Grayson Garbarino

My eco-change project is centered on transportation and riding my bike more. So, I wanted to do something a bit adventurous and out of the box for this week.

I chose to "feel the distance" as I've been calling it, which means that I chose to walk to places I typically drive to, like the grocery store. There is a grocery store about a mile and a half away that I go to for more niche items and so on. This week I made a point of planning to buy more items than usual from said store and walk there and back with groceries in tow.

I've done stuff like this in the past and I hike a fair amount, but the approximately 15 pounds of groceries definitely added some difficulty. I think we tae for granted these "short trips" but become detached from the distances we travel and create more pollution when we think a drive is negligible.

For this week's EcoChallenge topic I screened Tomorrow (2015) for my friends. It is an excellent documentary that is available on Kanopy, which is free if you have a library card.
The documentary is broken into different sections of society (economy, food, education, etc.) and shows how different communities around the world are inventing new sustainable or inspiring ways to create a better future. Not specifically environment-centered, but the action that always stands out to me is the Dutch neighborhood that prints its own currency.

For this week's EcoChallenge prompt I chose to make something I typically buy. My partner and I decided to make a loaf of bread because we have talked about doing so for some time but have never set aside the time, energy, and resources to make it happen. Fortunately for me my partner is already a skilled dessert baker so this was only a mild challenge for the pair of us instead of a Herculean Labor for myself alone.
I would say that it was surprisingly easy, but our loaf did not come out especially well. It certainly tasted good, but we have a long way to go before opening a bakery. Our biggest issue was that the loaf itself had some trouble staying together, and that the inside was far too dense for our liking.
Overall we had a great time making bread and we intend to keep on until we make a loaf to our uninhibited liking, by which time we'll likely just make our own bread from then on. I am appreciative of the EcoChallenge for the opportunity as well as the motivation to do this!

My partner and I were able to place an order with our favorite coffee shop, Portland Cà Phê, and receive our 5-pound bag of coffee this coming Tuesday, April 16th. Finding an airtight, opaque container that holds the approximate volume of five pounds of coffee was surprisingly challenging, much more challenging than switching the way we acquire the coffee itself. The available options were either much too small, intended for pasta and whatnot, or comedically large, intended for bulk dry foods such as oats and the like or dry pet food, or the right volume but were either not airtight or not opaque. We settled on a restaurant ingredient storage bin that is airtight but, regrettably, has clear sides and decided we would find somewhere in our apartment that does not receive direct sunlight to house this new container.
We already buy just about everything we can in bulk so this was a welcome and relatively unobtrusive change. We bought coffee in bulk previously from WinCo but found that it created a comparable amount of waste as buying each bag individually, because of the quality of the offered coffee bags at the store, so we were glad to make measurable headway in reducing a consistent source of waste.