Challenge: Greening my life...

So I've committed at least 40 hours a week to fighting poverty, but as a student of both International Studies and Geography it's hard to focus all my energy on just one issue. There's too much going on in the world and everything it too interconnected to only focus on one issue, so I wanted my challenge myself to take on another issue a little more directly. Start strong this week and see what happens from there.

Over Twitterverse this article from YES! Magazine caught my eye: "10 Ways to Change Your Life" and I figured I could take on a bit of a challenge for myself this week. I'm not following the article exactly, but I figured there are some ways I could make my life a little more environmentally friendly. One of my roommates senior year really pushed shoved certain aspects of environmentalism down our throats, so much so that we recycled about 3 times as much trash as we produced (which also might speak to how much my roommates and I drank senior year.)

So naturally, when looking for an apartment in Chicago I was a bit nervous about the whole recycling thing, my conscious and my senior year roommate would have not let me feel good about throwing anything away, thankfully my current roommate felt just about the same way. But I'm not perfect and I wish I could contribute a bit more to this cause, even if I'm only one person if I'm going to preach the message I should take a little more action day to day. Yes, I'm only one person but movements like this have to start somewhere.

So over the next week, I'm going to take a few steps to green up my life which I hope will result in some more long term positive changes. Thankfully, I already take the train and bus everywhere so my carbon footprint is a lot lower than usual, but I think the largest obstacle is some organization behind my life. So here are my steps I plan on taking over the next week:

1. Eat all the food in my kitchen before I buy more. So I waste A LOT of food. I've thrown away more mold covered food since I've moved in here, I never realized how much more 4 guys ate than just the two of us. So, I am not allowing myself to go grocery shopping until I empty my fridge and pantry. From here I can reevaluate what I buy and how I utilize the food I buy. Long term goal: reduce food waste. Short term goal: cook some interesting things.
2. Take out all of our recycling. This is more of a personal cleansing thing and it helps the environment.
3. Organize my room. I want to reduce how much I consume and the first step is to take inventory of what I already have. Long term goal: reduce how much I own. Short term goal: Clean my room.
4. Install a dual-flush converter on my toilet that my friend graciously provided me with. This might break my toilet, they say I don't need tools to install it. I don't believe it. Long term goal: reduce water usage. Short term goal: don't break my toilet.
5. Recycle some clothes. We over consume and we over buy. So I need to figure out where I can cut down, maybe realize I'm not as attached to some t-shirts as others and reduce and reuse as much stuff as I can instead of letting it collect dust.

So there's my ambitious week. I'll let you know how it goes one week from now, unless I break my toilet then maybe you'll hear about this one sooner rather then later.

Peace out!