No Garbage for a Year

Recently while skimming one of the six homeschool yahoo groups I'm subscribed to (what can I say, I'm a bit obsessive), something about garbage caught my eye. A poster was asking for recommendations for the best waste removal companies in the Atlanta area. She went on to say that for the past year her family had only had one bag of garbage a month, and so rather than pay for a weekly service, she took her garbage directly to a dump. But now they were generating more garbage, a whole four bags a month, and the dump was now charging and she thought it might be cheaper to pay for a service that would pick up.

Normally garbage is not a very exciting topic to discuss, but because of how a)competitive and b)environmentally conscious I am, I needed to know more. I asked how many were in her family and how she managed this feat. As I waited for her reply, I thought about the mounds of garbage we throw out each week, even with composting, cloth diapering, recycling, and trying to limit what comes into our home in the first place. But one bag of garbage a month? I convinced myself that she was single, worked long hours, traveled a lot and ate most of her meals out of the house.

Imagine my surprise when I heard back from the no garbage lady and she informed me that hers was a family of five, just like mine! The big difference between her family and mine is that they are vegans and we most definitely are not. But still...how much garbage does being a carnivore generate?

Thus began my garbage research. I started talking to like-minded people trying to find out how much garbage they had each week or month. A woman at a homeschool group, who has a family of six told me that they had two bags a week. My competitive spirit kicked into overdrive and I began studying what type of garbage we had the most of each day.

I quickly realized that we could and should be recycling all of our paper, rather than just newspapers and magazines as we had been. I set up recycling boxes under each desk in the house to help with this process and so far it's working well. Next I moved on to food garbage. The garbage lady mentioned that they cooked everything from scratch, which she felt reduced the amount of waste, but I cook from scratch too, so that didn't make sense. I looked at my waste removal company's website and found out that we can recycle cardboard too, so now our cereal and cracker boxes get thrown into the recycling bin.

Even with these changes, there is no way we could only have one bag a month! So for now my goal is to be more aware, to take the empty egg cartons to Publix to place in their egg carton recycling bin, and to get our weekly garbage down to 4 bags.