Trash Reduction!

Hey everyone, for this weeks blog, I am here to talk about trash/waste, and the reduction of it. So for the assignment this week we were told to either weigh the amount of trash, or go off of the amount of pieces myself or my house hold produces within a three day period. Next, I am to do some research and find some ways to reduce the amount of trash and for the next three days implement those waste reduction techniques to see how much waste we reduced within that short period of time. So here it goes, for the first three days I decided to measure out how much trash my household accumulated, but before I get to that let me tell you about my household size. I currently have at my home, my mother, Step-father, brother and myself. So for the household size of four people over a three day span, the amount of trash in weight was approximately 12 lbs. This weight was taking in account of my brother moving home, so there was a lot of packing material that was tossed out, but other than that the rest was due to day to day waste (wrapping from food, grocery bags, open containers, plastic cups etc). This amount of trash was including recyclable items like aluminum cans, boxes, newspapers and bottles.


Now on to ways to reduce trash reduction. According to http://www.johnsrefuse.com/blog/bid/135627/What-Are-Some-Waste-Reduction-Strategies-at-Home they suggest: Re-using food containers, Purchase more re-usable items, buying in bulk and using non toxic cleaning substances. These are some great ways of reducing waste, but one way that I have found helps reduce waste so much more is, only using what you need when you need it. Grocery bags are a prime example, after going to the grocery store and receiving your plastic bags, rather than tossing them out right away, keep them for the little things, they are the perfect bag for a small trashcan. Small reductions like this can go a long way. Purchasing in bulk is a great way to reduce waste because when you buy bulk items, they typically come with less packaging materials than individually wrapped items. Using no toxic chemicals is also a great way for waste reduction because toxic chemicals do not break down substances nearly as easily as non toxic chemicals.



So after three three days of implementing some waste reduction techniques not only myself but my household in general cut back on about four pounds of waste for a three day period. For the last three days we have cut back on the amount of trash that we have been producing by, using less in general. For meals, we cut out foods that had lots of packaging, utilized our own grocery bags at the store, we used more re-usable food containers. When going to the store, we had only purchased food items that we planned on making for the next few days and nothing that required multiple ingredients. Not only did we cut back on food waste and trash, the amount of recyclables that we were putting into the bin was cut down as well, that's not to say we stopped buying recyclable items, but the less we purchased, the less we threw out. The recyclable weight was cut down by about a pound whereas normal day to day trash was cut back about three pounds. One of the good things about cutting back on the waste was it also helped us to eat better, we were purchasing more vegetables that required little to no waste,  we purchased more fruits because they don't require much packaging, we cut back to having more soup to reduce the amount of waste from multiple ingredient packages. All in all, I believe that one waste reduction method I will stick to is purchasing in bulk, not only does it save money, but as I stated previously, there is less packaging materials that come with it. I also like the idea of only purchasing what you need rather than what sounds good. The saying, "Don't go to the store hungry" is completely true, when you are hungry and at the store, most people tend to impulse purchase more often.