30 Days. Speaking of Shaking Things Up...

Many moons ago, I wrote this post about bringing some focus to Emanation. I didn't have any great brainstorms myself, but my friend Tricia Sullivan suggested a series of posts documenting my progress through 30-day challenges. Many topics were suggested; 30 days as a vegetarian, 30 days without any media, etc. Great idea... hasn't gone anywhere.

Tonight, we watched The Story of Stuff with our friends David and Karianne. After several hours of processing and discussion, we decided that it would be interesting to put ourselves through some 30 days challenges together. For our first, we decided to compete, family vs. family, to see who can produce less waste. We'll do this by weighing our trash with a hay scale. Meanwhile, we will hit the local trash hotspots, after we discover them of course, and dumpster dive to recover as much usable and salable stuff as possible. At the end of the trash challenge, we'll have a yard sale with the stuff we collect from local dumpsters, and the winning family gets the cash.

All of us are admittedly quite lazy when it comes to issues of environmental consciousness. All of us also believe in the importance of stewarding this earth well. This exercise in living out our "trash talk" (clever, I know) will help us to figure out exactly how committed we are. It'll also be interesting to see how much money we can make in a month from simply scavenging what others have discarded. Stay tuned.