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October 10, 2007

Planet-Friendly Moving: It's The Little Green Things That Count

It's The Little Green Things That Count

Fox Mulder would understand this, and so should you.

These past few weeks have been hectic, but very productive. Still, despite deadlines and getting a really nasty cold and did I mention we moved all our worldly belongings about 3000 miles and then entertained family for a few days while we unpacked, we managed not to lose track of our green living principles, we just adjusted them to fit our needs.

It's so easy to let good habits slide when you're under pressure and outside your normal routine. Especially when you're moving house.

Stuff you'd normally recycle, you chuck. Stuff you'd normally keep in the pantry, you chuck. Stuff that would normally hang out in the back of a closet, you... get the picture.

I thought today I would share a couple of little random tidbits that helped keep our cross-country move's planetary impact minimal...

Packing

Packing is mostly about boxes, packing materials, and what you keep versus chuck.

First, the boxes. We had saved up a lot of boxes, snagged them from work and friends. We still had to get more and we ended up buying a few moving kits from Costco - not so many that we had extras.

Packing fragiles can be tricky. First, we used up all our stuffable clothing. Mugs got wrapped in t-shirts. Plates in towels. Why buy extra packing materials when you're likely going to wash your clothing on the other end anyway if its not neatly folded and has gotten dusty? For large, flat items like picture frames and flat screen TVs, I wrapped them in some non-scratching bubblewrap or their cover, and then I wrapped them inside throw rugs and taped that up like a Christmas present. Then I put them inside the box that our boxes came in which was a long shallow rectangle of flatted boxes. We also were given some fantastic bubblewrap which we reused with great success, no peanuts were used. For other fragile stuff, we used old newspapers and unbleached recycled paper towels.

Instead of throwing out stuff we didn't want to take, we craigslisted it, gave things away to friends, and donated things to charity. Canned goods we didn't want to bring. Garden plants. Clothing from our closet we never wear. Any viable container that was at least half full (cleaners, toiletries) went with us - caps taped closed and troublesome ones put in ziplock backs or wrapped in plastic bags. Wine boxes, easily gotten at liquor stores and such, make great boxes for glassware and jars, not to mention those half-full bottles and tubes mentioned above. Sometimes I just filled a whole wine box with stuff and then stuffed the box itself in a trash bag or two.

We read the owner's manual for the truck to determine the most fuel efficient way to pack the truck. Also, to avoid a lot of weight in the truck, we USPS media mailed ourselves most of our books, saving a lot of truck weight and the USPS gets better gas mileage than we would.

Moving

Because we were moving a very long distance and we are cheap and wanted control over how it was done, we decided to use a Do-It-Yourself moving truck. Penske came in with a substantially more reasonable price than U-Haul and Budget, and then on top of that we added a AAA discount AND a trick of the trade: you'll have much cheaper rental fees if you return the truck to a metropolitan area. Since we were moving stuff from a small California town to an even less urban area in the mountains of New Hampshire, we found that it saved us many hundreds of dollars to pick up the truck about 20 minutes away, and drop it off in the nearest major metropolitan area instead of the tiny drop-off location nearest to our destination which was still an hour away- at little additional diesel expense. The best way to figure this out is to play with the pickup and drop-off locations on the company's reservation website until you get the quote you like. We got the size truck we needed, made sure the tires were good, and turned on the economy gas mileage option of the engine (not on by default).

We brought a lot of our own snacks and drinks. Surprisingly, only a handful of states on Interstate 80 have rest stops with recycling facilities - California and Utah, then not until you hit around Iowa. We bagged our recycling and kept it around until we hit one of these nice rest stops and could dispose of things appropriately. Even though we were traveling, we still took leftovers from our dinner, like pizza, and ate it for breakfast or lunch on the road.

We took the most direct path, and stayed within the speed limit and tried to get the best mileage per gallon we could. The only thing we kicked ourselves for not asking was if the truck could take biodiesel, or we would have filled up using that. We did notice that while consumer gas stations have rules about not topping off, and regularly get cleaned up, the truck pumps are ridiculously fowl. Diesel is often puddled on the ground along with leaking oil from the trucks. I got very nervous one day when we were finishing filling up and the guy next to us hops out of his truck with a lit cigarette dangling from his lips as he pumped his fuel. Not cool. There needs to be more attention paid to this area of trucking and environmental waste management.

Unpacking

Unpacking required a bit of organization but it was very satisfying. Basically, we sorted out the used newspaper, slightly used paper towels, packing bubble wrap, and boxes. The boxes we carefully flatted to craigslist to someone who needs them for moving. The bubble wrap was packed back into suitcases to go back to California to give back to the person who let us borrow it. The slightly used paper towels were used to dust the furniture off as it came out of the truck, and any leftover is in the laundry room for the next time dusting or cleanup is needed. The newspaper we kept and are using in the woodstove. The ziplocks, plastic bags and garbage bags we used for packing were then resorted and used for non-food related purposes.

Because of all this forethought, we have very little actual waste from our moving expedition. Likely less than one trashcan full.

Entertaining

There's nothing like a nice glass of red wine at the end of a long day. Sometime soon I need to talk about corks versus screen tops, but there's also another kind of cork - the plastic cork. It looks kindof like a hard sponge, but low and behold- it's recyclable! We cracked open a bottle of Kono Barú 2005 South Eastern Australia Shiraz when Shane noticed that not only was the label upside-down to indicate it comes from the Southern Hemisphere, but the cute yellow cork was #4 plastic and marked for recycling. Did I mention it was a very nice bottle of wine?

Posted by sorsha at October 10, 2007 7:49 AM