June is FREE Month!

To celebrate our summer-time freedom, I thought June would be a great month to go FREE!

Paper-free to be more specific. This month will challenge us to ditch all the extra paper we use daily. Less paper in = Less paper OUT!

I will be addressing some (*ahem*) more extreme methods of losing the paper...feel free to skim over those or embrace them whole-heartedly!

There are a few key areas to address when going paper-free. Let's get started!
*Bills, bills, bills...we hate getting these in the mail anyway so why have them sent snail mail? Nearly all service providers & credit card companies offer FREE paper-free billing so start signing up today! Some companies are offering a billing discount if you sign-up because you are saving them postage costs as well.
TIP: Create a new email account solely for bills/business type correspondance and check in at a regularly scheduled interval. Go all out and schedule automatic payments and save yourself some time responding to those bills!

*Printer paper...Hopefully, you are a little bit better than me about NOT printing out ever little thing that you think you might need to actually carry with you. This is one reason that I love laptops and especially internet-accessible phones! Many times I have directions or recipes that someone has emailed to me and I feel compelled to print away...I have been trying to re-use printer paper as much as possible and re-format my printables so that more than one thing can fit per page. I would love more tips on how to economize on the printer paper!

*Paper Products...The easiest ones to get rid of are paper towels and napkins. Simply replace with regular household cleaning cloths and or cut up some old t-shirts/baby blankets/sheets/etc...to make your own! If you have already done this step you are ready to move on...

Next, what about all those pesky tissues that you need to keep buying and tossing? How about trying it the old-fashioned way with handkerchiefs? Make sure your family members hankies are color-coded (or something similar) and use this thrifty, resourceful option instead! Wash these in hot with a few drops of tea tree oil along with your regular detergent to clean and disinfect. Moving right along...

Once you have freed yourself of all those paper products, what about giving cloth diapering a try? Why throw all that money into a landfill? Check out Jillian's Drawers for a fantastic tester package filled with all the major types of cloth diapers (not all brands are included) risk-free! (Well, there is a $10 program fee, but much cheaper & easier than scouring the internet & ordering the different dipes one by one.) Definitely take the plunge and test some cloth wipes as well! Right-o...here we go...

Now that your baby is not wearing a paper diaper anymore, why are you? Test out some fantastic mama cloth! (I have not had the opportunity to "test-drive" mama cloth as I have had no "reason" to basically since August 2005...well, there was that one chance back in October 2007....) If you are interested in another type of "containment" device...check out the Diva Cup. Some additional benefits (other than environmental) to these products are anecdotal reports of shorter, lighter cycles with less cramping. WOOHOO! Sounds good to me...

Finally, if you really want to go paper-free...check out some family cloth. Doesn't that just sound better than "toilet paper"? I have heard many, many different ways to take this plunge and just honestly cannot quite make the leap.I have also seen recommendations to color-code each family members product. One of the best suggestions I have heard was to use it mainly for girly wiping (i.e. #1) and to continue to use regular t.p for everything else (i.e #2) followed by the "freshening up" with family cloth. Hmmm...whatever works...

(I cannot find a link to someone selling family cloth at the moment although I know I have seen it on Hyena Cart. I will keep looking...let me know if you have one!)