle deposit money by driving his recyclables from New York to Michigan.

With all of the soda that my family drinks and the fact that so many plastic water bottles end up in landfills, instead of recycling them like they should, I wonder how much money the average American family could pocket if they could return all of these containers for five or 10 cents backs? I’ll bet it could easily add up to hundreds each year.

The lists arrived via email the other day–what my children needed to buy to go back to school next month. There was the usual suspects on the list–spiral notebooks, multi-subject binders, pencils–which I could probably find in my sleep at my local office supply store. This year, though, there were some new and different requirements that made my budget-minded self shudder.

The first item was some fancy-schmancy calculator that my 7th grader would need in advanced algebra. I was too afraid to price it on the Internet ahead of time, for fear that its sticker will have three digits on it. The other item was something my 5th grader needed–color-coded spiral notebooks to correspond with subjects. The blue, red and green ones were no problem to find but a yellow-covered single-subject spiral notebook seems to be quite elusive in my hometown supply store, probably because all of the other parents of 5th graders have already been out to do their back-to-school shopping.

I searched up and down the aisles of the store looking for a yellow spiral notebook, finally stumbling across an employee who was crouched down, restocking erasers. When I asked her about the yellow notebooks, she looked down at the ground and shook her head.

“Follow me,” she said.

I wasn’t sure why asking about a yellow notebook was bumming her out. Then she stopped at a shopping cart piled high with bundles of shrink-wrapped spiral notebooks. The first notebook in the bunch was yellow.

“These are the only yellow notebooks we have,” she told me, laying a hand on the pile. “You have to buy the six-pack.”

This wasn’t all bad news–three of the other notebooks were red, green and blue, the colors we needed. But that meant we would have two notebooks left over, which hopefully my 7th grader would be able to use in one of her classes. (Her supply list is 5X as long as my 5th grader’s list and since she was at a friend’s house today, we’ll shop for her another day. Nonetheless, I’m hoping that two, single-subject spiral notebooks are on her list somewhere.)

About the time I was returning the other red, green and blue notebooks that’d we’d originally placed in our cart but no longer needed, I ran into a mom I know, who was also shopping with her 5th grader. We exchanged our hellos and then I began complaining about the fact that I neeeded to buy 6 notebooks in a bundle when all I really needed was 4 of them.

“I know what you mean,” she said, “That’s one of the reasons we started our own school supply box at home.”

“What do you mean your own school supply box,” I asked. “Do school supplies somehow magically appear in your box before each Labor Day?”

She laughed,” No. I mean, every June at the end of the school year, we take any leftover school supplies that are still in good condition and add them to our school supply box. We also add any extras from before-school shopping, like those extra notebooks you’re going to have, to the box. This way, when it comes time to shop, like we are today, I make sure I check our box first so I don’t end up buying anything we arleady own.

She also told me how she washes those stretchy-fabric book covers that are all the rage these days and then dries them on the line. That way she doesn’t have to buy new ones each year. And she condenses all of the unsharpened pencils and never-used highlighters into separate zipper-top bags.

Brilliant! Just brilliant. This is an excellent way to recycle and reuse school supplies and reduce spending at the same time.

Then it dawned on me: last year my now-7th grader came home from 6th grade with a never-opened pack of loose-leaf paper and two blank spiral notebooks–all of which were on her necessary school supply list but never got used. (Hey, when was the last time the schools actually updated their lists? You have to wonder.) Those supplies were still sitting on her bedroom floor, where she’d dumped her back-pack on the last day of school. (Note to self: get 7th grader to clean her room before the first day of school.) As soon as I got home, I was going to scoop them up and put them in a new “school supplies” box for our house.

My 5th grader just informed me that she, too, has a pile somewhere on her bedroom floor of left over school supplies from 4th grade. (Note to self: she needs to clean her room, too.) Great, now she tells me, after I’ve just spent $45 on new supplies? Well, once we get home, I’ll compare the new with the old, see where we’ve got any duplicates, and then do some returning tomorrow. Next year I’ll make sure I check our school supplies box before heading out to shop.

I’ve known for years about Freecycle and what it had to offer folks who wanted to get rid of stuff without throwing it out. I’d even written about it in my magazine articles and books. But I’ll admit that all of my Freecycle knowledge came from being a casual observed until yesterday, when I actually joined my local Freecycle group. I’m already a big fan.

As I’d mentioned in my Pack Rat posting, I’m in the market for a composting bin and after writing about that, I figured that Freecycle would be a great place to let others know about my needs. (I did find two composting bins for sale on Craigslist but the sellers were too far away to make the transaction worth my while.) I also put a “for sale” message up on Freecycle about those moving boxes I still haven’t been able to get rid of but still refuse to throw out.

