Frugal Friday: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Your probably wondering what the recycling motto could do with saving money?

First off reducing your waste, reusing packaging and recycling are just straight up good for you and the planet. That should be motivation enough or maybe this:




Okay, stepping off my podium now...And now for how recycling can save you money!

We (and I use we loosely since my husband think recycling is a waste of time but I am working on him) recycle about 90% of our trash, currently the bulk of our trash is diapers. Which yes if I was even more awesome and cloth diapered,we would be able to eliminate even more trash. But my venture into cloth diapering were just too much poop.

By only throwing away 10% of our trash we only have to change our trash bag every few days, which saves us a ton of money on trash bags which I think are way expensive. I re-purpose our dirty Ziploc bags as poopy diaper bags, which keeps the trash from smelling after a couple of days.

When I am working my Ebay business I re-use packaging from my own orders or the samples I received in the mail. About 75% of my packaging is re-used, which helps lower my shipping costs for me and my customers!

We have a reverse osmosis water purifier so that we can make our own purified water at home! This cuts down on trips to the store, plastic bottles, and cost less per gallon than store water. I also catch the "waste" water and and use it to water my plants (my mom taught me that one). This type of water purifier can be very expensive but we figured out that in two months we would have payed for the purifier anyways and since we will be drinking purified water for forever it was worth it to us. I also was able to get a really great deal from Natures Sunshine. Let me know if you are interested so you can be my referral : )

Another less commonly thought of way to save money and be green is an electric lawn mower. I discovered them while we were living in England and have become a huge fan now. There is almost zero maintenance: no oil changes, tune ups or break downs! The only thing you would need to do is occasionally have the blades sharpened! Ours plugs in to the extension cord, but you can get battery operated ones though I have heard they can be a pain with the recharging. We don't bag our grass so it's like getting free lawn fertilizer! We cut out lawn mower repair and fertilizer costs plus the energy it takes to keep emptying a bag. The ultimate green mower would be an old fashioned push mower, no energy use except your own which would = free workout, no gym membership needed!

You can check out recycle bank they offer points for recycling and and learning about recycling efforts, the point than can be used to get free stuff!

Another great site is earth 911, you can search for a local recycling center and they list all the products the centers will take.

All the little savings add up to a lot in the long run, plus the satisfaction I get from making the world a little cleaner makes it worth it!

Do you have any "green" ways to save money?