How are you doing with the One-Bag-A-Week Challenge? It is great to look in your big wheelie-bin on trash pick-up day and see one lonely bag in the bottom – this makes it lighter to roll and brings home that fact that lots of waste has been diverted from the landfill. Congratulations if you have achieved the goal.
Folk in California have to practice On-Bag-A-Week given the state’s new aggressive goal of diverting 75% of solid waste from the municipal trash stream by 2020. Wow!
So how do you get there? Here is a step-by-step plan:
First – Measure how much waste you generate now. Weather that is with a scale, number of bags, percentage of the trash bin that is filled up doesn’t matter just get a relative feel.
Second – Set a reduction goal. Sign up for the One-Bag-A-Week Challenge or go really big and adopt California’s goal…but do it now, don’t wait for 2020.
Third – Communicate the goal to everyone at home, at work and maybe even in your community. Get them jazzed up to meet the challenge
Fourth – Reduce the amount of potential waste coming in by changing your shopping habits
- Precycle! Keep recycling in mind while you shop for groceries and other products and choose products packaged in recycleable materials
- Commit to buying products made from recycled materials. Need a new fleece? Make sure it is made with recycled soda bottles
- Do a mental Life Cycle Analysis. Before you buy ask yourself; What will I do with this after I am done with it?
- Borrow, find anew or trade instead of buying. Use the library to read the newest book, movie, newspaper or magazine; some libraries even have tool collections for check-out; trade books with friends; look in the back of the pantry for never used foodstuffs and make something new and different; know someone with an unused exercycle? Borrow it from them!; Set up a community swap day and everyone will come away with something ‘new’.
Fifth – Make it easy (and maybe even fun) to divert the waste. Create obvious, colorful and easy to access collection bins for: Recycling, Composting, Electronics, Batteries, Terracycle and Trash. Check out our resource section for ways to recycle.
Sixth – Here’s the dirty part – audit the water stream – in other words: Examine the stuff in the garbage bag and take out everything that can be reused, recycled, donated, sold, composted…what’s left is truly trash. Measure it. How much did you divert?
