Day 156 of our Green Year: Moving and Offsets

As many people may have noticed, Layla and I have been getting rid of much of what we own, including a lot of our furniture. Along with reducing our possessions, the reason for this has been that we are moving.

Currently, we live far from family and it is not always easy to have this distance between us. After visiting family in August, we found that we missed being near them and decided that we would move to be closer.
Naturally, moving does create carbon dioxide emissions and we are moving quite a distance to be closer to family. Therefore, when we arrive, we will be purchasing carbon offsets from CarbonFund.Org to compensate for the distance we drove and carbon dioxide emissions we produced.

During the process for the move, we have tried to keep environmentally minded with everything. We did not purchase new boxes, and simply took boxes out of the McDonald's cardboard recycling bin. We will then be recycling those boxes when we arrive and unpack. We have ensured that nearly everything we own is in boxes so that there is no wasted space and no need for a vehicle that is bigger to accommodate the wasted 'air'. Packing has allowed us to get rid of much of what we own and we estimate we decreased what we own in the past few months by 50 percent as a result. Even the bags we bought to store items not in boxes were made from recycled materials. We did not buy any packing material, and instead used old newspapers (which we bought before we banned them), clothes and shredded papers.
In our new home, we will continue buying local and organic, but there will be some changes.

Our destination also plays into Our Green Year, as will be addressed in Day 157.