Earth Day pledge: One year War on Garbage

Recycling basket and kitchen waste bin
© L. Kathryn Grace

How is it possible that a two-person household can generate nearly 20 gallons of waste every week? I'm declaring a War on Garbage.

It's not like we haven't been conscious of the crud stuffing our can and recycling basket. After all, way back in 1972, I met the man who would become the father of my children when I spoke to the high school ecology club for which he was the teacher sponsor. The topic: Recycling. Our kids grew up with stacks of newspapers and magazines tied up with string, counter tops littered with rinsed cans and bottles, sacks and boxes of sorted waste piling up in the basement, waiting to be hauled to the recycling center.

Collected waste basket trash
© L. Kathryn Grace

Despite a lifelong commitment to reducing consumption and waste, my sweetie and I fill the 2.3 gallon trash bin and large recycling basket you see above at least once a week. Twice a week, I go through the house and gather waste from six small baskets, dump them in a plastic bag like this one, add a pound or so of dirty cat litter, tie off and pitch. Plus, every day I scoop and dump an additional mini batch of cat litter. None of that is recyclable.

Counter-top compost bucket
© L. Kathryn Grace

Then there's kitchen waste. Last fall, when San Francisco mandated that all households, including apartment buildings, separate food and yard trimmings for city-wide composting, we bought a counter-top crock for collecting food waste. Not having access to a garden, we welcomed the change and fill the half gallon crock three or four times a week.

All told, we're discarding roughly 20 gallons of trash, recyclables and compostables a week. Multiply that by 52, and we're shuffling 1,040 gallons of refuse through the system every year. That's just two people. That doesn't account for our contributions to the waste stream at work. According to the Clean Air Council, the average American pitches 4.39 pounds a day. That's about 1563 pounds a year. I don't know how much our 20 gallons of trash weighs. Either way, our 1,040 gallons or the U.S. average of 1,563 pounds per person seems an incredible amount of junk and gunk.

Peacemonger that I am, I'm declaring a personal war on garbage. We're tossing far too much stuff down our garbage chute. As Julia Butterfly Hill says, speaking of our throw-away culture, there is no away. When we toss something, whether its to the recycling facility or to the land fill, it never goes away. The one exception: Making compost from kitchen scraps and yard waste is such a boon for the soil, gardeners call it Black Gold. That's the silver lining in our personal garbage can story.

Next up: What to do about it? First step in my personal war on garbage: Analyze what we're pitching. I'll talk about that in the next post, and set my first objective toward reducing waste.

What about you? How much garbage do you dump every week? What have you been doing to reduce? How much do you recycle? Are you up for declaring a war on waste in your household?

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We make peace in a million small ways every day.

All text and images, unless otherwise noted, copyright L. Kathryn Grace. All rights reserved.

Have you checked your ecological footprint lately?

Last year, in recognition of Earth Day 2009, I calculated my family's ecological footprint and learned that if everyone lived as we did, it would take 1.83 Earths to sustain us all. Over the last year, we've made some changes, and today I checked to see if we had reduced our footprint. The good news is, yes, we have, a little. The bad news: we're still using more than our share of the Earth's resources. As of today, it would take 1.28 Earths to sustain all of us at my family's level of consumption. We've reduced our footprint by about half an Earth.

The really bad news: Most Americans are consuming way more, and because of that consumption, our nationwide footprint is enormous. You can get a feel for it on this chart, by Redefining Progress, comparing our footprint to the nation's as a whole. We're in gold. The U.S. is in blue.

Image courtesy Redefining Progress

I'm not trying to toot my own horn here. We've been working at this for decades. What I feel is sadness. I'm sad because, first of all I'm not sure our household can sustain the reduced level of consumption we achieved this year. The main reason our footprint is lower is that we took no airplane trips last year. We did not visit our family members, including my mom, once. I'm a family person. That's very difficult for me.

Another reason our footprint is lower than the nationwide average is that we eat very little meat. We are gradually moving to a vegetarian diet. Will we go all the way? Too soon to tell. We find a lingering distaste in our mouths after eating meats we used to love. Still, we bought three pounds of (grass-fed, organic) ground beef the other day. We'll keep it in the freezer for those times we feel we must have meat--and we do yearn for it now and then.

A third reason our footprint is relatively low is that we are fortunate to live in a city with good public transportation. That is by design. About fourteen years ago, we made a conscious decision to move to a larger city for that very reason. By and large, we do not need to schedule a City Car Share vehicle more than once or twice a month. We continually seek ways to reduce our combustible engine travel, but we're close to maxed on what we are likely to achieve on that as well, and with one daughter and her family seventy miles away, car travel is sometimes necessary.

Can we further reduce our ecological footprint? We're making small steps along the way. I'll tell you more about them tomorrow. Living consciously, taking no more than our share is tough when we're used to so much luxury and convenience, but there is no hope of living in a beautiful, socially just, sustainable world like Ordinary unless we change our sometimes thoughtless consumption patterns now.

I'll keep pushing myself and my family on this end. What about you? Have you checked your ecological footprint lately? How is your move toward a more sustainable life working for you? Can we share tips and struggles?

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We make peace in a million small ways every day.

All text and images, unless otherwise noted, copyright L. Kathryn Grace. All rights reserved.