Having a cup of coffee before I liberate the flock from their nightly accomodations. It’s raining lightly.
Today is trash pick up day in my rural neighborhood. Our last trash pick up was the first Wednesday of the month, November 7th. Our last recycling pick up is today. It’s been a long time since I began my quest to xtreme low waste.
About 4 years ago I made a commitment to engage in a plastic free July. It made me realize that even though I thought I had been doing pretty well avoiding plastic packaging, single use plastic sneaks into my life in unexpected ways. Even when I am making a conscious effort to avoid it. That’s the world we live in.
Never one to beat myself up, I adopted a “do the best I can” attitude and made some conscious changes in how I deal with my trash.
One of the first tools I adopted was a plastic yogurt cup that wound up in my house through a guest. I covered it with some pretty scrap paper and stuck a label on it christening it Tiny Trash.
Over time I have evolved my methods, until I realized that I wasn’t generating enough trash to pay for pick up. For the past year, I have had my trash picked up once a month, but even that is too often. I estimate, that it would take a year to fill my small trash can enough for pick up, at my current usage. And the recycling bin is even harder to fill, because it’s so huge.
The thing that helps me keep my trash production low is engaging in homesteading. Growing food, equals less packaging and allows me to compost almost everything, including some of the paper that I used to recycle.
I still have a long way to go. I still buy some things packaged in plastic which I’m not producing, like cheese and butter, packaging which I can’t compost, and have to treat like actual trash. That stuff doesn’t go away and I know that. It’s this awareness that keeps me seeking new ways to provide for my own needs without generating that kind of waste product. But today I’m celebrating my last day as a “waste pick up customer”, and that feels good to me.
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