Trash talk
March 6, 2008
Posted by CindyW in : Opinions & Thoughts , trackback
A while ago, I heard an interview with David Suzuki, a prominent Canadian environmentalist. It totally impressed me when the interviewer commented on how Suzuki’s family generated just one small bag of trash per month. “That is impossible,” I thought to myself. Suzuki suggested that not consuming packaged food eliminated much of the waste. Hmmm, that sounded interesting and plausible.
This week, my garbage pickup truck came and went. And we did not have a bag to contribute!!!
(excuse me for showing my trash can - not very pretty, really)
I know, I am being all immature and self-congratulatory. Surely the folks at Riot for Austerity are laughing at me. But I am so excited about the prospect of having a 13-gallon bag of trash every two weeks. Usually we have one bag a week. But this week is the first time we do not have enough to fill a 13 gallon bag.
David Suzuki was right. The first step to reduce trash is through eating non-packaged food. Whatever we buy from our local farmer’s market leaves virtually no trash – it either gets consumed by us or composted as food for our plants.
A closer look into what is in our trash bag reveals that 75% of it is plastic – cereal bags, bread bags, packaging for frozen shrimp, a couple broken trinkets from past birthday party goody bags, etc. Then there is a soy milk carton (cannot be recycled in my city), a Styrofoam take out box (a friend brought and left here), and kids’ “art work” that was too “decorated” to be recyclable. Short of making my own cereal and my own soy milk, I’d love to hear suggestions on how to reuse or recycle the bags.
Since composting takes away so much from my trash, I wish my city/county would collect “green waste” from every household like San Francisco.
Learning from many of you who have taken up the role of armchair activists, I will write to my city/county to campaign for a “green waste” pick up program. Perhaps I can even warm up my financially analysis skills that have been long forgotten to convince my city/county the economic upside…
Related posts:
My trash and your trash
Another city says no to styrofoam
A year worth of trash
CindyW
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CindyW
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Comments»
A beautiful sight!! Our trash is WAY down too and I agree with you. If you stop buying all the packaged foods and take out, your trash magically shrinks.
Our city is weighing whether to do food waste pick up (in addition to our green waste) and the local “Green” agency just circulated a petition for it. My sister lives in Berkeley where they have the food waste pick up (they pick up bread, meat, wax paper, stuff that you aren’t supposed to compost in your back yard). She says they virtually have no trash now.
Thanks for the visual!
That’s awesome! I get excited as well by how little trash I throw out. I’m only one person, so obviously my trash is less, but I basically go through one plastic GROCERY bag (so it’s a fairly small bag) once every two weeks. (I don’t compost my trash either. Too little room in my tiny apt.)
I save the bread bags and wash them out and then use them as produce bags. (I find my fruits and veggies last longer in a plastic bag. Also, because I’m not buying anything, this way I don’t have to buy those cotton produce bags.)
I’ve found our rubbish bin is emptier since we started shopping more thoughtfully (again, I used to be good, I slacked off) too. Small things, like it became possible to buy bread locally in a paper bag, or direct into my cloth bag, rather than plastic, and suddenly there was three or four less plastic bags a week. So shopping local (rather than at the supermarket) had two benefits!
Great post.
I mentioned you at
www.treehuggingfamily.com/green-links-to-love/
(You Make My Day award)