Soooo I've been bad about measuring/reporting recently, but I've still been keeping my trash!
Feb - 0.22 lbs
March - .28 lbs
April - .25 lbs
May: .24 lbs
June: 0.1 lbs
I've been really busy this year so far and really fell down on blogging / keeping track of stories, so all I really have to report are straws that I either forgot to ask to not be given, random sample spoons, and plastic that came in shipments I ordered.
This January I had the pleasure of attending my cousin's wedding in the Dominican Republic! It was quite the adventure and while I've done pretty well traveling while being zero waste, I did accumulate some waste on the trip including a few straws, a plastic bag, and some wrappers.
I also had a really weird exchange with an airline host. I asked if he could fill up my reusable mug about half way with the tea they were serving. He gave me all sorts of excuses of why he couldn't:
Host: "That'd be way too much tea!"
Me: "You don't need to fill it all the way, it can be equivalent to the cups you normally use"
Host: "Well what if I poured it into one of our cups then into your mug?"
Me: "... that sort of defeats the whole purpose, why don't you just pour it directly in here?"
Host: "Well there could be something weird in your mug"
Me: "There's not ... This is pretty routine, coffee shops do this for me all the time!"
Host: "No, no..." as he not so slowly makes his way down the aisle away from me "it definitely violates a health code..."
Well, the hostess on the last flight did this for me with no issue! At this point I just stopped, I was exhausted from an overnight flight and didn't have the energy to fight this guy over some mediocre tea. I don't know where the line is here between holding your ground and making a scene. Navigate this as best you can!
I also totally caved and got some of my favorite bagged tea because I wasn't feeling so well for a few days. It's Yogi Tea's Throat Comfort Tea and I have not been able to find a loose leaf alternative that does it for me. I may need to try mixing my own soon to prevent me from buying it whenever I have a sore throat!
Last year I made a New Years Resolution to start living a zero waste lifestyle, and I'm pretty sure it's the first New Years Resolution I've ever kept.
Obviously, I didn't produce literally "zero waste." I produced quite a bit of waste, several pounds. But I learned how to make different choices as a consumer. I got myself lots of reusable bags, I started making my own cosmetics, making my own bread, I bought more produce than ever before, I switched to a safety razor, and so much more! I took my role as an ethical consumer way more seriously, and meticulously tracked the amount of waste that I produced (as you can see below).
This year, according to what I measured, I produced 4.31 lbs of trash.
That's less than what you're average american produces in a day.
I had no problem buying and using recyclable materials. I worked my hardest to minimize this as much as possible, and it definitely was less than I normally would have used. But I made no attempt to quantify how much I put in my recycling bin. I am also benefited by the fact that Denver has an exceptionally good recycling program.
Upstream waste felt incredibly challenging to avoid. I didn't know if the items I bought in bulk were shipped in plastic, or almost anything that happened before the product reached my hand. Trying to avoid upstream waste as much as possible definitely turned me into a more ethical consumer. I have always had some attention on the well being of the people and animals responsible for making products that I use, but my zero waste journey magnified the extent I was willing to go to for ethical goods.
In science, we often have to account for human error. Nobody's perfect. Sometimes I forgot to take something to put in my jar. This wasn't a lot, but it definitely happened! I don't know the proper way to statistically calculate for my human error, so I won't. I'm just telling you it exists!
Some of what went into my trash jar came from the hut trip I went on this month. Other pieces were packaging from items I ordered, or items I was given over Christmas. All in all, it was a large trash month for me, but I feel like I did pretty well for it being the holidays.
I didn't put all of the wrapping paper from gifts given to me in my jar, because they are recyclable. At my grandma's house the trash collection was specifically accepting wrapping paper for recycling for the week following Christmas. However I did have thoughtful family members who either wrapped items in re-usable packaging, or didn't wrap things at all!
I had 10 grams of trash in my trash jar for November, but that was definitely not all the trash I produced.
Over Thanksgiving I was supposed to go to my parent's house in California, where I grew up. However, I was called last minute to New England because my grandfather had fallen very ill. If you know me, then you know that my personal form of comfort comes in the form of a piping hot cup of tea (with or without whisky). Because I was called away last minute, I didn't arrange to bring any loose leaf tea with me. So, I had regular tea. A lot of it. I think at least 30 bags.
So, after weighing some empty tea bags, I'm going to add an extra 24 grams to this month's jar assuming that I used about 30 bags.
That comes out to 0.075 lbs for the month of November.
