Reducing Waste

[PapayaVagina]

Help! We're trying to reduce our waste as much as possible but I'm still finding that there's too much leftover.

Does anyone have any good tips?

We recycle religiously everything that we can in this area and we are in the process of getting rechargable batteries only. We use cloth grocery bags and I will soon be buying cloth produce bags also. We compost also.

[jen-mom]

Buying things with less packaging is certainly good - bring in less means throw out less!

But, I'm wondering if you've paid close attention to your trash to figure out what is in it. Maybe you can highlight one or two particular areas that fill up your trash bins frequently and work on reducing those?

[EFmom]

No great tips here, but it's something I think about a great deal. It irritates me that it is often nearly impossible to find items without ridiculous amounts of packaging.

I almost burst a blood vessel when I saw that they are starting to market individually shrink wrapped potatoes. What on earth does a vegetable need shrink wrap for? Isn't that why they have skins on them?

[PapayaVagina]

My biggest frustration are the caps/lids on things since we cannot recycle those. Also the plastic bags that are unrecyclable in this area (the only ones that are, we don't need anymore because we use our own bags).

We don't have major waste (I'd love to have absolutely none) but what perplexes me are things like deodorant containers, mousse bottles (my partner, not me, lol), razor blades, etc. stuff like that, I don't know what to do with.

[Barefoot Farmer]

There is a great book -- Use Less Stuff. I can't remember the author's name, but it really helped us get on top of wasting less. Best of luck and

[srain]

We don't shave or use hair products, so that helps. I don't know what else to tell you about those products, which are inherently disposable, but we have very little garbage (including recycling, which takes energy too) because we buy virtually everything from our co-op in reusable containers. We can even bring in containers to get bulk tofu there! I'm on WIC, so we have been getting regular milk cartons, but they also have returnable milk bottles. (We compost everything compostable and the dog gets most noncompostable food waste, so we're able to go to the dump with 2 cans of garbage only about twice a year!)