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The American tendency toward over-bathing and over-personal-cleanliness.
I have friends who seem almost horrified with my admission that I don't feel a need for a daily bath/shower/hairwashing (when I haven't done enough to get dirty or sweaty, of course), along with not understanding my ability to re-wear clothing that, you know, just really isn't soiled yet. Our reuse a bath towel for several uses. Or only use 2 tbs. of laundry detergent to get a large load of laundry clean.
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Originally Posted by Blackdog Lin
Wow. You describe our household practices to a 'T'. We each take showers 2x a week, unless we've been in the garden or hiking. Towels get changed out every other week. Clothing work multiple times, except sox & unders. Tiny bits of laundry detergent, and only hot water for towels & bedding.
When my DSS moved out, our water bill quite literally dropped in half! That was a revelation... after bugging a young teen to attend to personal cleanliness, mid-high school he started taking 30 minute showers, no matter how much we harangued him, and almost daily. (Actually, he's since been diagnosed with Ankylosing Spondylitis, so I suspect he was managing his pain this way, but we didn't know that at the time.)
I applaud your choices!
Wasteful and dishonest - those who take out loans or take on debt with no intention of ever paying it back.....while the rest of us who do pay our bills diligently have to absorb the costs of their delinquencies.
I've never figured out the logic of the government paying farmers not to grow food, and at times paying them to destroy their harvest.
I think my biggest pet peeve about waste and nearly everything else in the world is fussy self-importance combined with a lack of common sense. Maybe people just can't be bothered educating themselves and take the "better safe than sorry" approach, but it's appalling sometimes. Person A puts down a paper toilet ring because oh my god, what you might catch from a toilet seat! Then it doesn't flush entirely and Person B refuses to try a second flush or god forbid pee into the toilet with that terrifying piece of paper in it, and instead treats the entire stall as if Person A probably died of typhoid fever while sitting there.
I object to the marketing angle that's convinced us that we must have a different product for absolutely every task we do. How gauche could you be, using the same product to wash your kitchen sink and your bathroom sink, your clothes and your dishes, your toilet and your floor, your face and your feet. Taken to its extreme, I'd say a person could own 80 different non-edible products in 80 different bottles, when 10 would be plenty (and if you're really being minimalistic, some of those 10 would be edible).
On the home front ... well I'm an extremist so at times almost everything bugs me, but the ones that crop up the most often:
running the washer half full because it's too much trouble to find the rest of what needs washing (ditto dishes). I don't really like using these devices at all, the dishwasher especially is so wasteful, and I certainly don't appreciate having half a load of stuff to wash after we run the machines.
Agreed, the piles of clothes in the hamper that have been worn for 4-5 hours while doing absolutely nothing but sitting around. Directly after taking a shower and putting on deodorant. In my eyes, that's better than a clean shirt, it's already got an extra protective layer of Axe in the armpits.
Condiment blindness. We have open duplicates of almost all of our stuff that ought to last weeks or even months because DH didn't look before he bought another jar of peanut butter, dressing, brummel or some other food.
Swag accumulation. It's sort of pre-waste, but we do not need another crappy pen, bookmark, half ounce tube of bad hand cream, fridge magnet for the local exterminator, booklet promoting the advantages of company x's product. We do not need six folders with fifteen glossy brochures for six cars we're choosing between. The less I take of stuff I don't need, the less has to be produced.
I agree w/ blackdog and redfox. I do take a shower every morning I go to school but I only wash the vital areas and I condition-only my hair. As I have gotten older I can't keep my skin from being dry. I also apply body oil in the shower but it simply isn't enough. Although I am rarely uncomfortable bc of the dry skin. It's just dry. During the summer, I wash my hair far less frequently and the showers are much briefer and cooler. When I do, eventually, retire, I will bathe far less frequently.
I also us a lot less soap in all machines than it calls for. However, now that I (foolishly) bought a high efficiency washer I always do 2 rinses and I don't think the clothing comes clean and w/o the 2 rinses I can't get the cat/dog hair out. I also don't hang clothing on the line for the same reason. I don't want to put clean sheets on my bed that are pilled with balled up cat hair.
I am really getting more and more into the baking soda and vinegar for cleaning. Baking soda and a Libman ergonomic scrub bush gets EVERYTHING clean. And I don't have to breathe in those chemicals. Not that I clean a lot anyway. But still...
Not trying to co-opt this thread about wastefulness and turn it into cleaning.
I do hate to see food thrown away. I eat everything I make unless it has stuff growing on it. I do not waste a lot of money throwing food away.
I really hate to see people driving cars that are big and weighted down with literally tons of steel so they get really bad gas mileage. Given the state of fossil fuel reserves in this world now, we really should be moving away from the gas-guzzlers but so many seem so oblivious.
I throw tons of food away. Don't worry, it all gets composted.
I can't help it that DH gardens as though we have a family of ten children. I cannot be responsible for bags and bags of carrots that taste like soap from our garden. You can't imagine how liberating it was on the day, years ago at the grocery store, when I placed a bag of carrots into our cart,looked him in the eye, and said "I am not eating your carrots any more." I easily eat a carrot a day and commercially grown carrots are da bomb!
When this year's fall crop of sweet potatoes was dumped out on kitchen counter, sure, I tried one of them. And it sucked. I threw the rest away (oh by the way--he won't eat them! He doesn't eat half of what he grows.)
The rotting onions in our basement? Half are edible, the rest get pitched. Our basement is full of squash. Now that's one area I could improve on, cooking squash. Acorn and Spaghetti squash are easy, the rest, not so much. Apple apples apples--half of the refrigerator in the basement if full of apples--some of them won't last and will have to be tossed.
So run me out of town for food "waste" I don't care. It's more of an overproduction problem here than a consumption problem.
I don't "hate seeing food wasted," in general. Some "food" is really junk and needs to go to the garbage. I think about all of the potlucks we go to where people just bring chips and cheap store-made cookies and cakes--that is all junk, tastes like crap, and needs to be put directly in the dumpster at the end of the party. I do think that people who cook a lot and then throw away batches of it are foolish with money, but that's up to them. One important thin I learned in Weight Watchers was this saying: The food is already produced, why do you think it has to go through you on the way to the garbage?
Yes, food that tastes like crap is definitely not worth eating. I'm shocked that his homegrown veggies don't taste good! Is he using organic methods? What's the soil like? Ok, that is a total aside. Back to the topic!
I'm interested in what causes carrots to taste like soap.
He could sell the food. Or give it to a good bank. But I like how you don't take on the responsibility to clean up after his hobby. :)
*food* bank