Easy Green Living: Make less trash

It bugs me whenever I throw something into the trash.  If you think about it, throwing out garbage is a double whammy:

1. You're consuming resources to create the item you're throwing away: raw materials and energy to make it,  fuel to transport, etc.
2. You're consuming resources to throw it away: fuel to transport away, using up land for a dump site, and potentially even polluting the land from the item's chemicals which could leech into the surrounding areas

If you project out many years, we'll reach the point eventually when we've run out of land to dump our trash.  Not a good way to run an ecosystem or society that you want to hand over to your future generations.

Here are a couple super simple and cheap ways to reduce your trash that I have adopted:

1) Use smaller trash cans

     Studies have shown that we tend to adapt our habits according to what our facilities allow us to do.  Perhaps that's why my company (which is a leader in being green) changed all the trash bins in each office to include a tiny bin for "landfill" garbage, and the rest of the bin is alloted for recyclable material.  I had one neighbor (who has the same sized family as me) express his surprise that I opted for the middle sized garbage bin for our trash pickup service instead of the largest one.  I have found that we can consistently fit one week's worth of living into the medium sized bin now.  I think a large part of it is that we're now quite disciplined about putting absolutely everything (particularly paper including junk mail) that our city takes for recycling into the recycling bins.

2) Take your own bags shopping

     One of the TV shows I like to watch is Survivorman.  One thing that never ceases to amaze me is that no matter what remote part of the world he decides to camp out in, he can pretty much always find human trash, and the most common is those disposable plastic shopping bags you get from grocery stores.  Those bags are unfortunately nearly indestructible when it comes to naturally decaying.  In several other countries like South Korea that don't have the extra land to just throw everything into a landfill have been making it, the grocery stores there have made it a standard policy to not provide you with plastic grocery bags for your groceries, and charge you a reasonably hefty fee if you want one.  It was very easy to get into this habit of bringing my own bags.  I simply bought a bunch of reusable bags and leave them in my trunk at all times.  The other advantage of bringing your own is that they are a lot stronger than the disposable plastic ones, so I've never had one break on me even with a very heavy load or with sharp objects that tend to puncture plastic.  These are the reusable bags I use and am quite happy with them:

3) Use reusable containers instead of ziplok bags

     I often pack my lunch or a snack to bring to the office.  Instead of using a ziplock bag (which is basically a throw away plastic bag), I started using tupperwear style containers for everything including sandwiches.  This is an easy new habit to swap out for the old.

4) At the office, use your own reusable water bottle or coffee mug as much as possible

     There is simply no good reason to use those disposable paper cups for coffee or tea instead of simply using your own mug.  I suppose the only excuse is that one is too lazy to spend about 10-15 seconds to wash your own mug out after using it, but otherwise I can't think of one.  If your office has a filtered drinking water dispenser, bring your own BPA-free water bottle instead of grabbing a bottle of water.  If you don't have one, then re-use the plastic water bottle as much as you can.  You would be shocked at the amount of plastic bottle waters that go into landfills, not to mention the incredible amount of gas burned to transport this relatively heavy good from place to place.

5) Use rechargeable batteries

     Batteries are a particularly bad throw away item because they have some nasty chemicals.  That's why some states out banned batteries from being throw out with regular trash and require that they be disposed of as e-waste.  Besides the fact that rechargeable batteries don't get throw away each time their charge is used up, rechargeables have the added benefit of being able to provide more juice to your electronics compared to disposable alkaline batteries.  Digital camera's, for example, drain a lot of energy and can go through a set of cheap alkaline batteries after just 20-50 shots.  Recharageables vary in their rated capacity of how much energy they store, but at least they all have clear ratings to tell you what you're getting compared to disposable alkalines which don't say.  It used to be that rechargeable batteries would suffer from 2 problems: 1) they would quickly lose their capacity to store energy each time they were used (also called the memory effect), and 2) they drain energy over time, so rechargeable batteries don't have a very long shelf life before they have to be recharged again.  Well, both of these problems are pretty much a thing of the past  Nickel metal hydride (Ni-MH) rechargeable batteries have minimum problems with the memory effect, and there are now some that specifically will host their charge for over a year.  My favorite are the Sanyo Eneloop brand, which you can pick up at Costco or Amazon. Sanyo is one of the top manufacturers of rechargeable batteries, and their Eneloop line is still actually made in Japan (which is a big plus in my book).  I must have about 18 of the Eneloop AA batteries in my house, with a charged set always on hand to put into the Wii controllers, digital camera, etc. Oh, and if you consider that you can re-use rechargeable batteries 500-1000 times, you come out way ahead in terms of cost.