EarthFriendly #2 : Ten Thrifty Things

Last year I started a very short-lived series called Enviro-Monthly. I keep meaning to re-start it, especially considering that it's on my list of 101 Things to Do in 1,001 days. (Not to mention the environment needs our help now more than ever!) After spending quite a lot on conventions and concert tickets last month, I had a sudden urge to be more thrifty too. In reading some thrifty blogs I found through Bunny Mummy, I noticed that almost all of the thrifty ideas are also environmentally friendly.
(The blogs were: Life After Money, Frugal Queen and Shoestring Cottage.)

It spurred me on to think about the series again. I thought about renaming it Enviro-Thrifty-Monthly or something similar, but it just didn't have the same ring to it. I don't want to be limited to posting about it once a month, so I decided to drop the 'Monthly' and just have a numbered series.

When reading the thrifty blogs I mentioned above, I realised there are already quite a few environmentally friendly and/or thrifty things I already do. Some of them I was taught as a kid, and others I invented myself as just sensible things to do. I thought I'd ease myself into things by listing some of them:

1. squish the last bit of the soap onto the new soap so it can all be used up.
2. collect plastic bags and food wrappers to put in the recycling bin at the supermarket (I wrote about this one last year).
3. bring lunch to work most days.
4. usually only buy food on sale.
5. re-use ziplock bags (as long as they're not dirty).
6. usually when Husband and I cook we make enough for at least 2 meals. We find creative ways to make the leftovers interesting. We NEVER throw food away.
7. use the slow cooker to make a week's worth of meals most weeks in Winter.
8. paid off my car loan 2 years early by transferring extra money to it each fortnight. I made sure to choose a car that cost much less than my upper limit so I was able to do this. Which was doubly a good thing really, because poor Tara only lived for another year after that, otherwise I would have had debt on a dead car. When we bought our replacement car, we had good credit from paying off the previous loan early.
9. work out the cheapest options for my daily public transport.
10. only put the heating or cooling on if I'm sweltering hot or freezing cold. (This is more of a preference than a conscious choice. I just don't notice heat and cold until it becomes extreme. When Husband is home it's a bit different: he's a lot more susceptible to temperature than I am due to his medical issues.)

Of course, we're not perfect and we could make a lot of improvements. I've identified many areas where I'd like to do better. Hopefully having a regular series will keep this in the front of my mind and motivate me to keep making changes.