Plastic Reduction Challenge #5 – Trash Audit !!

 

Plastics- reduction challenge #5 – Do your own trash audit the day before your trash pick-up day to see what you bring into your house regularly by looking at what is thrown out regularly.

 

A trash audit is a bit messier than the slow road to changing out your single use products for reusables or replacing plastic bottled cleansers and drinks with non-plastic alternatives, but an audit can lead to quicker solutions for reducing the plastic build up in your life.  Reducing the amount of packaging or needless products you purchase is key to reducing your waste and, of course, needless plastics.

 

We did our first trash audit about 2 years ago and it led to a few changes in our eating and buying habits.  We took the trash audit challenge again this week to see if those few changes made 2 years ago showed much of a difference in our waste now…. and what our next reduction step might be.

 

Three simple steps for your own audit –

 

Step 1 – Dump out this week’s garbage onto a plastic tarp for sorting and see if there are any obvious patterns of where your waste comes from; clothes, food, packaging, paper, recyclables, broken goods, etc.  

 

We noticed that we eat a lot of ice cream (we already knew that) and we haven’t figured out how to get rid of the ‘To Resident’ flyers that fill our mailbox occasionally – especially around elections.

 

Step 2 – To identify plastics in your waste stream, sort out all of the plastics found in your trash and your recycling for the week to see how you might reduce.

 

 

 

We had 3 possible recyclable/reusable plastics in our trash this week. The yogurt and tofu containers are both #5 recyclables so they were put in our blue bin.  An empty plastic prescription bottle was not put in the trash and returned without the label to Luke’s Pharmacy for them to reuse.  (I’m hoping that they were able to do that.)  The zip lock tortilla bag was washed and returned to the kitchen for later use for food storage as a replacement to buying single use zip lock bags.

The rest were non- recyclable plastics – not #1-#5 or the recyclable plastic film bags or wrappers you can take to Ohio Gulch or the DMV’s plastic film recycling bin at their front door.

 

Step #3 – Since the mess is already there, take a moment to see if there are any other items in your trash that you could also address.  

 

 

 

Clearly most of the waste here is ice cream packaging and unsolicited advertising. Our next step in cutting down on these two areas of accumulated waste are still being discussed.  Two years ago we found that most of our waste was packaging for breakfast cereal and the large yogurt containers we accumulated weekly.  Although we were already reusing the plastic yogurt containers where we could, we began making our own granola and yogurt and that has reduced our waste a surprising amount. 

 

 Refusing to buy items that lead to regular bulk and weight going to the landfill is the fastest way to reduce both plastics and unnecessary products in your home.  Learning to repair, replace, reuse or make your own are a bit less convenient than the manufactured alternative but the product is often a better one than store bought and can bring more personal satisfaction to you when you find your solution.