Happy New Year everyone!

Last year, at the start of 2010, I asked everyone what they were going to reduce, reuse and recycle in 2010. I said I hoped to cut back on buying clothes & do more cooking/baking at home to cut down on pre-packed food packaging (which I’ve done), and set up dedicated recycling bins to make it easier for us to recycle at home (which I’ve not really done, our recycling tends to end up in piles on the counter until we take it out, so I still need to do something about that!). I hope you kept to your reducing, reusing and recycling goals better than I did!

This year, my main reducing, reusing, recycling goals are to do a better job of collecting rainwater for use in the garden, find a way to deal with dog (and cat) poo in our garden rather than bagging it up and throwing it away, and to continue reducing the amount of hard-to-recycle packaging coming into our home by cooking from scratch/baking even more & to do other related things like make our own soap. And I really should set up those dedicated recycling bins like I said I would last year. (I’ve listed my other simple living – rather than specifically green – goals on my frugal/growing/cooking/making blog The Really Good Life). What do you think your green goals will be for this year?

If you’ve not got any, how about another question instead – if, in 2011, all the world, absolutely everyone, agreed to reduce, reuse or recycle one thing – just one thing – of your choosing, what would you pick? They’d keep doing whatever other recycling they do anyway but would do your one thing every day, without fail, no questions, no grumbling. So what would you pick?

I know some people who will say “everyone should stop using ‘disposable’ plastic bottles” or “everyone should start using washable toilet wipes, hankies & cloths at home” but I think I’d pick reducing food waste – getting people to reduce upfront wastage from buying too much in the first place and encouraging everyone (including businesses) to compost their food waste/kitchen scraps. For some reason, that’s really pushing my buttons at the moment – the senselessness of so much energy being put into food’s production, transportation and preservation only for it to be sent to landfill, gah.

(So I guess that should also be another of my green goals for this year: do all I can to minimise our food wastage here. Be the change you want to see in the world and all that. I’ve added it to my goal list now.)

So what one thing would you pick?