Waste Production 101

It is Friday. Trash day. We have not had our over-sized green trash can out on the curb in five or six weeks now. It feels good to produce less waste. This has been a longtime goal of mine. For me, it starts at the grocery store. Buying whole foods with little packaging. Purchasing staples such as rice, beans, and flour in bulk. When we changed our eating and shopping habits our waste production begin to decline. We take the trash out less often. Cooking from whole foods is healthier and challenging. It eases my conscience knowing I produce less waste.

The way one single species holds together and ecosystem is how reducing waste conjurers itself up. One thing leads to another and they all grow off each other. With less food packaging going into the trash can at dinner time, my footprint becomes smaller. Furthermore, I compost every scrap vegetable, fruit, or left over rice. It all makes its way out to the pallet lined compost heap. It rots and grows more food for us. Not eating meat often, allows me to better control what goes into the compost. We also reuse.

Nearly everything in our household gets used several times over before being given away, recycled, or tossed out. Plastic bags to parchment paper to foil and yogurt containers. This helps eliminate the need to purchase food storage containers, thereby reducing the amount produced—in effect lowering waste production. Plastic bags have a life that seldom exhausted. We wash and rewash our bags over and over to use them again. This not only reduces trash, but stretches our dollar a bit further down the road.

I have learned to constantly evaluate my waste production in hopes of reducing. It is hard to not produce waste for it is part of civilization. I know I am not perfect and don't think anyone truly could be. But reducing my waste production step-by-step helps ease my mind at the end of the day. Knowing I kept just one piece of plastic out of the landfill by reusing it helps. These little steps build up over time and soon conglomerate together.

One area I could improve my waste reduction is tea. We drink a lot and while we have some loose tea and metal tea balls, bu we do buy prepackaged tea. While we do compost the tea bags, the box usually gets burned, in the winter or thrown out along with the wrapping. This adds up. When I cook, I use everything possible. Vegetable trimmings often become stock before getting transformed into compost. This holistic approach to reducing waste has been a challenge. But it simplifies things. Life becomes less chaotic without wrappers, cans, and useless packaging. I cook from scratch. I learn new recipes and this guarantees the food I eat is simple, healthy, and closer to sustainability than microwave dinners. I know what I put in and I know what I eat—and I know just how much waste my cooking produces.

Of course waste production goes beyond the kitchen. We seldom purchase new things. Thrift stores have wonders and treasures up and down every isle. We thrive off of reusing everything even if it wasn't ours to begin with. We purchase items at a cheap cost and utilize it until we no longer need it, where we often return it to the thrift store. Clothing has no wrapping. Cookware comes without a box. And blankets, sheets, and decorations—no excessive packaging.

I would say the bathroom produces the most waste of all. Beyond what goes down the toilet, trash is produced here in a higher concentration then elsewhere in the home. Toilet paper comes wrapped up in plastic. Toothpaste. Shampoo. Tampons. Floss. Shampoo. Conditioner. Face wash. These are all newly purchased and include packaging. I try to reuse my shampoo bottles and fill them up with bulk shampoo. But toothpaste is a tough one to get around. Perhaps making it would be a healthier alternative.

My toothbrush is ideal. It defines my philosophy well. It is recycled. Made from yogurt cups and enveloped in recycled plastic. This wrapper is cleverly a return envelope with pre-paid postage to return the used toothbrush to the production facility. When received, it becomes a new toothbrush. Simple. Effective. And sustainable.

I see my drive to become sustainable and reduce my waste production a challenge. An average American produces over four pounds of trash a day. I can't fathom that or want to even create that amount. I'd be in and out the house carrying a trash bag. We need to tone down our consumption. Quiet the demanding materialism habits of ours. Play the music a little softer and it can easily start at home, in the kitchen, the bathroom, anywhere is a good starting point. Waste simply cannot fill up our open spaces.

These open spaces are where we come from and where we go for solitude, rebirth, calm and soothing experiences. Open spaces help de-clutter our daily lives from the chaotic flashes of television, phone calls, meetings, shots of espresso, and traffic jams.

I hear the dump truck lift more trash into its greedy mouth. A near fully mechanized process. The large green truck hauls people around the city, daily, to collect the smelly refuse of capitalism. These honorable folk move trash cans around and onto the hands of the truck. From there, the truck whines and lifts up the trash into oblivion. And off to the landfill. A wasteful program with little sorting or organizing of the waste itself. All over, weekly trucks scour the towns and cities devouring our excess. Filling up to the brim, compacting and mutilating the glories and prizes of materialism.

The trash monster loads up on trash, like a junkie on heroin, seems to need the smelly waste. It wheezes its way around my neighborhood every friday morning. Calling out to all that listen, announcing and clarifying just how much waste we truly create. The hero of waste production. But do we hear the implications? I don't know if we do. Trash disposal is taken advantage of. Taken for granted. I know. I once disassembled an old couch and weekly sent pieces of it to the landfill. It was a cheap and clever method of riddance.

With sustainability and eco-this and eco-that and hybrids and green covering the newspapers and packaging of society, we ought to look at our weekly trash production and make an effort to change. It starts in the home, reducing waste production, and in the store, purchasing less power. Now and into the future—it will continue to affect purchasing, which in turn—will affect waste production.