An Eco-Friendly Anniversary
Do you ever feel like having fun means spending money and that hitting the cool spots is a requirement for a special occasion? A minimalist lifestyle makes you challenge your definitions of a gift or a special evening, but in our search for finding ourselves and decreasing the importance that material possessions have in our lives, we can often find opportunities to reinvent traditional paradigms. Yes, going to a fancy restaurant can be nice every once in a while, getting presents is fun too, but when you have everything you really need, how to celebrate in harmony with nature and in a cost effective way?
Well, this is what my husband and I did for our two year wedding anniversary:
Ingredients
Beer or another cold beverage (put them in the freezer about 2 hours before)
Camera
We got this one from a friend, but you don’t need a DSLR, I also brought my old little digital camera and smartphones can take great photos too.
Your wedding dress and signature accessories
My go-to minimalist make-up: Physician’s Formula Organic Wear Mascara, sheer old Avon lipstick that I wore on my wedding day and eos Strawberry Sorbet lip-balm.
Favorite perfume for a while, Halloween.
Your favorite pet
Backpack
1 medium pizza of your choice
A big mountain
…and some trash bags, 2 folding chairs (if needed), a tripod, water and his clothes.
The plan
The plan: to hike up Madonna Mountain in San Luis Obispo for the best pizza and beer dinner ever!
Total cost
- 2 Sierra Nevadas Oktoberfest edition: $4
- Two thirds of a medium pineapple/chicken/white sauce pizza from our local pizzeria (Fattess ♥): $20
- Water: free
- Sunset: free
- Clothes: old
- Best seats in the house: free
- Gas: $3
- Total: $27
The Journey
When this idea was first born, I was picturing bringing a few extra things, like a table, plates and candles, but we didn’t really have the appropriate table and it would have been a lot more painful to carry. The slightly modified version was just as good as I imagined and we have a couple photos to remember.
We spent around 2.5 hours from bottom to top and back, which gave us enough time to hang out, dress up, take pictures, ask a stranger to take out picture (we forgot the tripod), undress, clean up and get going again.
We got a good workout carrying a few extra pounds in our backpacks, not enough to burn the pizza and beer, for sure, but we had the best view of the city for the low price of $0. The exercise and fresh air adds a lot to the experience; I wouldn’t change this for driving to a restaurant and overpaying for food, when all you need is pizza.
So, why was this eco-friendly?
- We didn’t give each other presents, we didn’t really need anything and this reduced use of paper, plastic, transportation costs and other costs linked to the distribution of the potential gifts.
- I did not get a new dress, but used my real wedding dress, yes, my wedding dress was black, don’t believe me? Here is a picture of our wedding:
- We drove to the start of the trail, but it was less than driving to town for dinner.
- By not going to a restaurant, we eliminate the use of water to wash dishes and napkins along with the additional electricity on cooking and handling food.
- We didn’t use plastic water bottles, instead, we had one of those backpacks with a bladder, like this one.
- We brought the food in plastic bags that later we used for trash.
- If you are like us, leftover pizza means breakfast + lunch, hence no cooking the next day! Woo-hoo!
- Healthy people are happier, happier people are nicer to others, when others are happy, everything is better!!! 🙂
Tip
The answer depends highly on the structural integrity of the pizza box in terms of contaminants. Paper products mix with oil and sauce easily, and since the recycling process for paper and cardboard -unlike plastic and aluminum- entails mixing the product with water, this can cause a giant contamination problem, since once grease mixes with paper it cannot be separated from the fibers. This can cause all the paper items mixed with it in your recycling bin to get contaminated, and thus, they cannot be recycled anymore. If you ever thought there was a magical machine that could separate good paper from bad paper, well, that doesn’t exist yet… boo. This little mistake costs the recycling industry millions of dollars, according to this article, a ballpark estimate puts the losses at US$700 million a year.
So, what to do if you want to be eco-friendly? You need to examine how much grease has permeated the box and NOT RECYCLE, but compost all the parts of the box that are contaminated. In my case, the box was way too dirty to recycle, so I couldn’t salvage any part of it, next time, I will take the pizza out from the box faster to see if it’s possible to avoid contamination. Also, this might be handled differently depending on the City, so I’ll make a call to confirm what the right procedure is.
Find more information here:
Can You Recycle Pizza Boxes? Kinda Sorta Maybe…