Doing it cheaper - waste not want not

I spend a good bit of time analyzing, some might say over-analyzing, everything we do.  This includes the amount of waste we produce.  As I've mentioned before, I have stockpiling rules that govern what comes into my house, what I'm willing to spend my money on.  One of the goals is to get as close to zero waste as is humanly possible.  I'm a realist, zero waste is never actually going to happen, but I can try.

The most obvious way to save money by reducing waste is trash bags.  If I'm not filling trash bags, I don't have to buy as many.  Seems simple enough.

My town provides roll away recycling bins, and I use mine.  My town will actually give you two if you request a second, and I did.  I recycle everything I can.  My husband doesn't quite get why I pull things out of the trash behind him and the kids.  He gets the logic of recycling, but he doesn't quite get why I pick things others have discarded out of the trash and put them in the recycle bin.  He honestly doesn't remember that is how I got him to recycle in the first place.

I also compost our food and yard wastes.  Again, if it's not going into a trash bag, we use and buy fewer trash bags.  An added benefit to not tossing food in the trash is that our trash doesn't smell at all.

There are secondary savings to recycling and composting past the cost of trash bags.

Every year I drop some money to freshen up the soil in my container garden, I buy fertilizer and I should buy some mulch.  I've never actually bought mulch.  Our leaf blower is also a vacuum, and it comes with a chopper.  I vacuum up the fall leaves and dump them unceremoniously on my rose bed.  Free mulch.  Having priced mulch, I save about $50 a year not buying it.  I compost what's left of the leaves, and I save about $20 in manure and fertilizer (I still end up buying some, just not as much) using compost made from yard and kitchen scraps.  I used to compost my egg shells religiously, but after being told I should lime my lawn every so often (it's the soil here), I stopped dumping them all in the compost and started saving them up to "lime" the yard.  Over the winter, the 30-ish ounce coffee container on my counter fills with egg shells, which I crush with a tall glass, and when the spring rains come I sprinkle it all over the lawn.  This saves me about $5 a year in liming the lawn.  Summer egg shells get similarly crushed and periodically sprinkled on the compost pile.  Some of them get worked straight into the tomato containers.

The savings from recycling are less directly quantifiable after trash bag cost.  According to the Aluminum Association "Today, it is cheaper, faster, and more energy efficient to recycle aluminum than ever before. For instance, only about 5 percent of the energy required to produce primary aluminum ingot is needed to produce recycled aluminum ingot. In addition, to achieve a given output of ingot, recycled aluminum requires only about 10 percent of the capital equipment compared with primary aluminum."  So recycling aluminum means that buying aluminum is cheaper for producers.  Businesses live and die by their profit margins.  If they want profit to be X%, or if they want to make $Y profit, the lower their costs, the less they have to charge for their product to be profitable, the less I have to pay for their product.  How much this saves me is an enigma, even if I could accurately quantify how much aluminum we use per annum.  It could be pennies or tens of dollars a year.  The same logic applies to other recyclables.

I mentioned that we have 2 roll away recycle bins.  They're not enough, and they won't let me have a third.  We have a single neighbor, and every now and again he lets us hijack his bin and fill it up on trash night.  We do that when all the inside bins are full, and the outside bins are overflowing already.  About a year ago we started segregating our aluminum drink cans from the rest of the recycling, crushing them, and collecting them in a bag in our shed.  We did this for 2 reasons.  1) We were visiting the neighbor every 2 weeks (which is how often they pick up the recycling), filling his bin and still having some to take back in our house.  2) There is no bottle and can deposit in my state, but there are scrap metal places.  Let's collect it and sell it as scrap.  Why not?  That's what the trash collector is doing with it.  We've been collecting aluminum cans for over a year now, we've got 2 full bags.  One of these days I'll take them down to the scrap place and see how much they actually pay me for them.  Probably won't be much, but as long as it's more than the cost of the bags and the gas, that'll be fine with me.  If it's more, that'd be great.  We discussed doing the same with steel cans, like what you buy soup in, but decided that we didn't want to get too complicated running more than 1 experiment at a time, and the cost of steel was lower than the cost of aluminum, so we'd stick with the more profitable metal.  Steel cans are harder to crush anyway.

