Easy Green: Utensils

Instead of buying plastic child-sized utensils, buy real, metal utensils at your local second hand shop. I found very inexpensive ($.25/piece) small, metal utensils, mostly salad forks and demitasse spoons while sifting through cutlery boxes at my local second hand shop. They come from incomplete sets of household cutlery, defunct airlines, closed restaurants, etc. and are the perfect size for small hands. You won't need to worry about plasticizers and leaching chemicals going into your child's mouth. You're reusing a perfectly good product, not spending a lot of money on plastic that may eventually end up in landfills or incinerators and supporting a local charity in the process. Our 3-year old has been using them for over a year with no trips to the emergency room.

New Roof: Step 1...Remove & Recycle Old Roof

Replacing a roof is messy. Bits and pieces of old roof surround the house and are dragged inside by everyone who enters. Our contractor did his best to keep the black tarpaper, shards of rotten wood, disintegrating shingles, nails and other miscellanea contained on tarps, but it was not easy. 

The asphalt roof was original to the house in 1965. It served the house well, but it's time was up. The roof sheathing was no match for the numerous Nor'easters that eventually rattled our two large solar panels to the point of ripping holes in the pine planks and creating leaks in the roof.

Recycle: There are trash companies that recycle construction and demolition debris. The challenge is to find a reputable company to do it (some claim to recycle, but dump in landfills instead) and to pay the additional cost of removing the rest of the debris separately. We used E. L. Harvey & Sons, Inc. out of Westborough, MA. It is a large, independent, family owned and operated business that's been around since 1911. Our rep, Greg, was nice and easy to work with. Harvey services eastern and central (to Worcester) MA, southern NH and RI to Providence. The company sends the asphalt to a vendor in NH to be ground up into asphalt products such as paving. Also, Harvey's recycling facility can recycle almost everything out of a mixed-content container and whatever can't be recycled is sent to an electricity-producing incinerator. Pretty cool. About 70% of the homes in the U.S. have asphalt roofs with a life-expectancy of about 20 years. Our new roof has a life-expectancy of 50 years. The National Association of Home Builders estimates that 20 billion pounds of asphalt shingles are dumped into landfills each year. Yuck. 

Reuse: The solar panels and related plumbing were removed by and given to a local man who will rehab them and install them at his mother's house. 

We didn't keep the solar panels.

1. They weren't working properly and we weren't willing to do the spend the time and money to fix them. It turns out they needed glycol, an antifreeze, heat-transfer liquid, coolant, depending on its application. Glycol is easy to get, we just didn't know how to maintain a solar system. There was also a mystery leak in the plumbing, among other things.

2. Where the panels once were will now be two roof windows and a skylight. 

3. Our heating system, including the solar-heated hot water tank, will need to be completely replaced in the near future as it is original to the house, too, and is incredibly inefficient and on it's last leg.  

So, what kind of roofing went on my roof? That's the next post.