Folks who know about zero waste, say you should do a trash audit, so you can see what you are throwing away and then take steps to reduce those things. I kind of skipped that step, but I know pretty well what we are throwing away.
The things is, our trash production is actually quite small. At this point we are usually trashing one thirteen gallon white plastic trash bag a week. Sometimes two, but mostly just the one.
But the recycling 🙄. In the days before I started trying to reduce waste, we regularly filled both blue trash cans on the weeks our recycling was picked up. At the time I actually thought this was a good thing. "Look how much of our waste we recycle!"
Now, I know better. I shop differently, and I have found some other ways to divert things from our recycling bins. Reuse for the win!
Cardboard
We are happy online shoppers. I don't see that changing. We like our weekly meal plan box. (I'll write more about meal planning at some point, but the meal plan box is less wasteful than it sounds.) We order pet food online. Buying just the one thing I need online is better than going to a store and talking myself into buying more things. So we have boxes. I used to break them down. I still do that for some small ones, but now I make sure to remove any plastic packing tape first, so they can actually be recycled.
What I discovered, is that I can give away boxes in our local gifting group. (I wrote about the gifting group here.) There are always people getting ready to move, or moving things into storage, or in need of a shipping box. The trick I found, is to wait until I have 5-6 medium to large boxes. This typically takes about 3-4 weeks, and I'm lucky to have an out of the way place to stack them. No one wants to come pick up one box, but they do like a solid collection. Once I have a critical mass, I take a picture and post it on the gifting group. A grateful person, who doesn't have to buy as many brand new boxes, picks them up from my porch the next day. The boxes get reused and I don't have to break them down or fit them in my recycling can.
Jam Jars
Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are popular in our house. So is jam on toast. Therefore we have a favorite strawberry jam that I get at a local market, okay it's Trader Joes. Their reduced sugar strawberry jam comes in an adorable 12 oz glass jar with a nice gold lid. When I started shopping in bulk bins, I needed a way to store items like gummy bears, and other things that I didn't already have pantry storage for. I started taking the labels off these jam jars and they are so perfect for storing all kinds of things. The jars aren't going in our recycling bin anymore, and I keep finding new ways to use them. Peanut butter jars (we buy that in glass now) and wide mouthed salsa jars are also great reuse containers. And I have a pretty solid plan about how donate these when I have too many, but that's another post.
Drink Bottles
In the past, my family consumed a lot of drinks that came in plastic jugs, usually the half gallon size. Lots of lemonade came into our house that way, but also iced tea, juices, etc. (See the plastic bottle in the image above? That's the last one I bought. We finally used them all up.) Then it occurred to me that it couldn't be that hard to make lemonade. I had lemons from our CSA box, and I've found that sometimes a neighbor picks their tree and leaves out a box of free lemons. I can turn four lemons into 64 oz of lemonade in under ten minutes. I'll put my recipe below. Boom, a major source of bulky plastic stopped showing up in our recycling bin. The version in the picture above is actually made with grapefruit juice because we got grapefruit in the CSA last week and I figured I'd try it. Works great with the same recipe. I got the glass jar on Amazon, so I wouldn't have to store lemonade in a plastic jug. It fits on the shelf in the fridge door just as well.
Laundry Soap Jugs
I have written previously about my switch to laundry sheets. I've been using them for months now and I'm still really happy with that choice. I didn't have a jug of laundry soap to recycle very often, but those will no longer appear in our recycling can either. I still want to be able to have bleach around for some uses, but I have learned I can buy it in tablets that come in a much smaller (though still plastic) bottle. So no more bleach jugs either.
Cleaning Products
I'm not a big fan of cleaning. I'm learning now that part of my lack of enthusiasm came from really hating chemical cleaning agents. One day during the pandemic, it occurred to me to put on an N95 mask while spraying the shower tiles, it helped, but the product still made my eyes sting. No thank you. And of course those products came in plastic bottles. Even when I dutifully bought refill jugs instead of new spray bottles, I was still adding plastic to my recycling bin.
Looking for ways to reduce plastic made me finally break down and try one of those brands where you buy the glass spray bottles and refill them with concentrates or dissolving tablets. I won't specify which one I'm trying, because I haven't tried the others and I don't feel excessively well informed about the variations. But I will say I love how well these products work, and how much they do not irritate my eyes, nose and throat. They smell good too. My cat, who used to run when I cleaned, actually comes to investigate when I start cleaning with these. I think he likes the smell of it too. My house is cleaner and there is less plastic waste in the blue bin.
Full disclosure: I am still working through what's left in some of those plastic refill jugs. There are at least 4-5 of them still in my garage. The use-it-up part of switching to zero waste takes patience. I got serious about this in February of 2023. It's May now and we are just starting to be done using some of our plastic packaged items. Eventually, I may finally admit that I should gift things I don't want to use anymore, but in this case, that feels like passing the problem on to someone else.
Paper
Oh, I'm going to need a whole separate post about reducing paper. It's a process I've been working on for years.
What's still in the recycling bin?
Well, paper, I'm still working on that. Some food packaging, mostly steel cans from pet food, and milk cartons. I tried to get my people to switch to milk that came in a glass jug that I could return for a deposit. The funny thing is the fancy glass jar milk came with a layer of cream on top of the milk. I think the dairy considered 'cream top' a feature. My younglings considered it a bug and would not drink lumpy milk. I thought it was delicious, but I couldn't drink all of a 1/2 gallon myself before it went bad. My husband has switched to getting his 1/2 and 1/2 in the pint size glass jars though, and we return it for the $3 deposit, so that's one less small carton in our waste stream every week.
Making less recycling seems as much or more important than making less trash. The truth is we already made very little trash when I started to consciously try to make less, but we were proudly generating a lot of recycling. As I look for ways to cut single use plastics, and reuse items before recycling them, we are slowly bringing down the volume of recycling in the blue bin. We need to put it out for collection next week, but this time it will be just one can instead of two. Progress.
