Live Within the Limits
Live within the limits
Change is almost always hard, and I imagine a few folks here in Altona might be wondering how on earth they will manage to live within the new limit of one garbage bag per household per week. There was a time I would have wondered this too. I personally do not yet have the discipline of living a waste-free lifestyle, but I’ve found that I can quite easily commit to diverting waste from the landfill. I’d like to introduce you a couple of concepts that have helped my household and has dramatically changed behaviour in my workplace as well.
Trash Audit
A trash audit helps you see exactly how much of your household waste can be diverted away from the landfill. You will calculate the amount of trash and the percentage of the waste that can be diverted away from the landfill. You can track your progress over time to see how much you are improving.
Collect the data
Collect your household waste the way you normally do for the week.
Get 3 receptacles for sorting your trash – one for compost, one for recycling, and one for the landfill.
Put on a pair of gloves.
Sort through all the trash. Count the number of items that you toss into each receptacle. (If you have kids in your home, have them help!)
Calculate the total number of items in all three bins.
Calculate the percentages in each category.
Once you have your baseline data collected, you can repeat the process for a few weeks. I recommend that you create systems in your home to encourage all members to practice diverting trash appropriately so that you can see noticeable improvements. See images below for what this looks like.
Sustainable systems
Having sustainable systems in your home will reduce a lot of frustration and ensure that everyone is learning how to sort waste. Here are a couple of tips that have helped me out:
Reduce the number of trash bins around your home. The kitchen and bathrooms are probably enough. Everyone will eventually adjust.
Provide easy access to compost and recycling. I place my compost bin in front of my kitchen trash so that it is physically more inconvenient to put things into the garbage bin and is a good visual cue for others to think about where they should put their trash.
Keep a bin for recycling in or near your kitchen.
Keep another bin for soft plastics. (You can bundle these together and toss them into your recycling – the town uses them for berms at the landfill)
Keep trying!
We’ve been sorting our trash like this for a long time. I don’t like the idea of policing what people are putting into my trash bins in my home – and I sometimes forget too, even though it matters a lot to me — so I sort the trash each week to ensure I’m diverting as much as possible from the landfill. Here’s an honest glimpse into what would have gone into the landfill if I hadn’t sorted things out:
Bathroom waste bin
This is the one where almost everything can usually go into the compost bin and not into the garbage.
There were 37 items in the bathroom trash.
31/37 or 84% of the items were compostable: 84% of the waste from that bin was diverted from the landfill because it got sorted.
6/37 or 16% of the items were neither compostable nor recyclable, so they went to the landfill.
Kitchen waste bin
We compost everything we can because we like to feed the earth. A bonus is that I don’t need to put a plastic bag into my kitchen garbage bin because everything in there is dry (and doesn’t smell!). As you will see, even though we try to compost and recycle everything ahead of time, we still sometimes forget, are lazy, or make mistakes; hence, the weekly sorting.
There were 26 items in the kitchen trash.
3/26 items were recyclable. (11%)
8/26 items were soft plastics (31%)
15/26 items were designated to the landfill (58%)
This may seem like a daunting task but if you get your family involved, they will soon begin to ask if they should be throwing trash into compost or recycling before it hits your trash bin. It won’t take long, and you will soon wonder why the one-bag limit on garbage seemed like such a big deal.