Eve O. Schaub's Blog, page 8

No One Expects the Garbage Inquisition

I’ve been having a hard time lately. The dips in my emotional rollercoaster have been, well, deeper. Harder to struggle out of. The other day I felt so depressed for a while I had trouble maintaining a normal telephone conversation. I just wanted to put the phone down and walk away. Maybe go to sleep. […]

Garbage, Garbage Burning Bright

So last night I had another garbage dream and I knew you’d want to hear about it. In this dream, I was at the house of a friend, but for some reason there were huge, stinky garbage bags all over the place. Suddenly, as happens in dreams, we realized that the garbage bags were going […]

The Chicken Who Lived

I know the world is ending, but first I’d like to talk about something that happened at our house this week: one of our baby chickens was attacked by a raccoon and lost a good part of her face. We’ve been raising baby chicks for the first time this year. We bought nine of them […]

Top Ten Facts You Need to Know About Terracycle NOW!

You know what makes me crazy? List articles. You know the ones: Top Ten Things You Could Be Recycling NOW! Or: Recycling! Ten Ways You’re Doing it ALL WRONG!! The reason I don’t like these articles is because they often purport to give you good advice about important issues, like recycling, but actually end up […]

Lovely Vintage Things

Note from Eve: This week features a post written by my daughter Greta. If you read Year of No Sugar you met her at age 11; now at age 20 she is an aspiring young actress studying at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting in New York City. Since school closed for the pandemic in […]

Are “Compostable” Products a Fraud, Or What?

Have you ever received a product in “compostable” packaging and felt good about it? Me too! But recently I realized, maybe I shouldn’t. I got to thinking about compostables while on a food run the other day with my daughter Ilsa: we were picking up a dozen bagels from a local shop and she asked […]

The Garbage Blob That Ate My Kitchen *or* How to Set Up Your Home Recycle Absolutely Everything Center

Periodic freak-outs seem to be a part of my process. Since the beginning of our Year of No Garbage, the corner of my kitchen has served as the hub of all things not single-stream recyclable or compostable. Call it my “wishful recycling” pile. In the early days back in January it was downright adorable: little […]

IS Plastic Wrap Recyclable?

Plastic wrap is a tough one. Also known as “cling wrap” or “plastic film­,” it presents maybe the toughest of all zero-waste conundrums. Only those who are trying to avoid it can fully appreciate how everywhere it is. Whole aisles of meats, entire walls of cheeses, all sealed off from the world in tidy little […]

Happy… Earth Day?

Well, hell. This is not the Earth Day I was expecting. Not that I’ve ever been exactly sure how I was supposed to celebrate Earth Day… but surely this can’t be it. Last week they brought BACK the plastic bags at my supermarket whose ban I was so delighted to witness only a few short […]

In Search of the Great Intergalactic Space Plastic Solution

Last night, I dreamed I had invented a way to turn clear plastic wrapping into food. I had made a lovely plastic salad that looked like transparent coleslaw. Fortunately I woke up before eating it. Probably this is because one of the concessions the current pandemic has wangled from me is that, I’m not really […]