DIY Halloween Costumes
With Halloween just around the corner, children and adults are mapping out plans for their costumes and that spooky buzz is in the air. Costume stores are bombarded this time of year with customers who are aspiring pirates, witches, and monsters. People line up for the cashier, prepared to drop lots of dollars on fake hair, bright makeup, and generic outfits. Plenty of these costumes that are so popular each year can easily be made with items you've got laying around your house. Not only can this happen at virtually no additional cost to you, but it's always better on the environment to reuse, too.
Here are some commonly bought Halloween costume items and the common household items that can replace the store-bought versions or at least provide solid alternatives to them.
1. Fake Hair.
Instead of buying a wig for Halloween, consider incorporating a head wrap or hat into your outfit instead. A hat can go with most costume ideas, be creative! For instance, if you want to be a 'sexy cop' this year, you don't need a blond wig that stretches to your waist. Try piling up all of your hair in a hat that can act as a cop hat instead.
2. Bold Makeup.
If you, or a female in your life, enjoy makeup on a regular basis, you shouldn't need to buy makeup that is Halloween specific. All you need is a regular stick of concealer and you can break it into chunks from there and dye them separately yourself-with natural ingredients at that! For instance, a chunk of concealer mashed with pomegranate juice will create a blood red.
3. The Outfit.
Think twice before you buy a Halloween outfit. Could you make that jagged black witch skirt from a piece of fabric you already have around the house? Could you paint black stripes on white panty hose for that pirate outfit? Maybe you could paper mache your own monster mask?
Lip-Smackin' School Lunches: Little House On the Prairie Style
By Leslie Billera
Napkin
First off, you can bet that the girls packed a cloth napkin, gingham or otherwise. Most likely Ma made her own with whatever leftover fabrics were around the house. Why throw away the napkins you've had for years and you're sick of, when you can recycle them on the kids! This way, if they don't return, you won't be too bummed out.
Upgrade kids' cloth napkin option with adorable and colorful fabkins, which are sized for kids and save you money in the long run.
If you must use paper napkins, make them recycled.
Pail
It might be a kitchy, TV-land concept to send your kid to school with a metal pail, but most likely they won't get the reference. Laptop Lunches is a hip alternative for this century. Made in California from FDA-approved, food safe plastic, they're sturdy, and reusable. Or tap into your lunchtime prairie with organic cotton lunch sacks, care of Ecobags.
Fruit
Fruit has by-passed cookies as the number one snack for kids according to a recent study. Organic fruit is even better. Invest in organic for apples, berries, peaches, grapes, bell peppers, celery, nectarines cherries, and pears. Don't worry as much about buying organic for thicker skinned fruits and veggies like Bananas, avocados, pineapples, mangoes, kiwi, papaya. Consider a Community Supported Agriculture subscription so you're set every day of the week.
How to Recycle in a Small Kitchen
I have a small kitchen. My house was built in the 60’s when storage space was still considered a luxury not a necessity; and because of it I’m forced to find clever ways to fit all the pots, pans, plates, glasses, serving dishes, small appliances, and oh yeah, food into my small kitchen. Because of my seriously limited space, recycling is tough. The fact that there is no recycling pick up where I live makes things even more complicated.
I only have a system in place for aluminum but I’ve been inspired to add plastic, paper, steel and glass to the list. The fact that my local recycling drop-off just increased the list of items that it will accept had a lot to do with my new-found enthusiasm. The challenge is working out a system that will make it easy to add these new recyclables in my small kitchen and be able to store significant quantities so that I’m not making frequent trips to the drop off.
First, I looked at the space I had already devoted to trash collection and recycling. I have a trash can under my sink and an aluminum receptacle in the island. When I try to fit another trash can under the sink, it dislodges the plumbing. I found that one out the hard way. So I can either use my one recycling container upstairs for all my recyclables instead of just aluminum, or add another.
I have a sixteen year old son who travels in a pack of friends and they seem to land at my house more often than not. All of them drink soda so we go through a lot of aluminum cans. OK, I drink soda, too. So I think that I’m probably going to need more receptacles if I’m going to recycle more items.
