Waste Reduction

In my opinion waste is a huge issue. I think my reason behind this comes from my grandma. Growing up she never let us kids waste anything, especially food. She was always talking about the hungry and unfortunate kids in other parts of the world. And now that I am an “adult”, I seem to have taken a lot from her words and approach this matter more seriously. Therefore when I first saw this assignment for my environmental science class I was kind of excited. We were asked to measure our waste for three days, research waste reduction strategies, and then for another three days put those strategies into play.  

In my household it is just my husband and I. So to be honest I don’t feel that we waste too much because we really do try to recycle everything we can. In our kitchen we have your normal everyday looking standard trashcan, and then right outside the garage door we have a large outdoor trashcan for recyclables. Within a three day period, together our waste accumulated up to one full trashcan, while our recyclables took up about a fourth of our large recycle trashcan. Hopefully, everyone can get a good idea of how much waste and recyclables we had because I didn’t have a scale to actually weigh everything out, and I wasn’t about to go through my trash and recyclable counting them one by one.

Most of our trash consisted of food and pure laziness. Even the items found in our trash, mainly paper recyclables, could have been thrown in the recycle bin. These items consisted of paper plates and paper towels/napkins.

When it came to waste reduction, I really liked the idea of getting another kitchen trashcan for recyclables only. But sadly, believe it or not, my kitchen is so small that I don’t even have room for another trashcan in there. That is why we keep the recycle bin right outside the garage door. Another great idea talked about watching what you buy. For example: buy durable products, repair or restore used items, buy items you can re-use, buy items you can recycle, and avoid excess packaging. This is something I know I can try to do more often!!

Therefore, for the next three days my husband and I tried out bests to make this change, and the outcome came out great. We also focused on not being so lazy and actually recycled everything we could. This time we filled up half of the kitchen trashcan, and about a third of our large recycle bin. The items most difficult for me to recycle I guess were my napkins after dinner. Those I just tossed in the trash. When it came to my waste flow it was hard for me to not throw away my leftover food. I am actually working out again and watching what I eat, so I tend to have leftover food that I just throw away. My grandma would be so disappointed with me. It’s really not that much, but my grandma hates any form of wasting food.

At the end of the day though, I liked the outcome and what I learned from this assignment. Therefore, I am really going to focus more on the products and things that I buy so that I can really try to reduce our trash even more.