The one with the green bin

This is not a drill. The city crew delivered a green bin to our house yesterday. I've looked forward to this for months now. So much of our trash was food waste. Yes, I am working on making less of that, but when I juice lemons for lemonade I still end up with lemon rinds to throw away. 

Now all food waste, rinds, leftovers goes in the green bin. We also get to include all yard trimmings, leaves, and untreated wood like that weird short log we've had in a corner for a long time. It also turns out we produce a lot of compostable materials in the bathroom: hair, q-tips, and biodegradable dental floss, so I'm going to need a compost container in there. 

But, as tempting as it is to buy some new compost bins, I'm going to take a deep breath and start with containers we already have. The city delivered a "small" food scraps bucket with the green bin, but it is ugly and flimsy. I don't want to see it on the counter and I think it may fall apart quickly with heavy use. 

Yesterday, I gave a good scrubbing to the OXO compost bin we used to use when I pretended I was composting in the back yard. It had some suspicious brown stains on the inside, but vinegar and baking soda were remarkably effective. It's cute and functional, but when it came time to make lemonade and dinner I remembered I had a white three gallon bucket in the garage. I called it the dinner bucket. It was easy to throw food scraps into, and scrape plates into, and after dinner it got dumped in the green bin without hassle. For ease of use, you just can't beat a short term compost bucket without a lid to get in the way.

The challenge now will be adapting my family and myself to these new habits. We have to find a way to store and move food scraps on a daily basis. We have to get used to making a trip to the green bin after dinner, and maybe more often than that. We have to re-evaluate how much non-organic trash we make and adjust the sizes of containers we need for food scraps, trash and recycling. 

You know you're a #zerowaste geek when the arrival of the green bin in the highlight of your week.

The one where I travel by car

Traveling via road trip is one of those times where I typically would use a lot of disposable items, mostly related to food, but also small toiletry items, paper hotel bills, bottled water, plastic bags, etc. 

Planning for traveling with less trash takes some thinking ahead, and some different choices, but it's really not that hard. Let's take a look at my thought process by category. 

Note: This post contains some affiliate links. Some are for items I bought, liked, and recommend. Other links go to items similar to things I got as gifts/swag from conferences. 

Food: 

This is the toughest. Fast food is so easily accessible and delicious, but it does generate a lot of trash. Choice is my tool here. I can choose food places that serve on reuse-able tableware. Panera is a favorite option for that reason, but there are also lots of local restaurants worth trying. Taking the time to get off the highway, and sit down at a restaurant is a good way to make less trash and enjoy the trip more. Google maps now makes it possible to find good food options that aren't within sight of the highway. And when friends tell me about good places to eat in their towns, I add those to my "want to go" saved section in Google Maps. 

Of course many places still want to hand me a plastic cup, so I plan ahead and keep a re-useable tumbler cup in my car. This comes in very handy. I can use it for a drink at a fast casual restaurant and also fill it with water in the hotel lobby. Plus, sometimes a restaurant won't even charge me for the drink if I brought my own cup. 

Snacks are readily available in bulk bins. I bring them along in canvas bags, or Stasher bags. This also helps me not spend money at convenience stores. 

Plastic utensils eventually show up in every road trip, so I bring a fork and spoon wrapped in a bandana. The silverware stays clean and the bandana is a re-useable napkin. I've never really needed a knife, but if I think I might need it I could add that to the kit. Some people like a bamboo utensil kit to save weight, but I tend to pack light enough that it's not an issue. Note: If you are getting take out food, you need to specify that you do not need utensils.

Hotels almost always have a coffeemaker and paper cups to go with it. My camping mug was an unexpected gift from an edtech vendor. I didn't think I would use it much, and then I thought about making tea in a hotel room. I would have to use a paper cup provided by the hotel to fit into the one cup machine. I remembered the camping mug and brought it along. It fit perfectly in the coffee maker, and I didn't have to trash a paper cup. One of the things I like about this mug is that it has no handle, making it easier to pack. The lid means I can use it to pack small items too. Apparently, it is hard to find one without a handle. This Yeti one is similar though. 

Water:

I mentioned filling my tumbler cup with water from the hotel lobby. On road trips I also usually bring 1-2 large water bottles that I filled at home. If needed I can refill these while traveling. Often I travel for conferences and there are usually water stations set up I can refill from. This way I never cave to the $7 bottle of water in a hotel room. (I'm not kidding. That was the actual price of the bottle in my hotel room a few weeks ago. And it was not a very fancy hotel.)

Toiletries:

Ahh, the travel sizes. They are so cute. I used to love going to the wall of bins at the drug store and paying a premium for little bottles of shampoo, sunscreen, and other assorted mini versions... of things I already owned in larger sizes. Of course I also owned cheap tiny refillable bottles that leaked sometimes. And I subscribed to one of those beauty samples boxes that sent me 5-6 small sizes of things every month, many of which became "save for travel" items. Then I would get out on the road and find out I didn't really like that product after all. 

It was in 2020 that I bought my set of Cadence capsules. Fair warning, these are pricy, but they are great for travel. I can easily fill them with the products I already use. (No more buying expensive travel sizes of items I'm not sure I'll like.) And, if I consider what I've saved by not buying travel sizes, these have paid for themselves. Plus, I always have exactly the same products I use at home. No surprises. These capsules never leak. Really, the caps fit tight and I've never had a leak issue through lots of flying and driving. They are adorable, and they magnetically stick to each other to keep them together. The lid labels are also magnetic and swap-able. 

The printing on the lids is often hard for me to read without my glasses, not ideal for the shower, so I swap the label tiles from different colored containers to create color combinations I can distinguish. Each original capsule is .56 oz, which is not large. Now, they make bigger versions too, but I have never felt the need for a larger size. 

Part of the reason some people say they want larger Cadence capsules is to carry shampoo. Since I cary a piece of a solid shampoo bar, I don't worry about that. I wrote about my favorite shampoo bars here. 

Grocery Bags: 

In any road trip there comes a time when I need to buy something, so I always cary an expandable bag. If I'm in my own car, there will also be standard sized re-useable grocery bags in the trunk, but the expandable bag is great to keep in my purse. I have a really compact one that was swag from a vendor a long time ago. I've tried to find similar versions of it to give as gifts. These were as close as I could get. I like that they come in a three pack. I put one in my daily backpack and gifted the others to family members. 

Paper: 

A lot of the paper is already out of our travel process these days anyway. Think boarding pass on your phone and hotels that email you the bill. (That sentence would make absolutely no sense to my grandmother, who was an amazing traveler in her day.) I still manage to cut a little more paper here and there, like refusing the map of the local area the hotel receptionist tried to hand me and choosing paperless receipts. 

With a little forethought, some planning, and by brining along just a few extra items, I was able to remove a lot of the trash from my road trips and make myself more comfortable in the process. 

The one where I own my trash

Part of my zero waste journey is cleaning out my house, downsizing, decluttering whatever you want to call it. And, yes, sometimes in the process that means I'm making more trash, but really I made that trash 20 years ago, or whenever I bought or created that item. I'm just finally admitting it is trash, and it is mine. 

Today I cleaned out teaching materials I haven't used in over 17 years. In 2006 I switched from teaching middle school to high school and I carefully stored all of my carefully curated middle school materials. Seventeen years later they were still in the same spot and I figured it was time to admit I probably won't be teaching middle school again, and if I did I wouldn't be using those materials anyway. 

So here is the part where I get proactive and take ownership of my trash. First of all it's not all trash, but if someone else were clearing out my house it probably would be. To keep most of it out of the landfill eventually, it makes sense to deal with it myself now.

Mixed in with the paper folders are books about each subject. Those are now listed on our local gifting group. The cardboard magazine files that held the folders for each unit are on the gifting group too. Then there are the three prong folders, one for each lesson. They include the teacher directions, originals to copy for students, overhead transparencies, and sometimes laminated materials too. I can't just chuck these in the recycling because there are too many mixed materials in there. 

See, you might think that everything you put in a blue bin gets recycled, but most of it goes through a sorting center and anything that has "mixed materials" is automatically trash, even if 95% of it is paper. So, to own my trash, I need to open every one of those three prong folders and separate the plastic things like transparencies from the paper things. Then I cut off the spine of the folder, the part with the metal prongs. Those go in the trash and now the paper covers can be recycled. 

My husband suggested someone might want the empty folders, but they were pretty messed up, written on, and many had places where bugs had nibbled on them. The last time I needed a folder like that was approximately 17 years ago, so I wasn't going to save them for reuse.

In about an hour I separated materials in over 60 folders and made sure 90% of those materials can get recycled instead of just becoming trash. 

Did I want to spend an hour doing that, not really. But I did want to take responsibility for trash I had created and do what I could to make it more recyclable and less trash? Yes.