April 20th - 26th 2008 Garbage Tally

Find out what other people have been trying not to waste during No Trash Week and share your own stories and opinions about the event! All comments are welcome, regardless of how much trash you are actually eliminating. We'd like to hear about what's been successful, what's difficult, and how you feel about the process. Feel free to jump in midweek or send comments after the event if you are trying it out at a different time!

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Day 1

Elise writes:
Unfortunately, I have already made some trash... So far I've tossed the seal to a new bottle of saline solution (each bottle usually lasts me about 4 months), a sticker from an organic pear, and the unrecyclable sharp metal top to a can of cat food (the kitty eats one can of cat food in about 5 days). I have also eaten some shared food which was made from ingredients with disposable packaging (cheese, matzo mix, chicken, cream, butter, pasta). I will be able to reuse the jar my pasta sauce came in, but it will eventually break or get recycled. I would like to see the glass jar industry standardize jar shape so we could return our jars to the grocery stores for pickup and reuse directly by sauce companies.

Brandi writes:
It's usually more convenient to make less trash on the weekend, but it's harder to manage when you go to an event.
foil from potluck baked potato, 1 paper napkin
1 paper program from church (which I plan to hang on to for a bit but will eventually recycle)
2 receipts (2!) from the coffee shop
1 gigantic receipt from Safeway
2 veggie cans (recycled)
We went into the coffee shop specifically to get a 'for here' drink in the middle of a long walk and even asked for no receipt. But the barista ran my card as credit rather than debit so ofcourse, unnecessary garbage. I'm going to try to carry more just-in-case cash on me this week.

Ashley writes:
I rode the bus to work today (as usual) armed with a nalgene bottle for water and a reusable thermal mug for coffee/tea to drink throughout the day. I drink a ton of liquids at my desk, which as you can imagine means lots of visits to the women's room. Consequently, for the first time I am realizing I use about 15-18 paper towels every workday (there are no dryers provided, and it takes 3 towels to dry each time!). Today I brought a clean, terry-cloth hand towel and have been taking it with me to the restroom. It's almost no hassle, the towel is so much softer to use than scratchy paper towels, and I'm saving lots of trash!

Jared writes:
Thrown out: Square of wax paper from deli pizza
Recycled: Root beer can
Used from containers that will eventually be discarded: toothpaste, deodorant, flossing stick

Margo writes:
- Trash -
fruit leather wrapper
plastic top to broth carton
tape/sticker from onions
floss
dustpan full of living room sweepings
birth control
- Recycling -
broth carton
2 grocery bags of junk mail, newspapers, magazines, etc (it was house cleaning - we generate that about every 4 or 5 ish months)

Day 2

Elise writes:
11:30 a.m. - Oops, without thinking I had some cookies which came on a circle of unrecyclable waxed paper... so that's one thing in the trash so far today. I've also had some rice milk which comes in a carton with a plastic cap, and the carton itself will have to be recycled eventually. I would like to see milk and milk substitutes sold in bulk from dispensers like they sometimes have in cafeterias. Many of us already refill our soap and olive oil containers, so why not milk?
9:30 p.m. - After some morning mistakes, the rest of the day has been going pretty well. The only thing to report is a few inches of thread from a shirt fixing project. However, I still have to go to the grocery store tonight, so I will have a receipt to recycle later. I'll go with empty paniers so it can hopefully be my only purchasing event of the week.
I learned tonight that a thin stick with a layer of my bath towel over it works almost as well as a q-tip for drying out my ears after showering, so I guess I can stop buying q-tips!

Jared writes:
Thrown out: Tissues
Recycled: Receipt
Used from containers that will eventually be discarded: toothpaste, deodorant, flossing stick, shampoo

Margo writes:
- Trash -
vitamin wrapper (they are individually wrapped calcium supplements)
apple sticker
tea bag (why didn't I compost it? I dunno, I forgot and tossed it without thinking)
banana stickers (I made banana bread, so there were about 3)
break cables (got my bike's cables replaced - they were in need)
- Recycling -
tea bag wrapper
strawberry container

Day 3

Elise writes:
Technically this morning, but I was still awake from last night... I threw out a string of dental floss. I had washed and reused it from the night before, but it started to disintegrate and became useless. I also used a work-provided towel for my shower after biking to the office and the stack of clean towels had been wrapped in shrinkwrap. I will use the towel a few times before sending it back to be washed, but from now on I will try to remember to keep my own at work instead. Then yet more floss got tossed as I prepared for my dentist appointment. At the appointment, I managed to rinse by cupping water in my hands rather than using a disposable plastic cup from their provided dispenser, but I'm sure there were a few disposables used during the procedure that were sent to the landfill on my behalf :( For dinner, I was half responsible for a small receipt from the teriaki restaurant. I think the ingredients use for the food mostly came without much packaging. Restaurants like that tend to get rice, vegetables, and sauce in very large quantities, without much wrapping, but I'm not sure how they buy their tofu or dispose of their fry oil. We brought our own wooden chopsticks to use, but I somehow lost one of them on the way home, which somewhat negated the effort, expecially since we stopped home first for the sole purpose of fetching the utensils. I should get in the habit of keeping a small set of utensils in the car for situations like this.

