Reducing Your Garbage is Easy
Posted by Chad Norman October 3rd, 2007 .Lately, we’ve been noticing how little garbage we have around our house. So much so, that I only have to take my big brown trash bin down to the curb every three weeks (still too much IMHO). I used to fill it up to the top every week, but now it takes 3 weeks! For a typical suburban family of 4, this is quite a feat…yet it was so easy. Here’s how we did it:
We got really serious about our paper recycling. 35% of municipal waste is paper, and we were still throwing a lot of it away. We began recycling all of our paperboard packaging containers - that made the biggest impact. Using cloth napkins eliminated 99% of our napkin/paper towel trash, and gave our family dinners a little elegance. And of course, we started collecting ALL the cardboard and taking it to our local drop site. That’s a lot of paper, and it made a huge difference.
In addition, we have just started to consume less. We buy products that aren’t over packaged. We take canvas bags to every store, not just the grocery. I keep yard waste out of the garbage. The next step is composting our food waste.
All these little things add up, and fast. My goal is to only take my trash out once a month - 12 times a year. I think that’s doable. Can you image if we all went from 52 pickups to 12? Wow, talk about making a difference.
How are you reducing your trash output?…let us know!
3 Responses to “Reducing Your Garbage is Easy”
- 1 Pingback on Feb 22nd, 2008 at 10:04 am
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Hi Chad,
Great post and great progress! I’ve been trying to do the same thing, but I haven’t kept good records of how many times I put out the trash. I’d say once every 3-4 weeks or so, but it is rarely even half-full for our family of three, plus 2 dogs and a cat.
We recycle everything we can, especially paper, compost organics (including unrecyclable paper shreds like paper towels (the unbleached, 100% recycled ones from Publix), coffee grounds and banana peels from work, dog/cat hair and yard clippings). Our dogs consume most of our food scraps and their poop is shoveled into a border, the ivy loves it!
I have recently begun composting our cat litter in a separate pile away from the other composting. All the poop is flushed, so it is just ammonia, water and litter covered with leaves. I use a combination of that recycled pine sawdust litter mixed with the reject recycled newspaper litter. It is a work in progress, but so far so good with no smell.
We take anything usable to Goodwill or the Kidney Foundation or give it away on Freecycle.org.
Another thing we do is when we walk our dogs around the neighborhood, we bring plastic bags (we have switched to reusable bags, so my source is other people’s at work) and pick up trash and recyclables to bring home. We have no problem filling up 2 bags and more of it is recyclable bottles and cans than trash.
Publix will take plastic bags, brown paper bags and styrofoam egg cartons and containers, so we take those there.
Our biggest trash issues are still plastic envelope windows, plastic packaging, #5 plastic containers (Argh!) and tissues.
Yes, I do think your opinion is righteous. (So do lots of people). Luckily majority of people are intelligent :).