As small as my kitchen is, I had some room at the end of the island so I needed a narrow trash can. When I went to the local housewares store, I didn’t find anything that was made specifically for recycling. I settled on a really pretty stainless steel container that is heavy duty, holds 40 liters and cost around $90. I know that all steel has some amount of recycled content and I like this as much as I like the look of the can. Now I use this can for all my recyclables other than aluminum. When it’s full, I take it downstairs to the garage (where I have more room) and sort it into separate bins. This way, I manage to keep my small kitchen neat and clean and use multiple bins in my garage for storage so I make the trip to the recycling drop off once every two or three weeks.
QUICK TIPS
FOR SMALL KITCHENS:
1. Use one container for all recyclables.
2. Rinse all your recyclables before tossing them into the recycling can. If you
have curbside recycling pick up, you’re probably set. If you have to drop off
your own recyclables, then you’ll also need to create a sorting station.
3. Set up a sorting station someplace that you have room like a garage.
4. Have individual bins in this sorting station that correspond to the containers
at your drop-off.
Get off the Bottle and on the Filter
Last year Americans spent 15 billion dollars on bottled water and the sales estimate for 2007 is 16 billion dollars. One can argue that it’s money down the drain because the truth has been watered down by some of the largest bottlers. About 24% of bottled water is just filtered tap water; like Aquafina and Dasani.
You can achieve exactly the same quality of water by installing a filter on your faucet at home. If the cost ($100 or less) of purchasing a filter for your home causes you to hesitate, consider this; you can buy a half-liter of bottled water for $1.35. If you filled this same bottle with filtered tap water once a day, it would take roughly 10 years before you spent that $1.35. However, if you purchased one bottle of water every day, after 10 years you will have spent $4,927.50.
GET OFF THE BOTTLE
Besides the incredible savings that you get with filtered tap water, there are environmental and socially responsible reasons that just strengthen the case for the tap.
Environmental Reasons - Plastic is a petroleum based product. The pollutants associated with the manufacture and transportation of these plastic bottles is unnecessarily damaging to the environment. Of the 50 billion plastic water bottles used last year, about 38 billion went straight to landfills. The plastic in those landfilled bottles is worth around $1 billion. 12 billion bottles were recycled, but remember that plastic doesn’t recycle into the same quality plastic. It can only be recycled a finite number of times before it can no longer be recycled.
Socially Responsible Reasons - Like other water from pristine ecosystems, Fiji bottled water is collected from natural sources and shipped halfway across the earth to the US where we already have clean drinking water in every home. Unfortunately, Figi doesn’t have a great public water system and last year Figians fell ill with typhoid casued by contaminated drinking water. When over 1 billion people in the world don’t have access to safe drinking water, buying bottled water with all its associated financial, environmental and social costs seems irresponsible – especially when a home filter gives you the same or better quality water than bottled water.
Filtered Water - The Solutions
THE SOLUTIONS
Carafe Filter
The simplest filtering solution. Buy a carafe that has a filter in the spout. Keep a full carafe in the fridge for pure, cold water all the time. You can even keep some of those plastic bottles and fill them up from your carafe when you’re on the go. Like all filters, you do have to change the filter with use. Positively Green recommends the Brita Classic carafe filter for $29.99 from amazon.com. 3-Pack refills cost $17.99 at amazon.com. The filter holds two quarts and it filters out mercury, organics, other metals and 0.5-1 micron particles.
Under-Sink Filter
The Kenmore 38461 is an excellent choice for an undersink filter. It does require making a new hole in your sink surround to install the separate faucet and this filter does not come with tools. The filter isn’t particularly easy to change, but it does remove sediments, cysts and 0.5-1 micron particles. For pricing information on this filter system and the filter replacements, see sears.com.
Faucet Mounted
The Pur 3 Stage Horizontal Filter mounts on standard faucets and it filters out lindane / atrazine, mercury, asbestos, organics, MTBE, cysts and 0.5-1 micron particles including lead, and chlorine. It has a bypass function to allow you to switch to unfiltered water for washing dishes. The filters last for 100 gallons. A filter change indicator lets you know when to change the filter. We found the Pur faucet mounted filter on amazon.com for $39.99 and filter replacements are $21.99 for a 3-Pack on amazon.com.
Reverse Osmossis Filter
Reverse Osmossis – While the reverse osmosis process does do a fantastic job of filtering water, it creates between two to four gallons of waste water for every gallon that is purified, so from a green standpoint, a reverse osmosis filter isn’t a great option.
Whole House Filter
A whole house filter is a good option for overall water quality, but for purifying drinking water specifically, a carafe, a faucet mounted filter or an under sink filter is the best choice.