CELEBRATING LACK OF LANDFILL WASTE

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"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? 

1. 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. :) 
2. 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. 
3. 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. 
4. 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. 
5. 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

WASTE SYNCHRONICITY

~beautiful food~

This past weekend my SO and I picked up Bea Johnson's book "Zero Waste Home" from our local library. We've enjoyed reading it so far. As the title indicates, the book is about reducing waste in one's home and life by following the 5R rule - Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Rot - and in that order. That last R interests my SO and I a lot, because we've been wanting to compost for a while now. This has been hard to do though, given that we live in an apartment and in a community that has yet to get recycling bins, let alone have sustainable waste management practices that include composting bins and pick-up. 

So after a few failed attempts, I finally just decided two weeks ago to start saving our food scraps and figure out ways to compost them somehow. Interestingly enough, without worrying about what we would do with the food scraps once our bins got full and the fruit flies started to amass, an easy solution has appeared at the end of each week. Last weekend we had planned to do a "collective errand run" on Saturday morning that also had us stopping at the MOM's organic market. They have a public composting bin, so in went our food scraps! 

While at MOM's, I discovered that to avoid fruit flies you can just put your food scraps in the freezer. So that's what we've been doing all this week, but there's only so much freezer space we have, so what to do? Again, a solution presented itself without me thinking much about it. I was going to go into the office (I work from home now) this week for something and there is a Whole Foods right across the street. I remembered that they had a public composting bin there, so all those bags of frozen food scraps came to work with me! 

What happened at Whole Foods that morning convinced me that there was synchronicity at play here... 

I went into Whole Foods to ask where the public composting bin was and this nice lady said I could bring in my food scraps and she'd take care of it. Before I started to go to my car she asked me if I had a composting bin, and I said no. She then said, ok we can give you one. I thought, alright fine, let's see how much it costs. I was curious to see what she would present to me, so I went along with it. She brought out a long, rectangular box and proceeded to hand it over to me. As she said bye and started to walk away, I asked her how much it was and she said nothing; that it was free from the county. Wow, I thought. How cool!

Granted, we can't really use this bin because it's meant for a yard (we'll give it to one of our relatives); and neither MOM's nor Whole Foods are within walking or biking distance for us, so none of these experiences present a sustainable solution. However, they did encourage me to continue down the composting path. Before embarking on this journey, I hadn't thought of everything nor figured out how exactly we would turn all our food scraps into compost, but I realize now it's totally ok. Even though we live in an area that's not consciously green, these experiences have shown me that there is so much energy around this cause from different places and people, and that gives me a lot of hope for what we're trying to do with our little bins of food scraps.

Happy composting!

~Modern Akhmatova