Last night I got some tangible proof that our efforts to waste less food and create less trash are paying off. My husband mentioned that he was going to call the city since we didn’t need our trash picked up every week anymore, and so maybe it would cut our bill. I asked him how much he thought we had cut our trash output, and he said we were generating less than half of what we used to have.
Awesome. I actually think it’s even less than that, but either way, it’s great. And it makes a lot of sense. I had a heaping plate of “produce debris” waiting to go out to the compost bin that in the past would have gone into the trash. So in addition to keeping it out of the landfill where it creates harmful gasses, and creating compost to use in a garden, our new habit also keeps the trash from smelling rotten. It’s a win/win/win, one of those brilliant intersections that Katy Wolk-Stanley at The Non-Consumer Advocate calls a trifecta.
Composting is one of the main reasons we’re creating less waste, the others are:
*Cooking from scratch more often and buying less packaged food
*Refusing to buy products with over-the-top and nonrecyclable packaging (as much as possible)
*Throwing away a lot less food by participating in Food Waste Friday
That’s it. Those four things have contributed to cutting our household waste by more than half.
My husband generally abhors what he considers banal conversations about household management and the like, preferring abstract topics like what makes you care about a character in a short story and what makes an individual vote against their own self-interest. It makes him fun to live with, especially since he can always come down to earth long enough to perform useful household tasks like taking out the trash.
Are you creating less trash these days? Please leave your tips and advice in the Comments section. And if you need inspiration, visit My Zero Waste and follow the saga of the Green family in their attempts to cut waste.
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