"In the garden of your days cultivate festivity, play and celebrations." - Mary Anne Radmacher
A couple months ago, I believe it was right around Easter, I told my SO that we should start creating our own holidays to celebrate. It makes perfect sense to figure out the things you really honor, love, and/or admire, and then designate hours, days, weeks, and months to celebrate those appreciations. Some things we came up with were "Off the grid" a.k.a. celebrating no electricity Sunday evenings (5pm-bedtime); "Nature Wonder" a.k.a. celebrating all that Mother Earth has to offer - so some days can be about food, others can be about sunshine and stars, yet others can be about insects, and so on.
Over the last few weeks we've realized we should start celebrating our lack of waste for the last four weeks or so! I'm so excited about this, because it directly speaks to the zero waste lifestyle principles - Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Rot - that we read about in Bea Johnson's book "Zero Waste Home". So first thing's first, this is what we achieved over the last month: we reduced our regular trash, meaning stuff that goes to the landfill, to one grocery bag-worth per every two weeks or more!
How did we do it?
- First, we refuse to buy packaged things (mainly groceries, since that's mostly what we shop for regularly) and are trying really hard to avoid plastic. The exception to this rule is glass, because we're still in the process of collecting glass jars to then store our food in and use to buy bulk foods in the future. And actually one of the key ways to avoid packaged foods, is to buy in bulk at the farmer's markets or local health food stores. We now bring all of our bulk food containers when we go grocery shopping. It's kinda fun. I feel like a kid carrying all of its stuffed toys out and about. :)
- Second, we reduce how much we buy. This has actually been happening for about a year now. We're trying to simplify our lives, by going through every single thing in our home to examine what we really need to keep and what can be re-purposed, donated, or tossed. This also allows us to see what we are missing and need to buy. So far, we've been astonished to find that there isn't much that we need when it comes to clothes and most house-items.
- Third, we are committed to finding ways to reuse things we already own and shop with this purpose in mind. Some of the clothes we decided we don't need as part of step #2, have now become cloth shopping bags, food storage bags, cleaning rags, etc. This is also critical when it comes to groceries. We have a growing collection of glass jars that we use to store food, serve drinks and desserts in, or use as water bottles.
- Fourth, we recycle all of the plastic, paper, and cans. This is something that we'd like to improve upon actually. When we started this whole waste management experiment, I decided that we should designate our regular, tall-size trash bin as the recyclables bin and a bucket for our regular trash. While regular trash has been minimal, we were shocked by how much recycling waste we were producing every week. It's really incredible and unfortunate, because we are trying so very hard to reduce our use of packaged goods. Then again, we're just starting down this road, so I am sure we will get better with time.
- Fifth, we rot EVERYTHING that can be rotted. We are passionate about this step! Although we don't have a composting bin yet, since we live in an apartment and are hoping to have our own home and land in the near future, we are trying to do our part as best we can to save our food scraps. We currently put all of our food scraps in bags and store them in the freezer throughout the week. Granted, we have two freezers, so this makes it easy on us when it comes to space. This way, we don't have to worry about fruit flies and the smell. Then at the end of each week or every two weeks, when we do our grocery shopping, we stop by Whole Foods or MOM's to toss our compost in their bins. It's worked out really well so far.
All in all, I'm super excited about the work we've done thus far to go down to one grocery bag-worth of landfill trash on a bi-monthly basis. There is of course always room for improvement, and that's what we'll continue to do as we try to refuse and reduce our acquisition and use of packaged goods of all kinds.
Happy waste reduction!
~Modern Akhmatova
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