Overwhelmed Families and How To Deal

A member of the Catholics for Zero Waste (CZW) facebook group asked this question:

Can we talk practical solutions for busy and overwhelmed families? I am feeling super discouraged because I am so overwhelmed already and I feel like all attempts at reducing plastic waste are all ways to make life way harder.

Several people responded with their approach (do what you can!) and tips for how they handled things.  A really thorough response came from member Tricia Koroknay-Palicz, who composed her post from her cell phone while in a hospital waiting for her newborn to awake!  Congratulations, Tricia!

Her organizing principle comes from this Washington Post quiz based on the book and project Drawdown.  Read more about this here.  She works through each point and applies it to her family.

Tricia Koroknay-Palicz I think about this too. My mindset on this is that (i) we are called to what we can do / give what we can give joyfully. and this looks different for different families. and we need not compare ourselves to them. (ii) I try to prioritize our household actions in this arena based on two factors: impact of the action, and how much of a sacrifice/challenge the action is. For thinking about impact, I found this article helpful.

My takeaways from it included: 

(i) cutting down on food waste and eating more plants and less meat are both amongst the top 5 things one can do, impact-wise. Both of these also help our families budget, and fasting days are part of the Christian tradition. 

(ii) using water more efficiently helps keep our water bill down! in our house this means keeping the water level on the lower side at bath time, and only letting the kiddie pool be filled once per day at maximum. we could also hook hoop our gutters to rain barrels and use this water for watering the garden, but I haven't gotten round to that. you can often get water barrels for free. 

(iii) in the energy category, switching to wind energy was highest impact. PEPCO actually allows third parties to provide energy to pepco customers, and if I remember correctly we switched over our electricity to 100% wind energy through such an arrangement and this resulted in a lower per unit energy cost and brought down our electric bill by 20%. 

(iv) in the transportation category, shipping goods more efficiently and flying less both appear. flying less is good for our family budget (e.g. spending a summer vacation week at a state park within a 3 hour drive from home rather than flying to a far off destination). and shipping goods more efficiently can mean dropping our amazon prime membership and just waiting until we have a number of things in our amazon cart before clicking the buy button (orders over $35 get free shipping). 

A few other things I have found to work for our family are: using whatever paper already comes into our house, such as paper bags, packaging materials, junk mail etc as art supplies for my daughter; trying to do things locally whenever possible to reduce our car use; intentionally nearly always only buying used stuff - we use value village like other people use Walmart or target; wearing out our clothes and shoes; buying produce at Bestway (much less packaging!) or through lancaster CSA (we found cost very reasonable, cheaper than any other supplier of organic food, with no packaging, and not much more expensive than our local regular grocery store; eating seasonally (e.g. eating local peaches from the grocery store when they are in season rather than ones shipped from South America out of season; using Tupperware and reusable lunch bags rather than disposable lunch baggies / sacks. 

Further down the thread she includes these other points:

 a few more things that we do as a family: if we can't buy an item used, we do without. this meant sleeping on a matress on the floor for a year while I waited for a king size bed frame with drawers underneath it to appear on craigslist (did you know you can save searches and set alerts to yourself when an item you are looking for appears!). you can also do national searches of craigslist. and ebay can be good for hard to find items. 

we buy larger packages of things (cheaper and reduced packaging) and subdivide for use (I use bread bags to store meat in our freezer, and glass jars that come with my husband favorite salsa for raisins, olive oil, and other pantry staples.).

my husband and I are both known at our workplaces for our willingness to take home whatever leftover food there is after a meeting.

we use dryer balls instead of dryer sheets.

we use cloth napkins instead of paper napkins.

we have longer intervals for laundering towels (2x per month), sheets (1× per month except for potty training child) and certain clothing items. this lowers time, energy, and water spent on laundry!