Let's Talk Trash

Let's talk trash.  Literally.

Trash is a relatively new invention in the history of humanity, but we're rapidly creating many mountains of it.

A couple of years ago I read an article from a West Coast magazine about a woman whose family produced one small handful of trash per month.  I was amazed.  Did she make crafts with their trash?  Recycle it?  Find creative ways to reuse it?  While they did recycle a little, they mostly didn't use trash.  Not even the little stickers on produce.  She shopped in stores that sell items in bulk where you can use your own containers.  Her children were allowed one small bin of toys and that was it.  They each owned 7 shirts.  They used bamboo toothbrushes.  There home was very minimalistic.  She made calls to stop junk mail.

Since reading that article, I've been quite a bit more trash conscious.  Sadly there is no where for me to shop in my area where I can use my own container to store cheese, cereal, or meat, but still I've spent months trying to whittle away at our trash production.

What do I do to reduce waste?

Cloth diapers during the daytime.

Cloth washcloths instead of paper towels.

Cloth napkins.

Reuse jars and large yogurt containers.

Reuse container lids (for painting).

Reuse plastic forks and cups from parties or eating out.

Use my own grocery bags and reuse the plastic bags I do get.

Give all veggie scraps to chickens.

Give all meat scraps to dog.

Use reusable water bottles and sippy cups.

Recycle all #1 & 2 plastics, cardboard, and glass.

Recycle all white paper.

and I even got myself a bamboo toothbrush.

But after recently reading another woman's journey to bring awareness to our excessive use of plastic, I was inspired at her challenge to collect and document all the plastic you use in one week.  I decided, though, that I'd like to see all the trash we produce... not just the plastic.  

So here it is, folks.  I'm showing you my junk. :)

  

On an average week, looks like we make about one big bag of trash.  If there is Spring cleaning or a birthday party, there is definitely a bit more (kids toys are packaged in A LOT of trash).

Our trash.

Out of the bag, this trash covers my living room floor.... and one bag of trash doesn't look or feel as innocent when I see it spread before me.  The majority is food packaging: individual yogurt containers, plastic bags from crackers or cereal, cheese wrappers, applesauce cups.  There are usually a few random broken toys (like this week's moldy rubber ducky).  I use a disposable diaper each night, so weekly I have at least 7 of those. This week I used extra plastic bags because I lost my re-usable wet bag for holding dirty cloth diapers.  Down on the bottom of the picture is all our junk mail and other papers that can't be recycled as cardboard nor as white paper (shiny stiff card-stock sorts of things, and stickers too).  We didn't eat out this week, but if we go to our favorite quick-service restaurant, we practically double our trash.  I'd love to see some more environmentally friendly meal packaging...

Recycling is great... but not nearly as great as if it weren't produced and used in the first place.  We typically have a very full recycling bin by the end of the week.  I also admit that out of laziness I'll throw something in the trash instead of rinsing it for the recycling bin.

This was a really fun experiment for me.  If nothing else, it made me extraordinarily conscientious of every single little thing we throw away.  I'm not sure what next steps I can take to continue to reduce our trash,  but I'm always trying to change our habits just a little more to lighten our wasteful footprint on this world.