The Sustainable Domicile

This blog series is about our ongoing attempt to confront climate change, as expressed through the everyday objects, goods, supplies, and sundry used in our home here in Upstate New York.

For a Room by Room walkthrough, go here.

The Room by Room Guide outlines the essential equipment, tools and consumables used in our house. These three categories of essential equipment, tools and consumables are things we use over and over just about every day. The path to sustainability is through using less over all in each of these categories, which can feel like a challenge on the one hand, and a form of simplification on the other.

Unlike essential equipment and tools which can last a long time, and perhaps get worn out eventually, consumables get “used up” each time we use them (that’s what they’re for, in fact!). Food is a great example of a consumable, so would soap, ink, water, heating fuel, and so on. In our house, we may add new essential equipment and tools occasionally, whereas we plan our consumables on more like a monthly basis. So it’s especially important to make sure that consumables are non-toxic, plastic-free and able to safely return to the earth.

If you need a primer on why to avoid plastic, go here. For us, plastic is a hard nope.

So, after we take a pass on petrochemicals & plastics, what’s left is either mineral or agriculture. That is to say, with the exception of petrochemicals & plastics, most everyday objects are either made out of  inorganic materials (like metal or glass), or they are “organic” materials, ones that come from plants, animals, and other living things that we humans cultivate because of their usefulness to us. Before the invention of plastic, 100% of the materials used in homes were some combination of the naturally occurring - yet intentionally cultivated - materials of agriculture, and the naturally occurring - yet intentionally collected - inorganic materials from the earth.

Overall, then, that means that traditional craft knowledge, and heritage methodologies have a great deal to teach us about how to harness the mineral/agriculture materials humans have lived around for so long. There’s also been a lot of interesting and noteworthy material innovation over the past past century outside of plastics. So this blog will talk a lot about cultural heritage and traditional ways of making, as well as consider new innovations.