For 2019, I have decided to challenge myself! Actually, maybe it’s not so much a challenge, as an assessment. For the last 3 years, I have been chipping away at how much garbage my family of 4 sends to the landfill. People often ask me just how much trash we make, and while my husband and I estimate around one 8 gallon bag per month, I’m not entirely sure! My(very poor) math tells me that if we are right, it should take us just about 12 months to fill our 95 gallon curbside bin!
So…. that’s my challenge, to keep our landfill contributions to under one green curbside bin for this year!
One bin, one year.
We are already off to a bad start.
While my New Year’s Resolution may have been a less-trash challenge, my husband’s clearly was not! Because if it were, he sure chose a fine time to update all of the light switches and receptacles in the house! So, here we are, half way through January, with a far more than a half-full bin. Sure, I can stack and squish this non-recyclable plastic packaging, and that may take up less room in my bin, but let’s be honest here, compacted trash is not less trash, and no better for the environment.
And all the while somewhere in my house sits a box of usable, but outdated electrical receptacles and switches waiting to go to the Habitat Restore…. but if they can not use them and I can’t find another viable option, this too, is landfill bound. Now that will fill my bin! If I didn’t know better, I’d say someone was trying to sabotage my challenge!
Before deciding whether or not to take my own crazy challenge, I thought about the potential pitfalls and came up with some ground rules.(Yes, I did consider home projects because we do have couple down the pike.)
Stay tuned to hear my anticipated pitfalls, and how I plan to keep it to a bin this year without driving my family crazy!
I’m a wife and mom of two school-aged girls, living in Cary, NC. I started moving “toward zero waste” in September of 2015 after reading Bea Johnson’s book Zero Waste Home. Bea’s single jar of trash a year for a family of four didn’t seem possible for my family of four, but I knew we could do better and was inspired to try.
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Ken and Mary Collins
January 17, 2019 at 4:52 pm - Reply
Leigh, I really admire what you are doing, and consider that there may be energy and waste savings down the line from what your dear husband has done. You are being real, and life is real. Each of us does the best we can, and often being too rigid about the criteria we miss a big opportunity.
Leigh, I really admire what you are doing, and consider that there may be energy and waste savings down the line from what your dear husband has done. You are being real, and life is real. Each of us does the best we can, and often being too rigid about the criteria we miss a big opportunity.