Photo on left: [sturdy plastic green box issued by the city, full to the brim with 2 weeks’ worth of our household recycling]
Photos on right [cylinder about 4 feet high and 10 inches in diameter, made of chicken-wire and containing plastic ziploc bags and various other lightweight nonrecyclable plastic trash]:
- Above: About two MONTHS’ worth of our household trash, household of 3.
- Below: The same household trash, compacted by squashing down with a shovel.
I took these photos to demonstrate the extent to which food packaging accounts for a huge proportion of household trash in the USA.
The three of us buy very little stuff other than food. We each have different eating habits and dietary needs. One housemate cooks a lot and uses about one Ziploc bag per day to marinate chicken etc.
I personally am able to avoid a lot of food and drink packaging simply because I’m very obsessed with avoiding it. For example, I am able to get produce from local farms delivered without plastic bags. And I’m able to get milk in returnable glass jars. And when I want a soda as an occasional treat, I walk down the street to the convenience store with my refillable cup. And I buy delicious fresh-baked loaves of bread from a European market and they put it in a plain paper bag.
Even so, there is a lot of packaging I find difficult to impossible to avoid. Very much to my chagrin!
I enjoy making what you might call “practical trashy demos”: Visual representations of the trash we produce. The little “trash cage” cylinder is made of chicken wire that someone threw away at curbside. Once it gets super full I will empty it into the actual trash can and put it out for the trash collection.
According to the @Riot for Austerity numbers, the average US household produces 4.5 pounds of trash per person per day. A lot of that is probably because people throw food in the garbage. Instead of composting it. And a lot of it is surely packaging for food and consumer goods.
Our cylinder of “fluffy” plastic trash weighs maybe 7 pounds.
Also, although I mentioned that we use a recycling bin, I never assume anything really gets recycled. I end up using a lot of the tin cans in craft projects. And, fun fact, in our super humid and salty coastal climate, a tin can will rust and disintegrate in a matter of weeks. The early rust stage is a great opportunity for decorative painting of cans to repurpose.
You can see photos here on my deep green Facebook page for as long as the will of Zucc allows.