sustainability – art, design and social practice

so i guess some progress had been made on my carbon footprint impact but i feel like for the past three weeks that has dropped a little bit in certain ways.  this is because i just moved and so i am having to readjust to certain things/i don’t have certain amenities that i used to.  a lot of these things i hope that have back to normal by thanksgiving break when i don’t have school getting in the way of any free-time.

i didn’t turn on any heat until it got below 50 degrees in my room.  but i have just recently moved into a place that is much more energy efficient –though not nearly what you could actually consider “green”– as it is not made entirely of floor to ceiling doorwalls.  i have the heat usually set at sixty degrees so that if it gets really cold it will turn on but most of the time it is off. 

some things that i am planning on doing, mostly during thanksgiving break, are putting up curtains to limit the air leaks in my two windows and also starting my composting bin now that i don’t have roommates and can do things as  i want.  i’ve had to bin for awhile and so i just need to drill holes into it and do a couple of other necessary things…like take out the stuff that i put in there when i used it as a moving box.

 i try to only have one light on at a time at night and so during the day my main source of electricity is to charge my phone and power the clock on my stove.  i also no longer have a microwave and am trying to get by for as long as possible without one.  i thought it would become a problem when wanting to heat up left-overs, which in that case i feel like it would be better to use the microwave than reheat on the stove, but that has only really occurred once.

 i’ve also been trying to eat more raw foods which was working out a bit better during the summer but now i am starting to crave warm foods because of the cold.  i have already abstained from any animal or animal by-products and have been an avid recycler for quite some time.  i buy around 95% organic foods and try to shop at the farmers market whenever possible, though i could go more.  i am making nut milks so as not to have to try away massive amounts of tetra-paks and have been buying as much as i can in bulk.

i haven’t bought any new clothing in a long time except for a sweater from a thrift stores and plan on only buying second-hand whenever i need anything.

i had been washing most of my clothing by hand and line-drying them though in my recent move i have to admit that i did use the washer and dryer twice because my bathtub didn’t seem clean enough and i didn’t have a line set up.  basically laziness /lack of time if i really think about it.

i’ve always been a very strict about turning off lights when i’m not using them due to my dad beating it into my head as a child, but recently i have sort of taken on that role and have tried to instill it into my friends’ heads to do the same while at my house and also at their own.

i had been using cfl bulbs for pretty much all of my lighting sources but when i moved i had to leave them behind and the lights in my new place are predominately incandescent and there is a track lighting strip which uses halogen bulbs.  i’m planning to buy new energy efficient bulbs as soon as possible now that i have a little bit more money.

i have a problem with collecting other peoples garbage and also not being able to throw things away and so when i moved recently to a smaller place, trying to minimize the amount of my stuff that would make it to the landfill was a top priority.  i managed to give away a good amount of stuff on craigslist to people who needed it and also hosted a free art supply shop in my bedroom where my roommates and whomever else happened to be around could “shop” and take whatever they needed.  i also did a similar thing with toiletries so that they wouldn’t have to just be thrown in the recycling.  i think i managed to only have one major trash bag, but i did create a rather large pile for recycling which isn’t too much better.

the one thing i am pretty upset about is the fact that i am flying home to michigan over winter break.  i had talked to my parents in september about taking the train but didn’t buy tickets because i wasn’t sure exactly when i’d be going home.  in the meantime, train prices have gone up significantly and airfare the opposite and so it was impossible to convince them to do otherwise.  airfare was a major part of my carbon footprint and a part i had hoped to eliminate and so this was pretty bad news.