Frugal Babe

A rich life without a lot of money

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Doing Our Part

June 20, 2007 By Frugal Babe

In addition to being frugal, my husband and I try very hard to be as ecologically responsible as possible.   Often, the two go hand in hand.   Buying used stuff is a great way to help the earth, as it means that new stuff is not being manufactured for us.   It’s the ultimate form of recycling, and easy on the budget as well.

We recycle everything that we can – paper, cardboard, plastic, metal, and glass.   We try to buy things without a lot of packaging, and buy in bulk as much as we can.   We refill water bottles instead of buying water.   When we’re the only ones here, we follow the “if it’s yellow let it mellow” rule, and since we drink so much water, it takes a while to get yellow.   We’ve xeriscaped most of our yard.   I ride my bike to my library job, the bank, the thrift store, the post office, and the grocery store if I can fit everything into my bike basket.   My husband works from home, so he doesn’t have to commute to work at all.   We have a garden that we fertilize with compost.   We use garlic and vinegar to keep bugs off our plants.   I use vinegar to clean just about everything in our house.   Being careful with natural resources has become second nature to us, and I rarely think about any of it anymore.

But we had been talking for quite a while about switching to wind power for our electricity.   Most of the things that we do to help the planet also help us save money, or at least don’t cost money.   But our energy company offers an option to pay extra on our electricity bill and have our power purchased from wind energy farms.   We never knew exactly how much extra, and we had talked about it several times, but felt that we couldn’t afford to pay extra on our energy bill.   Now that we’re feeling better about our finances, we’ve decided to make the switch to wind energy.   We had no idea how much this would cost, so we went to the power company’s website and figured it out.   It looks like it’s going to increase our monthly bill by a whopping $5.   Can that be right?   We’re signing up with our next bill, so we’ll see.   But if that’s really the case, we’re kicking ourselves for not doing it earlier.   We had assumed that it would be quite  a bit more expensive than what we pay now.   Once we get signed up and see our first bill, I’ll let you know if it’s really only $5.   If it is, wouldn’t everyone be doing it?   We shall see.

Filed Under: the simple life 7 Comments

Comments

  1. NCN says

    June 21, 2007 at 1:27 am

    I’m pretty sure that I read somewhere that it can be dangerous to reuse water bottles (or soda bottles) due to the type of plastic used in them…
    I’ll do a little research and see if I can find the article, but it might be something to look into…
    NCN

    Reply
  2. FrugalBabe says

    June 21, 2007 at 4:06 am

    Thanks Basil – you and Bianca are pretty darn cool yourselves :)

    NCN, I’ve read that aswell. There’s a chemical in #1 (and I think #2) plastic that breaks down when it gets hot and leaches into the water in the bottle. So leaving plastic bottles in a hot car is not a good idea. But we don’t use disposable water bottles, and the chemical issue is one of the main reasons. We use nalgene bottles which are a much heavier, more stable plastic.

    Reply
  3. basil says

    June 21, 2007 at 3:44 am

    You guys are the coolest people we know anonymously.

    I was driving to work today and fantasizing about buying a house – and I didn’t care about the house so much as I just wanted to xeiriscape the bejeezus out of the yard. I was really in a xeiriscaping mood today. Seriously.

    Bianca and I are with you 100% on everything you touched on – and I’ll check back to see if NCN comes up with any info on us possibly killing ourselves by reusing our Refreshe water bottles.

    Reply
  4. basil says

    June 21, 2007 at 3:45 am

    I totally spelled xeriscaping wrong. I’m not good with words that start with “x.”

    Reply
  5. Grace says

    June 21, 2007 at 2:28 pm

    We reuse bottles too – but we buy the sturdy hard plastic ones that are meant for refilling. I wish I could bike more places, but we live in the burbs, which means everything is so spread out that it’s impossible not to drive everywhere. We also switched to Wind Power last year – and yes it’s only about a $5 difference, but in fact, our city rebates that back to us, so we actually are paying the same or less than with regular electricity.

    Reply
  6. basil says

    June 27, 2007 at 9:48 pm

    We’re Naglenein’ it now.

    Thanks for the heads up on the leaching.

    Reply

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