Besides tea bag wrappings, there's also a small stir straw, and some plastic wrapping that came with some gifts I purchased for the holidays in there.
This month I produced 29 grams, or 0.06 lbs of trash.
This is a 0.02 lbs improvement from September, which I am pretty pleased about.
I feel like I've definitely reached a pretty sustainably minimal level of trash production. By changing a lot of my consumption patterns, habits, and methods, I've eliminated a lot from my day to day life.
In my trash jar this month was mostly tea bag packages, wrapping from a prescription of mine, fruit stickers, and the wrappings around some cheese. I think there were some other random pieces of plastic from price stickers, and the tops of bottles.
I've become a bit complacent recently. I've been able to produce very little trash the past few months, an amount that seemed incredibly difficult to achieve earlier this year! But now that I've attained this level of trash production, I think it's time for me to reevaluate and set new goals. Probably before the new year, but definitely by then!
This September I produced 37 grams or 0.08 lbs of trash.
The biggest item in my trash this month was a bunch of sample spoons from our local ice cream joint. This amazing local creamery actually serves ice cream zero waste (which is why I go there). However when my friend and I went there to celebrate her getting a new job (yes we went for ice cream over wine, it was hot out, and it was awesome), the very kind gentleman on the other side of the counter just started giving us a bunch of samples w/o us asking for them! I didn't have the heart to tell him that I didn't want the plastic.
I sort of struggle with situations like this. I want to educate people, and at least feel ok telling them what I'm doing and why. But I also don't want to present it in a way that would insight any resentment. If someone is being very kind, you may make them dislike the whole zero waste movement by not handling that moment correctly.
I usually just don't say much, but I think I'll need to come up with a better way of handling these moments when they happen.
Oh well, on to October!
Including my waste from NYC I produced 0.15 lbs of trash this August. That's definitely an upturn for me, but without NYC I was only at 20 grams or 0.04 lbs of trash. I feel ok about that, I felt like i could barely breath in NYC without spending money and producing trash!
What really did me in (other than NYC) was freaking popsicles. It's been warm here in Denver and I'm a sucker for frozen treats of any kind! I think I'm going to need to invest in some home-made popsicle supplies to prevent this in the future.
I did make some homemade sushi this past week. The wrapping around the top of the soy sauce bottle and the plastic wrapping around the seaweed were the only two pieces of waste for 10 rolls of sushi. I'd say that's significantly better than those prepackaged ones you find in the grocery store!
This is the first time I attempted to go a whole month with only my mason jar. Up until now I've filled it in about a week, or would have had it overflowing in a month. But this March, I succeeded! I produced 91 g of trash this month, which is just 0.2 lbs! That's just 0.05 lbs per week, which would be pretty good for me anyway.
My jar this month was full of trash from my backpacking trip, fruit stickers, a powdered sugar bag, tea wrappers, and several other non-descript pieces of plastic.
My biggest pieces of plastic were a plate and fork. Why did I end up with these, you ask? Well, someone from one of my jobs hosted a dinner party. She prepared a BEAUTIFUL meal. I brought my own cup, but wasn't prepared for plastic plates and utensils. I didn't want to ask for one of her plates and forks, since she had gone to so much trouble to prepare a wonderful meal and host us all. So, I simply washed this plate and fork between dinner and dessert, and kept it.
I chose to take the plastic over being perhaps mildly rude, but why? When I talk to people about what I'm doing and why I have a few codes that I like to follow:
These are guidelines I came up with when I became a vegetarian in order to avoid being considered a stereotypical "pretentious vegan/vegetarian."
If I had asked my coworker to use one of her plates and forks because of this project that I was doing to reduce plastic waste, it may have made her second guess using plastic ware, but it also probably would have made her feel bad, perhaps embarrassed or ashamed. That is not how I want people to feel when we discuss zero waste lifestyles. I don't want to shame people into going zero waste or lowering their plastic footprint, I want them to feel empowered, educated, and excited about it!
So, long story short, I now have a plastic fork and plate added to my trash bag. However, one of my co-workers who does know what I'm doing asked me about it and started a whole conversation with a large group of people about it, I'll count it as a win!
So this week, I had some plastic wrapped tea (ones I had before going zero waste), the wrappings of girl scout cookies, and the wrapping of a large cookie that was individually wrapped.
My total trash weighed in at 9 grams, or 0.02 lbs
This week most of my plastic came from tea bags. These were not new ones that I bought but ones that I had already purchased and just decided to start going through. Since I have been making pretty solid efforts to transition to loose leaf tea and bulk coffee, I feel ok about this. I just have to be good about knowing that once the tea wrapped in plastic is gone, I won't be purchasing any more.
