Minutes of the September 17, 2019 Meeting

Here are the minutes of our first meeting.

Participants noshed on fresh baked bread, baba ganoush, and sun-dried zucchini chips.  The conversation range widely, from the Backstreet Boys to bus routes.

We shared our interest and experience -- and lack of experience -- with reducing waste.  Here two of the successful experiences people related (the ones I remember most):

1. One participant described a dry well she's had installed in the front of her house in her front lawn to significantly reduce rain runoff.   She noted that it turned out to be harder to get contractors and she thought;  there were enough questions about this topic (both how to go about reducing rain run off, and about how to engage the city "Save It Lancaster" program, that we thought this would make a good topic for a future meeting.
2.  Another participant shared a particularly clever technique for reducing mis-sorted trash in her six-child household.   Instead of using a very large trashcan in the kitchen (where the kids could easily toss in recycling and have it hidden in the vastness in the trash can), she switched to using three small, well-labeled buckets with pictures and words.   The buckets were small enough that recyclable bottles couldn't "hide" in the wrong bin.  Her landfill-bound trash went down two thirds (!) when she switched to this technique.

Annalisa  had a small Show-and-Tell area, featuring 

• copies of Bea Johnson's Zero Waste Home that people could (and did) borrow,
• a basket of T-shirt bags for quick cleanup and handkerchief use, 
• cloth napkins with personalized napkin rings to avoid having to wash napkins after every use, 
• glass containers that she takes to Lemon Street market and Central Market to get food such as beans, rice, oil, sandwich meats and cheeses, and Easter candy. 

Her daughter was especially impressed with the homemade T-shirt bag for the Maplehofe milk jug; this keeps the jug from rattling against other things in her bag.

A conversation about tallow and soap making brought us to suggest that, in a future meeting, soap making as a way of repurposing household fat might make a good topic.

Here are some of the personal goals that attendees decided to set for themselves:

• Reduce food waste;
• Without going all radical about it, pay attention to what goes into the trashcan in order to reduce garbage gradually;
• Convince CVS to stop giving me mile-long receipts [note: after I asked them for help with this, the pharmacy staff switched things to get electronic receipts sent to my husband's email address]. 

The next meetings will be October 22, November 19, and December 17.  Mark your calendars!