we love these crafty bitches.

Check out the latest awesome produced by our fave Northern ladies over at Yankee Crafty Bitch! These gals take DIY to a new level, and we love them for it. We yet again enlisted them in helping with our Spring Cleaning, Zero Waste-athon, and they yet again came through with a bitchin' way to reuse our seemingly unusable stuff. Last time, they delivered a sweet organizer made of old paperboard jewelry boxes. This time? Our old, scratched CD's have been transformed into...

A home disco ball! Oh, man. 

It's kind of mod, it's kind of McQueen-meets-Martha, and we're kind of obsessed.

Want to make your own? Natch. Get all the info, photos, directions and encouragement you need on their blog. While you're there, you might want to check out all the other cool stuff they're up to (wood-fired Rice Crispies treats, anyone?) and shake some of that city livin'. Almost as good for the soul as dancing under the light of your very own disco ball.

spring cleaning, zero waste. sneeze count: 7

Heyo! So, here we are, getting ready to launch our new website, putting all the final pieces together so we can bring even more people in the Boston area local food, and we're STILL up to our elbows in all of this junk. Still. We can start a new business, we can build relationships with farms from all over New England, we can get people excited about a new opportunity to live locally, but we can't keep our teeny tiny apartment reasonably clean and organized. Our mothers are so disappointed in us.

But wait! We are making progress. We've found a slew of terrific and sustainable ways to get rid of our clothing (check back for that post tomorrow), our pals over at YCB are working on that whole CD repurposing extravaganza, aaaand... We have a solution for all those wire clothes hangers that were taking up more space in our closets than actual clothes. Hooray! High fives all around.

As it turns out, wire hangers are a bigger boon to our environment than we ever thought possible. According to NBC News, 3.5 billion wire hangers are sent to the landfill EVERY YEAR. Say what? 3.5 billion? Ah, yup. Absurd. Luckily, recycling these things is pretty easy and doesn't require any more effort than you'd already be making. Wanna know what we mean? Read on, fellow Greenologist!

Our first plan of action was to call our dry cleaners and ask their advice. They are, after all, in the business of hanging clothes on wire clothes hangers. Well. Partly, anyway. We use Clevergreen Cleaners, not only because the solvents they use to clean are biodegradable, but because they use less water in the cleaning process AND they design their work spaces to be as energy efficient as possible. Awesome. Anyway, we called these folks up. We said, "Hey, Clevergreen Cleaners, what should we do with all of these wire hangers?" And they said, "Hey, Greenologist lady, why don't you just bring them back to us?" And we said, "Oh. That's really easy. 'Cause we'll be over there to drop stuff off again soon anyway." And they said, "Yup." BAM. Problem solved.

So here's the deal. Just bring the hangers back to your cleaners. Recycling them the conventional way (in that blue bucket on your sidewalk) might work. But it might not. Not all cities will recycle those hangers, and by bringing them back to the cleaners, you're keeping more NEW hangers from having to be made, which keeps manufacturing and shipping waste down, too. Which is kind of the point.

This whole thing took five minutes for us to resolve. If everyone took two minutes to just throw their hangers into their dry cleaning bags with their clothes on the way out the door, we could keep 3.5 billion pieces of metal out of landfills. Seven minutes for a cleaner, greener planet? Yes, please.

Also, if you aren't already using Clevergreen, you probably should. Our clothes smell WAY better than they did after hanging out at those other places, AND they're holding their color and shape longer. They're not giving us anything to say that, by the way. It's just the truth.

spring cleaning, zero waste: yankee crafty bitch edition!

So, in case you were wondering, this zero waste cleaning stuff is NOT EASY. As we sit here, blogging, sipping some deliciously local Rao's coffee we picked up last night at Sherman Market, we remain cluttered into a corner by stacks of magazines and broken appliances. It's looking like we might be here for a while.

Luckily, our crafty friends over at Yankee Crafty Bitch (twitter 'em at @yankeecrafty) have reached out to us in our time of need and picked up one of the challenges we were least excited about: finding a use for all of these paperboard jewelry boxes. They're EVERYWHERE. They're ALL EMPTY. And yet, they're boxes. And as such, they possess inherent usefulness. And as such, we can not simply throw them away. (We know, we know. We have a serious problem.) Dun da daaaa! YCB to the rescue! Check out the totally awesome solution they crafted up:

It's a desk/jewelry/craft organizer! It's all one unit, instead of a bazillion random free-ranging boxes! They used the lids, too! We can store our safety pins, sewing needles, spare buttons, earrings, thumbtacks, blah, blah, blah, without buying a desk or jewelry organizer and sending those boxes to the landfill. We love it! We know you love it, too. Want to make one? It's super easy. Check out their blog for the step-by-step here. 

Worried about us over here, under all this junk? Don't be; YCB has promised to make another appearance in our quest for Spring Cleaning, Zero Waste, so we've got a lifeline to organization. Check back here for another awesome YCB creation soon (follow us on Twitter @gogreenologist so we can let you know when it happens)! Until then, don't forget about our Green Challenge; while we slave away, you could be winning stuff. Pretty nice deal you've worked out for yourself, there, fellow Greenologist.