Illustration: Emily Beaton. Photo: iStockphoto
Before kids, I didn’t worry about my environmental impact very much. I took transit, lived in a tiny apartment and never filled my garbage bin enough for weekly pickup (read: single career woman who was never home). When I had kids, I developed anxieties about our planet and what state it will be left in for my children. Ironically, when I had kids was also the time our family became a waste-producing steamroller leaving a trail of destruction in our wake. I swiped a paper towel to clean up every spill. I kept a heavy arsenal of foods in plastic bags lovingly referred to as “snack packs” for car trips. Speaking of the car, we drove everywhere. Takeout containers paraded into our home each week, then paraded out as waste. Diapers piled up, garbage piled up, everything piled up. (Don’t get me started on the aftermath of our monthly Costco trips.) But with every much-needed coffee?in a disposable cup, of course?I heard a nagging voice. And it started to get to me. Overwhelmed by the piles of stuff in our house, I realized I was craving less clutter in my life?less garbage, less chaos, less stuff. At the start of this year, we made a concerted effort to get our act together?no matter how tired we were from chasing two toddlers all day. Slowly, we made little changes and began to turn things around. We began spending way less time dealing with clutter, garbage and shopping?and we start...