So this week, I bought flowers wrapped in plastic, you can check out the journal below for the reason why, and these were my biggest item. I also finished a tube of lip balm that I had from before, two straws that I forgot to ask the bartender to leave out, the usually fruit stickers, and the wrapping of some girl scout cookies.
My total trash weighed in at 41 grams, or 0.09 lbs
This was up from last week, but not by too much, so I'm still feeling ok!
So, about the flowers... this past weekend a neighbor of mine passed away. I didn't know her or her spouse very well at all, but I did feel that a show of kindness was needed. Unfortunately, with my work and school schedule, I didn't have the time to bake cookies that evening. Also, fun fact, there are no flowers growing in Colorado in February. So, in my haste to bring what I could as soon as possible, I bought some very pretty flowers wrapped in plastic. I know I probably could have waited a few days and baked something (or gone to a bakery as a different neighbor did) but I didn't. My desire to get something immediate overwhelmed my need to be zero waste. For now, I'm ok with that. But I do feel I should maybe have some go-tos for situations like this.
On a happier note, this week my boyfriend and I celebrated our 3-year anniversary. He knew how torn I was about buying the flowers in plastic, so he bought me a beautiful bamboo plant, already potted, with zero plastic in sight!
Also, my roommate informed me that as a household of four we only went through 1 bag of trash! We think the combination of me not adding anything to it, and composting is the reason. I don't know what the average trash-bag production per household is but I'd guess that's on the low end!
And finally, girl scout cookies. I'm so torn on this one. Thin Mints are one of my favorite things of all times, and I really do like supporting the GS. I know I could make some on my own, but I just can't decide which cause to stick to, supporting young women or zero waste. For now, I'm caving on zero waste, but I think I'll need to come up with something better in the future. Maybe learn to make my own and then just donate to the girl scouts w/o buying cookies? That seems like the most logical choice. We'll have to see how my homemade ones turn out!
So this week, nothing at all that miraculous happened. It was utterly and undeniably normal. I had some tea that came in wrapping, ate one bar that came wrapped (at a volunteer event), used one cauliflower packaged in plastic, and had the normal accumulation of fruit stickers.
My total trash weighed in at 17 grams, or 0.04 lbs!
That's my lowest weight so far, which I'm stoked about.
As I said above, this week felt really normal. I didn't have anything that seemed to outrageously affect my trash. This gives me hope that reducing my trash to nearly zero really is possible, since several things in my trash were really avoidable (like the bar and cauliflower wrappings). Maybe soon I can start switching to a monthly weigh-in instead of weekly!
However, starting today, I am working two full weekends at ski school. For the environment, it's pretty eco-friendly, but it's definitely possible to produce more waste in that environment and I'll need to prep to avoid it! Update on how it all went down next week.
So this week, as you can read below, I was sick. This meant lots of tea and throat lozenge wrappers. I also bought a nice poster frame which was wrapped in plastic, flossed, and ate lots of fruit with stickers.
My total trash weighed in at 49 grams, or 0.1 lbs!
I'm pretty happy with that, because that's really it! No spilling milk in the grocery store, no getting my hair dyed, that's the whole shindig!
Even though I'm pretty excited about that number, I still want to do better, and be better prepared next time I'm sick!
So this past Friday I woke up with a sore throat and sort of feeling icky. But we were heading up to the mountains to ski so I sort of shoved it off. Well, after two days of skiing harder than I have in quite some time (thanks Dylan) my body decided it wasn't going to put up with my nonsense anymore. I don't think I ever got much of a fever, but I was coughing, stuffed up, achy, and just overall exhausted.
Whatever, Alli, we all get the common cold, why are you telling us about it?
Truth is, I haven't really been sick since I started going zero waste, and let me tell you, it's a dozy! We had three opened packages of throat lozenges which I quickly dove into. I also ransacked our throat comfort and breath deep tea stashes. I will need to work on a homemade lozenge before my stash runs out. Glad to be slowly moving some of the things I bought pre going zero waste out, though!
I went through almost all of the breath deep tea, and so today I went to a local tea shop, Tea for Ewe in Denver. The lady there helped me find a loose-leaf tea that was a pretty close match to the breath deep! Can't wait to test it out, even though my throat feels much better now!
So this week I did okay. Ordering things for the school year has been killing me! If I couldn't find a book used (most of them I did) the new ones were all wrapped in plastic. I cut my hand and needed a band-aid, forgot to ask for no straw at a restaurant, finished my birth control packet, and got my hair dyed.
