Unstuffed: Don't Waste the Paste

Friday, January 6, 2012

Don't Waste the Paste

"the origins of the word frugality in Latin are frugalior, meaning useful or worthy, and frux, meaning fruitful or productive. These meanings give the word a nice feeling, but unfortunately, the word has changed over the years, and has come to mean thriftiness, the abstention from luxury and lavishness. In this book, the word will be used in its original meaning-...to make full and 'fruitful' use of all [one's] resources."
~Warren Johnson

In keeping with my theme of abundant frugality for the year (using Warren Johnson's definition of frugality) I thought I'd mention this simple trick I use to make full and fruitful use of my toothpaste resource.

I pay a premium price for an all-natural, locally produced toothpaste. (I used to make my own but I wasn't happy with it and like this toothpaste best.) To make those premium dollars go further, I make my toothpaste last longer by not only squeezing the heck out of it when it starts to run low, but finally, I cut the end of the tube off with a pair scissors and use my toothbrush to scrape out as much paste as possible.

By doing this, I can usually get another three or four brushings out of the tube. Now that doesn't sound like much, but added up over all the tubes I use in a year, I figure stretching my toothpaste out this way keeps pennies in my pocket and excess trash out of the waste stream.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...: a chance to use math in real life. My gradeschool math teacher informed me that such an opportunity would arise!

say 20 brushings a week, two months per tube, 160 brushings per tube, 6 tubes per year, 60+ more years of life left for you (you eat well). 360 tubes in your remaining lifetime.

saving an average of 3.5 brushes worth of paste over 360 tubes is 1296 brushes or 8.1 tubes of paste saved.

I was going to consider attaching a dollar value to this but that means I would have to consider inflation which is important since sixty years ago that $5.00 toothpaste cost $0.50... continuing the trend a single tube may cost $50 sixty years from now.

Also note that if everyone in ottawa did this for one single year (let's say during 2012) there would be 3.5*6*917550/160 = 120,428 fewer tubes of toothpaste purchased & disposed of.

No doubt this would cause our fragile economy to collapse and we would have you to thank.; January 7, 2012 at 2:33 AM
Anonymous said...: p.s. Thank you!; January 7, 2012 at 2:36 AM
Anonymous said...: 30 HELENS AGREE

If every Canadian just attempted this trick once with a single tube of toothpaste, it'd save the equivalent of 746,128 tubes of paste.; January 7, 2012 at 2:52 AM
Amber said...: Ha! This totally made my morning. :); January 7, 2012 at 11:59 AM

Raison d'etre

In 2008 I didn't buy anything new for the whole year. Food and basic toiletries (but not toilet paper) were the obvious exceptions (twice I broke my own rule). Used items were allowed, but I tried really hard to reduce consumption as much as possible.

I finished my year successfully, and along the way learned a lot about how much the world consumes, the waste we produce, sustainability, voluntary simplicity, climate change, peak oil, resource depletion, the water crisis, the food crisis, voting with your dollar, voting with your fork....

Now, I've transformed into a slightly nutty, very passionate, gardening, preserving, DIYing, simple living, nature loving, weed eating, backyard medicine making, urban homesteader, and I still don't use toilet paper!

With the help of the Awesomedudeguy (ADG), I'm continuing my exploration of living lightly and frugally, while increasing my self-sufficiency and resiliency, staying debt free, and preparing for a climate changed, resource depleted world, in uncertain economic times.

My nothing new restriction is lifted, but I continue to be a gentle, local consumer as much as possible.

My hope is that some of the information and resources I post about here will be helpful to others. Thanks so much for stopping by !

Yours in unstuffing,
Amber

"Forgive me if I never visit. I am from the fields, you know, and while quite at home with dandelion, make a sorry figure for the drawing room" ~Emily Dickinson

"I never had any other desire so strong, and so like covetousness, as that.... I might be master at last of a small house and a large garden, with very moderate conveniences joined to them, and there dedicate the remainder of my life to the culture of them and the study of nature." ~Abraham Cowley

"The laws of nature are under no obligation to cater to our culture’s emotionally charged fantasies of perpetual progress and limitless growth." ~John Michael Greer

"Sometimes we think we are too small to make a difference in this big world. Our actions seem insignificant in comparison to global issues such as climate change and population growth. However, the reality is that action on an individual level is exactly how big changes are made. Without individual and family sustainability, there’s no community sustainability. And without community sustainability, there’s no global sustainability. In fact, earth-wide change is absolutely impossible without individual change.
It really does come down to you and me."
~From Living Sustainably: It's Your Choice

"The universal conspiracy of the silent-assertion lie is hard at work always and everywhere, and always in the interest of a stupidity or a sham, never in the interest of a thing fine or respectable. Is it the most timid and shabby of all lies? It seems to have the look of it. For ages and ages it has mutely laboured in the interest of despotisms and aristocracies and chattel slaveries, and military slaveries, and religious slaveries, and has kept them alive; keeps them alive yet, here and there and yonder, all about the globe; and will go on keeping them alive until the silent-assertion lie retires from business--the silent assertion that nothing is going on which fair and intelligent men and women are aware of and are engaged by their duty to try to stop." ~Mark Twain

"It is not enough simply to abstain from theft...We must remember that nothing in this world really belongs to us. At best, we are merely borrowers. It is our duty, therefore, to borrow no more from the world than we absolutely need, and to make full and proper use of it. Taking more than we need, and wasting it, is a form of stealing from the rest of humankind."
~Commentary on Sutra 30 The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali