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 with less recycling in the blue bin

Recycling is one of those things that makes me feel good. I've always considered myself very good at recycling. Our blue bin has never contained trash and always had clean, dry recyclables. I regularly checked the flyer from the city to make sure the things I put in there really were recyclable. I broke down boxes so I could fit more in. Our recycling cans, yes I have two, were often full on pick up day. 

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. 

The one with the dental floss

Yeah, it's a little thing, probably the smallest thing I throw away on a regular basis. And, to be perfectly honest, I probably have not contributed as much dental floss to landfills as my dentist would like me too. 

But, hey, every little bit counts, and it turns out there are some really easy ways to stop using plastic in my dental care routine. All of these things avoid plastic in their packaging too.

1. Bamboo toothbrushes: You probably already know about these. I've been using them for years, even before I decided to make a conscious effort to use less plastic. I haven't been entirely successful in getting the rest of my family to use them, but that may change eventually. It's been great being able to tell my dentist I don't need a new plastic toothbrush.

2. Bamboo electric toothbrush heads: These were new to me. My dental hygienist strongly encouraged me to get an electric toothbrush. I resisted because I love my bamboo toothbrushes. Then a family member bought an electric toothbrush at Costco and it came as a pack of two, because Costco. The extra one she didn't need became mine and I resigned myself to buying plastic brush heads for it. But, behold, there are bamboo replacement heads now. I've been using it for months and so far no issues. Some reviews say people don't like the feel of wood in their mouth, but I was used to using a bamboo toothbrush anyway. Eventually, I'll need some pliers to pull out the bristles and compost the brush head in our city collected organic waste bin, which I don't have yet because that program is still in it's roll out phase. 

3. Biodegradable Dental Floss: I LOVE this stuff. I even floss more regularly because I get to use this adorable little glass container with this floss that feels like it is really cleaning between my teeth. First you buy the starter kit with the tiny glass jar and three spools. Then you just need the refills after that. It took me about two months to use up my first spool, so I'd guess the starter kit is a six months supply. The refill pack has five spools. A few disclaimers, we previously bought a warehouse store pack of plastic floss, so we still have some of that to use up. Also, I have one place where my teeth are very tight. Sometimes, I can't get in there with the biodegradable floss and I have to revert to the thin plastic stuff for that corner of my mouth. The reviews that complain that the biodegradable floss is not as strong are correct. It does break sometimes in tight spaces. I can live with that. It's part of the adventure. This picture is from my first spool once it was almost used up. 

4. Dental floss picks: One member of my family prefers floss picks. He has a lot, but once he uses those up we will switch to a variety that are biodegradable. 

5. Toothpaste: I honestly use very little. I don't have a replacement to recommend here, because we haven't gotten through the supply of back stock of toothpaste we have. Seriously, we may need a year or more to go through all the toothpaste currently in our drawers. Once all of that is gone, I'll look at the options. I know there are a lot of choices. Toothpaste tablets, with and without fluoride, abound. Let me know in the comments if you have any suggestions. 

I've linked to versions I bought or am considering buying next, but you may also be able to find these things near you at a local health food store or refill shop. Whenever possible I encourage you to shop locally for your #zerowaste items and support those small businesses. 

Note: This post and others includes one or more affiliate links. I usually only link to products I actually bought, use, like, and recommend. In this case, I did link to one item I plan to buy in the future. I'm a teacher. If you use one of my affiliate links, you are contributing toward books for my classroom while buying something you want anyway.

The one where I bring my own leftovers box

We like to go out to eat, but I almost always end up with leftovers. Asking the server for a to-go box as they deliver my meal has become standards practice. So often we have struggled to flag down our busy server and get a to-go box at the end of a meal. 

But, with a zero waste lifestyle goal, I began just bringing my own container to stow my leftovers. I don't need to add another task for a busy server, and I can box up my food whenever I'm ready. 

It sometimes feels a little awkward to bring my own box. I admit I was a little nervous about it the first few times, but the reactions from servers has been really supportive. The first time I did this, the waiter saw me loading my extra raviolis into my own container and he said, "I love this!" then he repeated it several more times. 

The tight sealing lid has never leaked, unlike single use packaging. I can fit the box in my purse, both with and without food in it. (I would never have put a single use box in my purse, definite leak situation there.) I don't have to take home any extra packaging, paper or plastic, and my food stays fresher. 

When we are getting ready to go out to dinner I just grab a container from our stock and slip it in my purse. I am fortunate enough to have a nice bag that is big enough to do this. 

I found my glass food storage containers at a discount shop that sells overstock from other places, but they are basically these.  Any container you have that fits in your bag and is airtight will probably work for you. 

I'm going to keep bringing my own box whenever I think I may have leftovers. Maybe you'll do the same. 

Note: This post includes an affiliate link to a product I didn't actually buy. It is the closest thing I could find to one I did buy from a local store. I suggest you try to find something similar from a local overstock place near you. If you by something through the link I shared, I'll earn a small (very small) portion of your purchase and I'll use it to buy books for my classroom. 

This post also includes a link to the company I bought my purse from. I love the bag I bought from them. They also offer teachers a discount and I love a good teacher discount. 

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.  

The one about grocery shopping

I am still really new to this make-less-trash idea. I've been moving in that direction for awhile, and I've already posted about some things I've been doing for a long time, getting a CSA box of produce, using shampoo bars etc. But I thought, when I decided to actually make a lot less trash, that grocery shopping would be the toughest part. It turns out there were some easy changes I could make there too. 

Food is what we buy the most and consume the most. It creates the most single use plastic, the most recycling containers, and the most trash in our household. The fact that I live with other people who want to eat specific things is what will keep our household from ever being entirely free of single use plastics. 

But, I've made some major progress and convinced them to make several important changes in our habits. I've gone back to doing most of my weekly grocery shopping at the local store that sells items in bulk. And they sell candy. 

Our previous chocolate consumption meant buying a large plastic bag filled with individually wrapped smaller items. It was trash inside trash, just to get to that small bit of sugar. 

My son's sweet tooth, and mine too, are now very happy with gummy bears and chocolate items from the bulk bins. Scooped and bagged in canvas for transport, these are an easy way to reduce our wrapper waste. And, it turns out that the 12oz jars our favorite jam comes in, make great re-use containers to store snacks and candy. (Removing the labels was easier than I thought it would be.)

The list of things I can now buy in *package free* canvas re-usable bags includes: 

-candy and chocolate

-dates, dried fruits, nuts

-rice, flour, salt, sugar

-oats, quinoa, popcorn

A small investment up front in canvas bags was all I needed to get started. I currently own four. They were all .99 cents. So, for about $4 I was able to get started bulk buying. As I use up my existing stock of bulk goods, and need to buy more bulk items in some shopping trips, I may need to buy a few more canvas bags, but I consider the minor investment worth it. The bags have their own weight printed on them, so the cashier deducts that from the weight of the bulk items I'm buying. 

I've also removed most plastic from my produce purchasing by using cloth net bags. The few produce items that don't come in my CSA box, now go into cloth mesh bags. I am still buying berries in plastic clamshells because I love berries in my lunches and that's the only way the grocery store sells them. Sigh. 

Above, is what my latest Sunday shopping trip looked like. A bunch of bulk items, produce in mesh bags, a loose bell pepper, some salmon wrapped in paper, and the boxes of berries. Yes, there is still some plastic, but way less packaging trash than I used to create while shopping. 

And if you think that's not a lot of food for a week, you're right. Remember we also get the box of produce from the CSA, and frequently we get a weekly box from a meal plan service. I'll need a separate post to cover my meal prep and planning strategies. My weekly grocery trip is typically one dinner protein, usually fish. Snacks and candy, some produce, and any bulk items we are running low on. 

A monthly Costco run keeps us stocked for canned goods, a 25 Lb. paper bag of bread flour, milk, butter, and most recently a delicious watermelon, when I realized it was one of the few produce items I could buy there that wasn't wrapped in plastic. 

My grocery bills are going down. Yeah, we are seeing crazy food inflation and I'm saving money buying in bulk because I'm able to buy smaller quantities at the bulk price. When I scoop from the bulk bin, I'm only getting what I need for the week. Learning that I do not need to buy and store large packages of sugar, flour, oats etc. has been a nice side effect of this less trash plan. 

Note: This post and others includes one or more affiliate links. I only link to products I actually bought, use, like, and recommend. I'm a teacher. If you use one of my affiliate links, you are contributing toward books for my classroom while buying something you want anyway.