So my normal trash weighed in at 29 grams
My hair dye waste was less than I expected it to be, but still substantial:
So the total weight of my hair dying visit was: 442 g
This means that my grand total trash this week was 471 grams, or about 1 lbs. This is the most I've had so far, but it was essentially because of dying my hair.
This week went relatively smoothly. Getting my hair dyed produced the most trash that I've made in a while. Most of it was aluminum, which isn't as bad as plastic, but because of the colorant that was on it the sheets couldn't be recycled. I thought about taking them home, washing them, and then recycling them. But I also didn't know if it was worse to rinse the colorant down the drain, or to send it to the landfill. I went with landfill, but I would like to do some more research on hair products in general to see if my concerns were well founded.
So starting now, my weekly weigh-in posts will have two sections: the weigh-in and a journal entry. Several people have said that they are interested in the "journey" aspect of this blog. So the journal entries will feature my success and failures in going zero waste each week to give a less filtered view of what this whole process can be like. Luckily for you, this week I managed to create a massive scene at a grocery store.
My trash total this week was: 27 g
This was way less than last week by quite a bit! But the amount of plastic also went up. This was in part due to buying electronics for school, buying electronics to replace the laptop charger the puppy chewed, and the plastic that some of the hardware associated with the compost bin came wrapped in.
Now all that looks pretty darn good. But if you read my journal below, you will discover that quite a bit of waste was generated at my expense at the grocery store. So I will count those in as well.
So, given this, my new grand trash total would be: 927.5 g ...ugh...
However as many people in the zero waste community will say, in one form or another: this isn't about being perfect, it's about giving it your best shot.
This week, as you may have guessed, I had an small dairy-related incident. I have switched to buying a local, glass-bottled milk. We go through about 1/2 gallon a week. As I walked up to the cash register, I was feeling pretty good about the grocery store trip we had just made.
We were grabbing what I had forgotten earlier in the week: milk and coffee. Of course, as with almost any grocery trip with my significant other, we ended up buying more stuff than planned. But we were able to keep it all zero waste, even his candy request!
But then things went terribly, terribly wrong...
I set down my basket on the ground so I could grab the empty milk bottles out of the bag I was carrying. But when I set the basket down I must have done so at just the right angle/force/pressure/other science things to break the bottle!
A whole half gallon of milk went spilling all over the checkout aisle, glass and all. I quickly tried to grab the remaining items out of the the basket, but some milk did make it onto my cotton bulk bags, and therefore on the items in them (nothing was ruined though!).
The checkout girl was incredibly nice and understanding. My boyfriend went to grab another bottle, while I attempted to help. Although, honestly, I was probably making matters worse at this point given the onlookers that were gathering around to watch us struggle. On top of it all, the checkout girl thew a ton of paper towels down to halt the movement of the milk before a mop was brought to the scene.
So, in my attempts to reduce my plastic use, I managed to waste a half gallon of milk, a glass bottle, and about half a roll of paper towels, and a plastic bag that aided in the cleanup process. It felt like I had taken 1 step forward only to take 3 steps backward.
The reason I am rambling on about this is that I want anyone who is thinking about going zero waste or reducing their impact to realize: this is not a picture perfect process. As I mentioned earlier, the overwhelming sentiment in the zero waste community is: it's not about being perfect. Well I definitely wasn't perfect this week, but onto the next!
So part of this journey for me, and most in the zero waste movement, is tracking the waste I do produce in an effort to identify the things I am throwing away, and eventually eliminate them from my lifestyle!
To clarify: this is my non-food, and non-recyclable trash. I did recycle, and I did produce food waste. I haven't built my compost bin yet so food waste is still going in the regular trash as of now.
So my mason jar and its lid weigh a total of 258g
My trash with my mason jar weighed a total of 361g
I feel pretty good about that, seeing as this is my first time actually tracking my trash. I did need to move to a larger mason jar, but only once!
I found that most of my trash was tea and coffee related. Other than that I had one wrapper from an egg sandwich, one dixie cup, some medical supplies from cleaning and bandaging a friend's cut, one plastic lid that came with a USB drive, and some miscellaneous candy and food wrappings.
Many of these things were purchased before going zero waste, and I just happened to use them up (like the coffee bag). Some things I purchased in a hurry (still working on habit), and some were the result of nannying. I nannied for five kids this past weekend and was totally unprepared to keep my zero waste habits around them. Now I'll be better prepared for next time!