Margo writes:
- Trash -
vitamin wrapper
2 small plastic cups
napkin
tissue
q-tip
- Recycling -
2 reciepts

Jared writes:
Thrown out: A couple tissues, plastic bag and lable from suet package
Recycled: Receipt
Used from containers that will eventually be discarded: sunflower seeds from 25 lb. bag, deodorant, toothpaste

Day 4

Elise writes:
One plastic bread bag and one waxed paper cereal bag re-trashed, a piece of plastic wrapper I found abandoned on the kitchen floor. I also peeled off a 2 square foot sheet of paint which was coming off the make-shift lid to our backyard compost - it's better that it will no longer be chipping into the soil where we grow our veggies, but now it's headed to the landfill instead, which also sucks. Ohhhh, I really want some ice cream. I miss the self-serve soft serve cones they used to sell at PCC... it was a wonderful trash-free dessert. Dinner tonight was bulk-purchased organic brown rice with dumpstered salt from a reusable glass spice jar and a stirfry of organic broccoli, organic local mushrooms, and parsley grown in a friend's garden, sautéed in bulk-purchased olive oil.

Margo writes:
- Trash -
vitamin wrapper
paper towel
tissue
- Recycling -
3 old reciepts from my pocket

Jared writes:
Thrown out: Just tissues

Day 5

Elise writes:
Breakfast was a disaster: Recycled a rice milk carton and threw out its plastic cap, ate cereal from a plastic costco bag. A large bag of cereal takes me a long time to go through, but the resulting trashed bag will still be around in the landfill for too many years to come. Tonight I threw out a dust pan of nasty grit from under the couch, and recycled 10 pieces of unrequested mail! 2 of the spam flyers were ads for condos, so I was able to find their phone number and leave them a message requesting to be taken off their mailing list. Hopefully that will work! I'm sick of companies sending me garbage I didn't want! I also re-dyed my hair tonight. Both the jars and the dye itself are bad choices - I should have made my own dye out of kool aid or food coloring.

Jared writes:
Thrown out: Tissues
Used from containers that will eventually be discarded: shampoo, deodorant, toothpaste

Margo writes:
- Trash -
vitamin wrapper
chip bag (the chips were abandoned so I took them)
apple sticker
sticky note
2 pads plus wrappers
floss
- Recycling -
paper bag
paper scrap

Day 6

Elise writes:
This morning I threw out a plastic bag from sunflower seeds for the birds. I buy the 25 lb paper bags of seed, but I had been given this bag by someone else. I'm noticing this week that most of the volume of things I have put in the trash are not things I have purchased. That's a good sign, but also means that I need to do more to convince others to stop buying things in plastic packaging. Today I turned down an offer of delicious popcorn from a bag - it was soooo difficult! But popcorn is such an easy, cheap, and trash free snack to make myself, I really have no excuse for not bringing my own from home. Lunch was tricky today. We had team lunch at work and I had to order it. I got a taco bar group dealy, where most things come in tin trays. We were able to save several of them to take back for refilling next time we order from there. This particular restaurant isn't too freaked out about health codes so they let us use the containers again and appreciate that they don't have buy us new ones every time. I also made sure to request no disposable plates, silverware, or paper napkins with the order. For drinks we finished off some of the bottles from last week's lunch. I try to avoid getting people individual drinks, and opt for whatever the store has in large bottles, but those bottles still end up recycled and the lids still go in the trash.

Margo writes:
- Trash -
apple sticker
vitamin wrapper
2 pads plus wrappers
straw
- Recycling -
receipt used scrap paper

Jared writes:
Thrown out: Tissues
Recycled: One receipt
Used from containers that will eventually be discarded: toothpaste

Day 7

Elise writes:
Wow, the wastefulness of communication... I spent most of today doing a puzzle hunt, which involved solving several thinking puzzles which were given to our team in packets of lots of paper. A few of the puzzles creatively used repurposed and still reusable items such as legos to augment their clues, but most of the information was presented to us printed on new paper. Many of the puzzles had lots of words or images on them which couldn't have been conveyed by hand-copying onto other surfaces, and even printing on both sides of the paper would have made them tricky to solve because the clues often involved viewing the information all at once. Maybe the best solution would have been to print in smaller text so that more could be combined on one sheet of paper, and to print on the back side of previously used paper. Since it was such a good puzzle set and the puzzles are being repurposed for reuse by different groups, perhaps they clues could be put together out of more durable and yet eventually recycled/reused materials and just transferred around the region so groups didn't have to remake the puzzle every time they want to host the event. This strategy would require some coordination between hosting groups, but the internet is full of communication and organizational venuew and it would probably be pretty easy to work out. After the event, as well as at the fund raiser for Power of Hope that I attended afterward, trays of delicious foods were catered for everyone. The second event's catering used washable glass plates and metal forks, but the first catering only provided paper plates with plastic forks, and since I had forgotten to bring my own dish and utensil I had to take just a few items at a time and balance them in a drippy way in one hand. A lot of the food provided looked like it was never very packaged, but some of it (dips, cheese, chips) most likely was originally wrapped in plastic. I avoided several foods which looked like they had come in the most trash-making containers, but I was weak and ended up eating some things that definitely had once been packed in disposables.

Margo writes:
- Trash -
napkin (we went out to breakfast, and I'm sure they threw mine away even though I didn't use it)
2 pads plus wrappers

Jared writes:
Thrown out: Packaging from catered food was most likely thrown out on my behalf, piece of paper
Used from containers that will eventually be discarded: shampoo, toothpaste

After Thought - Overall, how did it go?

Elise writes:
Unexpected benefit of being more trash-conscious about my eating choices - I lost weight! Many of the foods I avoided this week were high fat snacks and desserts. I skipped the ice cream during my trip to the grocery store, I stayed away from the office candy bars, and I didn't nibble any chips or microwave popcorn. But I still fulfilled my urge to snack by eating airpopped popcorn, oranges, home-made banana bread, and home-made chocolate chip cookies. When you make your own treats at home you can control the ingredients that go in and make them healthier than the packaged versions of the same thing usually are, and you can make them out of ingredients you bought in bulk!

Jared writes:
It was a triumph. I'm making a note here, huge success.

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