Three weeks ago, we weighed Oscar (our trash can) who came in at 42 pounds. This included ten pounds of compost materials. This week (now that we are composting), Oscar weighed-in at (pause) 25 pounds! Whoa - that’s 17 pounds in just two weeks! If only I could find a similar diet plan for myself.
Today, my kids joined me as we put on the gloves and sorted through our trash so we could determine next steps for reducing our waste. After putting a tarp down, we separated the garbage into piles of similar materials to understand how much of what was going into Oscar’s diet.
Here’s how that 25 pounds of trash broke down (not including compost materials which are now going into the compost bin):
- 9 pounds of Pull-ups (Yikes!)
- 1 pound of table scraps (including chicken innards, chicken bones) not allowed in the compost bin
- Less than 1 pound of plastic packaging, including dirty plastic bags that could not be recycled
- Less than 1 pound of other items, including bottle caps, a non-reusable razor, a shave stick and a styrofoam take-out container
- Minimal amounts of compost materials (that somehow missed the compose bowl beneath the sink)
- Minimal amounts of tissue and other paper recyclables, including toilet paper rolls.
I highly recommend that anyone serious about reducing their waste conduct this same experiment. It’s a bit like keeping a journal of what we eat everyday and realizing that that those daily Hershey chocolates add up over the course of a week.
The biggest eye-opener for me was the Pull-ups. Having used a cloth diaper service for years for both of my children, I had never really experienced disposable diapers up until a year ago when my daughter transitioned into underwear. At the same time, we noticed that the cloth diapers tended to leak through the diaper covers, and so we began to use Pull-ups to get her through the night.
With just a little bit of research I’ve found that there are some new great alternatives to the cloth diaper. More on that next time…