The admin of the “zero waste, zero judgment” group posted a #TrashAuditTuesday last week (June 24).
It’s a private group, so if you want to see the full post and the other people’s responses, you’ll need to join the group. It’s on Facebook. In the meantime, here is what I wrote:
I love this post, thank you Admin!
Just looking at my own trash, my main type of trash is plastic food packaging, including those big bags lined with shiny silvery stuff (that crackers and chips & things come in), that I am unable to avoid. It’s very frustrating, I do end up just doing without certain foods sometimes but other times I would have a hard time feeding myself properly.
I do not exaggerate when I say it was a game-changer when my local organic food store (the small intimate one, the only one near me — not any of the corporate ones) started being able to carry nutritional yeast in bulk instead of in those obnoxious thick plastic bag things (that a lot of healthy & organic foods seem to come in nowadays).
I compost all food and cardboard and paper, and do not buy any paper towels or any kind of plastic bags. And refuse plastic shopping bags at the store.
I have two housemates. They have gotten mostly on-board with composting food scraps and cardboard and such. However, one of them cooks quite a bit (a great thing for the wallet and the health!), and uses a lot of plastic Ziploc baggies which ends up being a pretty substantial part of our trash. They are usually covered with oil and marinade and stuff. So it would be a lot of labor and materials to try to clean them and reuse them. Plus there are just way too many for me to want to reuse. Still and all, it is very lightweight and not a high volume of material.
(I do put them in a mesh basket in the yard and allow the ants and other bugs to enjoy, so they get pretty clean, but I still just would not have any use for so many plastic bags.)
Same with tiny plastic yogurt containers. It’s a certain brand of yogurt that one of my housemates likes. So we just have a lot of those plastic containers. Sometimes I am able to use them in an art project or something. But most of them will ultimately be destined for trash, once the bugs & other yard-babies have cleaned them out.
And, all of us get takeout sometimes and end up with Styrofoam containers. Although, I’m starting to zero in on the establishments that either use cardboard containers, or let me bring my own container.
Mostly our trash is pretty lightweight. I would say estimate maybe two pounds/ one kilo a week. When I’m by myself, it’s more like 2 pounds or less per month. And in addition to being light in weight, our trash is fairly low-volume as well. One of the huge benefits to composting paper products and kitchen scraps.
Recent trash-cutting wins for me:
•A neighbor started roasting coffee, which he packages in widemouth mason jars. He actually wants us to return the jars so we can keep reusing them. Before, the only way I could get coffee was in these thick foil-like bags which I could never find enough uses for. I used to be able to buy coffee in bulk when I lived near a supermarket but not now. And anyway I think they have stopped offering bulk coffee in the supermarkets here anymore.
•Also, I recently started getting milk and yogurt in giant glass jars that various friends and/or commercial establishments will take back.
Further Exploration:
• (Regarding the eco-footprint of waste, someone in the ZWZJ group shared the following, and I feel OK posting it out here since it’s not a personal comment, but is about a publicly available book.) “Peter Kalmus aka Climate Human has the following annual amounts listed on p.163 of his book Being the Change.
“700 kg CO2e from food and yard waste (less 200kg CO2e if you compost all food waste, less 200 kg CO2e if you compost all yard waste, less 300 kg CO2e if you get at least 1/4 of your food from freeganism); 150 kg CO2e from sewage (unless you practice humanure.)”
“300 kg CO2e comes from paper waste (assuming you recycle paper and cardboard, otherwise it would be higher), and 300 kg CO2e from textiles. If much of your clothes are secondhand reduce your textile waste proportionally.”
“BTW I highly recommend his book. Available (low carbon) at most libraries or used at Thriftbooks.”