So, instead of going through a 20 count box of trash bags, sometimes 2, a month (we have a large family), we go through a 45 count box of trash bags a year.  That's a savings of $25 a year.

All tolled, I've listed $100 in annual savings just by thinking hard about how much trash we're producing and taking action to fix it.  Can you pull $100 or more a year out of your trash?  Try it, let me know how well you do.

Doing it cheaper - lighting and ceiling fans

About 5 years ago, my husband and I started discussing LED lighting.  At the time, LED light bulbs were very, very, expensive.  They're also more energy efficient than CFLs, and they don't contain Mercury (I'm not even going to go there).  We've watched, we've waited, the price has come down quite a bit.  So this spring we decided it was time to replace a couple of insanely ugly light fixtures with ceiling fans.  Ceiling fans are awesome when it comes to keeping the heating and cooling bills down.  We looked at a good number of fans, but we leaned hard toward those with LED light kits.

Does this new ceiling fan with LED lights produce as much light as the monstrous 20+ light bulb chandelier it replaced?  No, but I wasn't expecting it to (honestly was praying it wouldn't, that thing was bright, it was easier to stare at the Sun than that chandelier fully lit).  It does produce ample light for the space though.  And it's a ceiling fan, so it keeps me cooler than the chandelier.  And, even with the lights on and the fan on full, it still draws no more power than the monstrosity.  If I'm using it just as a light, it draws less than a 1/10th what the chandelier was drawing for power.  Lighting is an admitted small percentage of our overall electric usage, but if I'm saving $25 a year on my power bill because of a couple of LED lighting, I'm good with that.  The energy draw of the fan is less than the energy draw for those last few degrees of heating and cooling I'm not needing to achieve, which should trivially save me $100 a year (and quite probably a good bit more).

It's been a particularly temperate (read cold and rainy) summer here thus far.  While I've been running the A/C in the baby's room (set to 78 degrees), and in the office to prevent computer overheating (set to full blast as soon as my husband boots his computer because that thing can jack the ambient room temp by 5 degrees in about 15 minutes), I haven't yet run the A/C in my bedroom.  Even on the dozen or so nights where the temperature was above 85 degrees hours after sundown, I haven't really needed the A/C to be comfortable.  There was 1 night, just one, where I seriously thought about it.  I decided against it because the problem was more the greater than 60% humidity than it was the heat, and I was betting on it to rain overnight.  It didn't.  It was a rough night.  I had to wash the sheets the next day, and before I could get them out to line dry them, it was pouring.

Doing it cheaper - at work

I commit a good bit of thought to everyday actions.  I ask myself "is there a way to do this cheaper?"

Frequently, the answer is yes.

Back when I worked in the cubicle jungle, I broke myself of the habit of ordering lunch everyday in favor of bringing my own from home.  I took it a step further by storing some shelf stable foodstuffs for those off days when I'd forget my lunch.  This easily saved me $5 a day.  Then I worked on my coffee habit.  I wasn't about to give up my daily cup, but could I do it cheaper?  Yes, yes I could.  A couple of the other ladies were in when I told them I wanted to get a coffee pot so we could brew our own.  I'd been spending $1.50 a day on my midmorning cup, but for $1.50 a week I could go in on some high quality coffee.  Next, my afternoon soda fix was costing me 75 cents a can.  I popped across the street from my office, to the drugstore, on my lunch break and grabbed a full price 12 pack for $5.  I kept the 12 pack at my desk, and dropped 1 can in the office fridge in the morning.  I saved 33 cents a can.  I started watching the sales at the stores, and got in the habit of grabbing 12 packs when they went on sale 2 for $5.  Now I was saving 54 cents a can.  I was saving almost $40 a week, and I wasn't depriving myself at all.

Bringing your own lunch to work is often the first suggestion people get when they start looking for ways to save money on food.  Even if you're not packing leftovers (generally the cheapest lunch option), a homemade sandwich or salad will be several dollars cheaper than buying one.

I'm not just interested in saving money on food.  I want to save money on everything.  This is the first in a series.  Stay tuned.