While I still haven’t found someone to sell me a composting bin (or to take these moving boxes off of my hands), I’ve already received a number of kind, thoughtful and helpful messages from other Freecycle members in this group, offering advice on places I might consider looking for composting bins. Two folks suggested I sign up for local gardening classes that they’d taken where a composting bin is part of your tuition–an option I never would have considered if it weren’t for the Freecycle folks. That really blew me away.

I’d always thought that Freecycle was just about exchanging of stuff, not the sharing of ideas. Now I’m going to have to spend some time looking over old messages on the Freecylce board so I can see if I can offer some helpful and friendly advice in return.

For as long as I’ve known him, my husband, Bill, has been a pack rat–and proud of it. Perhaps it’s because when he went away to college, his mother had a yard sale and sold off all of his childhood possessions, without him knowing. He arrived home on break one year, looking to take a walk down memory lane with his toy soldiers and Matchbox cars, only to discover that they were long gone.

Since then Bill has had a hard time getting rid of anything, which explains why in every house we’re every lived in, we’ve never actually parked our cars in the garage. Why? Because our garages have always been full of Bill’s stuff.

Besides wanting to avoid getting rid of something potentially sentimental, Bill subscribes to the theory that as soon as you throw something away, you’re going to need it. For many years I fought Bill on this notion, especially when I got on a clutter-busting kick, and starting tossing and purging things around the house so everything would become neat and tidy.

One of the first times I realized that Bill was right in his pack-rat ways was when it hit me in my wallet. I’d lost some weight, and decided to get rid of my old clothes in my old size. I’d always heard that if you keep “fat” clothes around, you have no incentive to become skinny. Then I had surgery and had to go on medication, which caused me to gain back all of my weight. So I got rid of my skinny clothes and bought new fat clothes. Then I switched doctors and she switched my medication, and suddenly I was skinny again. This time around I did buy new skinny clothes but I did not get rid of all of my fat clothes. I’ve kept a couple of pairs of pants and few tops so that if my weight should fluctuate in the coming years, I won’t have to go shopping all over again.

These days, I don’t get on Bill’s case about the fact that he’s got pants in four different sizes. In fact, because we moved ourselves to this new house–and burned a ton of calories in the process–Bill lost weight and went down a pant size. And all he had to do to find something to wear was fish out his box of clothes in that size that he’d been saving all these years.

The “I shouldn’t have thrown that away” message came back loud and clear this past week. It’s when I decided that we need to set up a new composting bin in our new backyard. (We were never allowed to have one in our old neighborhood–association rules and all.) And I started searching around for how much it would cost to purchase one.

“You know, we used to have a composting bin,” Bill said to me.

“What are you talking about?” I replied.

“Remember that old black ugly bin that our old neighbors gave to us when they moved out? The one you used to store your gardening tools in? That was a composting bin.”

“No, it wasn’t.” I was starting to get a little defensive.

“Yes, it was. And you beat me down so much about decluttering the yard that I finally gave in and threw it out before we moved.”

OMG, Bill was right. I do remember our neighbor saying something about that being a composting bin and Bill saying something about how if we ever moved to another house where we could compost, it would be great to have. I feel like such an idiot for getting rid of that.

Anyone know where I can get a composting bin cheap? I promise not to throw this one away.

I have read that unplugging anything electrical when not in use is a great way to cut your energy consumption and therefore your energy bills. I’ve tried to do that with a number of items around the house, including the cell phone chargers, reading lamps and the shredder (which I use to shred junk mail and then reuse as packing material for sending packages, but more about that in a future blog posting).

But I got to wondering: what about the electrical appliances that I use daily and can’t unplug or don’t because it’s not convenient to do so? How much energy were these appliances sucking up?

I just found a cool website through the U.S. Department of Energy on Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE). It provides mathematical formulas for determining how much you are spending in energy dollars to run certain appliances. This is a good and bad thing–good because it gives you a measurable way to understand your energy costs, and bad because the reality of how expensive it is to run appliances is quite scary.

For example, my circa 1970s refrigerator in the kitchen, which came with this house, does a great job of keeping things cold but at what price? It says inside the freezer door that the unit uses 1,388 kwh (kilowatts) of energy to run each year (with the disclaimer that actual energy use may vary. I’ll bet.) According to the EERE formula, that means that we spend $117.98/year to run this refrigerator. But wait, there’s more. We have an “overflow” refrigerator in our mudroom that is plugged in all the time. However, this is a newer model frig, purchased in 1999. It’s a Kenmore, top-freezer model from Sears and has a good Energy Star rating. By comparison this fridge costs $39 a year to run.

Gee, which refrigerator do you think we should unplug the next time we go on vacation? The choice is obvious.

I’ll keep you posted on how expensive or efficient other appliances in our house are.