Welcome to our Go Green Challenge: 4 Weeks to an Earth-Friendly Home! Find more posts from this series here. As a reminder, we are focusing on reducing the amount of waste we send to the landfill this week.
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Week one of the Go Green Challenge has my family focusing on reducing our garbage. The ultimate goal is to get to zero-waste, but considering where we are coming from, nothing in the trash can is probably unrealistic. But I do believe we can make a significant dent in what we send to the landfill by making some changes to our lifestyle.
Here is what we are focusing on this week and will continue to implement throughout the 4-week challenge:
Recycle everything possible.
As per Shelly’s suggestion discussed yesterday, we have a recycle bin in addition to the blue cart provided by our garbage provider for curbside recycling in the garage (see the picture above). We will be even more diligent than usual to take advantage of our curbside recycling and we will also collect other recyclables, put them in the extra bin, and dispose of them properly. Later. When Shelly comes to my house and tells me what to do with it.
I also have put a recycling container in both of our bathrooms and in our office to pick up stray recycling that would otherwise be put in the garbage by our lazy selves.
Compost food waste.
I cannot believe the amount of food scraps that end up in the trash or the garbage disposal in our home. I will discuss our composting solution tomorrow.
Eat out less often.
At first, we were encouraged to stop eating out altogether, but that’s just craziness. Eating out is one of our favorite things to do, so I’m going to ease myself into this and focus on staying at home to eat as much as possible and then selecting places that don’t have disposable packaging or packaging that can be composted in the store (like some Burgerville restaurants) or recycled (like Baskin-Robbins’ ice cream cone wrappers).
Buy nothing new.
New stuff comes with lots of packaging, and oftentimes it’s not recyclable, so we want to stay out of the stores.
I broke this rule within 92 minutes of the start of this challenge. Audrey, my nine-year old, was getting an allergic reaction to some nickle-free earrings on Monday so we stopped by Claire’s (a poorly-made-product wasteland) to purchase sterling silver earrings. I’m sure you can find used earrings somewhere (is that nasty? I’m not sure), but it was an emergency (a nine-year old emergency, not a real-life emergency) and I just took care of it. Maybe we can use the plastic packaging to pick a lock in the future.
Reduce food packaging.
Oye. This is going to be a tough one. I have a strong aversion to from-scratch cooking (not my fault, it’s inherited from my mother), so unless my husband is going to bring home a cook, I’m going to have to get all domestic up in here.
I will bring reusable grocery bags or plastic bags from the past to the store. I am going to keep using the packaged food we currently have in the home (because not using it would just be nutty), but we will replace it with as-close-to-package-free food as possible. We will buy bulk at WinCo and Fred Meyer for as many items as possible. For refrigerated food, I will select the options with minimal packaging as possible, like block cheese and deli meat in simple wrappers. For food that typically has tons of packaging, I will attempt to make those items at home. On my list this week are yogurt, bread, and baby food.
I would love to find affordable milk in glass jars, but as far as I can tell, New Seasons is the only store remotely close to me that offers this. The nearest New Seasons is a twenty-minute drive from my home, and considering that it’s $9 per gallon, I’m going to save the gas and the $6 and just buy it in the plastic gallon at my local store.
This is the part of the zero-waste challenge that is most exhausting to me. Go ahead, judge me. I’ve come to terms with my domestic shortcomings and realize that my skill-set lies elsewhere, like cracking jokes during times of awkward sadness and driving. I’m a good driver.
Luckily I have a husband with low-expectations and friends who will make me bread (thank you, Kate).
We are going to tackle disposable diapers, wipes, and toilet paper waste during week three of the Challenge.
Now it’s your turn: What part of going zero-waste would most challenging to you?
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Whenever I buy produce, I try to avoid putting everything in those little plastic produce bags, my husband thinks I’m crazy, put I don’t see the point in putting a few apples, peppers, cucumbers in individual bags. I just put everything in my cart and use ONE reusable bag for all my produce
Same here!
Hey, if you’re feeling crafty, reusable produce bags are fun to make. http://www.imperfecthomemaking.com/2013/04/diy-reusable-produce-bags.html?m=1
pull ups is our worst area. I try to only have him wear them at nap and nighttime, but when we have a busy week- this is the first area I slack on. He loves wearing them better than cloth and laundry is less complicated.
I’d love to know what you do with the plastic bags from Winco bulk. We do Winco bulk and I bought big bins to store flour, sugar, rice, oatmeal… and small containers for spices, etc. But, then I feel bad getting plastic bags of Winco bulk.
I love the idea of an extra container upstairs in bathrooms. I have been noticing the “lazy factor” we have of not carrying recycling downstairs!
We brought bags from home that we’d saved from previous bulk purchases to both Fred Meyer and WinCo.
I’m not sure how I’d handle the bulk spice purchases though. I might just use their little bags and find another use for them when I got home?
Your writing style is hilarious. The end.
To answer your question, we do pretty well in most areas and have been trying to get better about recycling, but our paper waste is probably far more than it needs to be. We buy everything in bulk or glass jars as much as possible, but I’m trying to imagine the look on my husband’s face when I try to tell him we need to give up paper towels. We’ll get there, he comes along with my crazy ideas eventually.
We REALLY want to start composting. We eat mostly whole foods, so the majority of our waste is food compost. I can’t imagine how our trash would be reduced! We don’t buy bread, don’t drink milk, send our egg cartons back to the gal who we buy eggs from and so on. You’re inspiring me to do more!
I’ve been making all of our sandwich bread from scratch for several months now. I’ve tried many different recipes but this is my favorite:
http://www.annies-eats.com/2009/04/09/light-wheat-bread/
So easy, and one of the only recipes I’ve tried that actually rises to resemble the size of store-bought sandwich bread.
We live in Multnomah County who implemented a compost program last year where you can place compost into the yard debris bin. At first it was a difficult transition but now that we are used to it, the difference it makes is significant. In a family of 3, with others always over, we have 1 trash bag of trash per week, fill the recycling to the max weekly and take out 2-3 smalls bins of compost. What was nice was when the composting program was implemented, plastic compost bins for the kitchen were sent out and the trash service was changed to bi-monthly as a big push to make a change.
I am a longtime recycler, and began saving as much food waste as possible when the compost program began. But we are a family of 5 adults and 4 indoor pets, and our 1 can of trash per week now costs me an extra $5 every two weeks for the “extra” can on the bi-weekly pickup. It’s nice having weekly instead of bi-weekly yard debris/compost pickup, but it’s still costing me an extra $130 a year.
I had a funny thing happen yesterday. I was at the Starbucks drive-thru (car idling…whoops, not good!), and I told the barista, “Don’t pour my coffee ’til I get to the window…I have a travel mug (very good). Anyways, when she handed me back my mug, she also handed me a big wad of napkins. (I pulled away before I truly comprehended her wastefulness.) Afterwards, I counted out exactly how many she had given me – thirteen napkins for a single cup of coffee (very, very, very bad)! So much for saving a tree yesterday!
I’m not sure exactly why anyone would buy milk in glass jars, since the plastic gallons are recyclable anyway.
The idea is to avoid the use of natural resources to make the container in the first place and to instead use a reusable container (they clean and reuse the bottles).
I am so bad about throwing compost in the garbage. Our family of 3 usually has 1-2 bags of garbage a week. Even when there were 4 it was about the same. I know I could take it down to one constantly if I quit with the compost in the garbage and put a recycle container upstairs by the bathrooms.
I love this topic by the way!!
Toilet paper waste? How do you avoid that? I am curious to see how you avoid this:)