Zero Waste Cross Country Move

Just a few days after the school year ended we packed up and moved cross country from NY to Colorado. That sounds so casually adventurous. So easy breezy. Not exactly…it was a big change, but we were ready.

The work was all in the cleaning, purging and packing. Trying to keep waste in mind, this is how we did it:

Purging: For weeks I worked on a yard sale (a total bust), selling on Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, donating and sustainably discarding. It’s important to have vetted resources for purging: textile recycling, e-waste recycling, book and toy donations. It takes work to research, but you want to make sure things actually get recycled or responsibly discarded. Selling is not for the faint of heart. That proved to be more work than I could handle. Clearly that needs a better strategy than I had. Of course sharing with neighbors on our Buy Nothing group was my favorite. But also work to post and coordinate. But always worth it.

Boxes: I didn’t buy a single box! I sent an email out to my neighbors to save them for me and I’d pick them up before recycling day and some even dropped at my door. I also posted an ask on my Buy Nothing group. One family was moving in as we were moving out. They’d put on their porch and I would swing by and get some every few days.

Tape: I concede to plastic tape. There is nothing worse than working with shitty tape. No one should be subjected to picking a tape roll to find the end. Torture. You need a tape gun and good tape.

Now that we’ve moved, we still have so much to unpack and a basement full of stuff we haven’t opened. We’ve passed along some boxes and recycled some. What’s nice is that the kids have forgotten about some of their stuff, so there will be more purging. I’ll have to find new donation and discarding resources, but luckily Boulder has done great work there.

But I have to keep coming back to: “Why do we have so much stuff?” The lesson is to minimize what we have and stop bringing stuff in. It’s a constant work in progress.