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It helped to lead us into making our own toiletries and cleaning products, much of it with vinegar and baking soda, both for health reasons and less packaging.

We took this effort to heart and took it away with us, and from then on, we upped our game at reducing waste.

We used upturned pretty bottles as garden borders. The outdoor shower stall was a collection of those plastic lids fastened to more chicken wire so as to provide privacy. He’d used chicken wire and old lumber to create huge bins that were filled with sorted rubbish: bucketless plastic lids with no known destination, glass liquor bottles (it was attached to an eco-hotel) awaiting a trip to town… There were piles of trash all around the volunteer space. We worked at a farm on Isla Ometepe where the owner refused to send any garbage created onsite offsite unless it could be recycled or was going to be repurposed. Somewhere along the way, Nicaragua to be precise, Emma and I decided to hold ourselves accountable for the trash we created, which is to say we own up to it without simply shrugging it off. Damn it! Image by Shirley Hirst from Pixabay Even now, I’m thinking we could have just tossed some of it in the attic so as not to add more to the landfill. It was heart-breaking taking it all to the dump, so much so that we condensed the packaging as best we could into a couple of large boxes and moved it around the house for quite a while-months maybe-before finally buckling and getting rid of it all. The dive into sustainable energy produced more garbage than the rest of our build in total. Right there at the end of construction, we got a bevy of boxes lined with Styrofoam and all sorts of accoutrements sealed in little plastic bags. The biggest irony of our home construction was that the most problematic item brought into the mix-garbage-wise and logistically-was our off-grid solar power system. I even disassembled the crate our cookstove was sent in to build a firewood rack for next to the stove. We reused old nails and screws and brackets when we could and tried to buy them from bulk bins when we couldn’t. Errant bits of plastic here and there got sealed up beneath the floor or in the walls, which were fairly standard framing so as to meet North Carolina building codes. We’ve held onto the larger sheets of plastic and used them like tarps, meaning they’ve been repurposed several times over at this point, covering things and temporarily sealing sections of the house off. Where we couldn’t avoid packaging, hemmed in by the inspections department, we sought recyclable and natural alternatives as the better choice.Ĭardboard boxes were saved and used as sheet mulch. Sure, recycling isn’t the best answer, but it isn’t quite the same as sending things to landfill, either.

We’ve recycled off-cuts of tin roofing, bent nails, snipped electrical wires, and almost everything we couldn’t find a use for. We bought insulation with recyclable packaging and actually recycled it. There is still a rogue pile of not-so-nice wood that gets stacked and moved about every so often because we’ve not yet figured out what to do with it. Some stuff, say with split ends or too puny to use, we transitioned into firewood. Scrap pieces and off-cuts were saved for future projects, such as a hodge-podge pantry floor or mismatched shelves. We’d repurposed the bulk of the wood that went into our house and bought most of the rest from salvage yards. Aware of the mountain of garbage produced at most construction sites, we would brag to one another, our feet up at the campfire, as to how we made it this far…and then this far…and now this far…without filling even the standard outdoor rubbish bin. Through the building process here, we became accustomed to patting ourselves on the back.