Move update

Tuesday is the big day- I am moving apartments, staying in Queens but going from Astoria To Woodside. I'm using Movers Not Shakers; they provided me with re-usable plastic moving boxes to reduce move-associated waste.

Part of any move is de-cluttering before packing in earnest. Or it should be! Often you can tell when someone has moved by the pile-o-crap left on the curb, lots of it usable stuff that has just been left there. Sometimes those things get claimed, but a lot of times it is landfill ahoy.

Last week I took 3 bags of stuff to Goodwill, gave away my TV with Craigslist, and sold my DVD player to a singer acquaintance. This weekend I sold a stack of books to The Strand Bookstore, gave away the ones they didn't want, took a bread bag stuffed full of plastic caps (some mine, some my roommate's, lots collected from sidewalks) to Aveda for recycling, and a smaller bag of spent toiletry packages to Origins for their recycling program. Still left to do: take my broken electronics- cell phone, power cords- to the neighborhood Office Depot and put in their recycling bin. I'm selling and giving some things to my roommate- futon couch, microwave, toaster, Brita water pitcher.

With all of that, the trash output from my move shouldn't be noticeable from the street view. But then there's the paper. My Achilles Heel. My Paperloo. I have way too much of it! After a year of de-cluttering by joining The Compact, a year spent Post Compact, and a year going PlasticLess, I still have a lot of paper clutter. Packing it up has been painful. Sigh. I'm still a long way away from having a Zero Waste Home.