What I Do With Garbage

I'll admit that garbage is not my favorite thing. In our house, my husband is the garbage man. But we have things set up in a way that makes it easy for every piece of "no longer wanted" material to move on to it's proper place in the ongoing process of life.

My view of garbage

The dictionary definition of garbage is "discarded or useless material." I used to think that if I didn't want something any more, it had no use to anyone. Now I don't see anything as useless. Somewhere, practically everything can be of use. Indeed, in Nature, there is no garbage--just raw materials being exchanged from one form into another.

I think one of the reasons we have such a problem with garbage in the world is because we have the idea that waste is to be hidden or removed and not even talked about openly. Waste is literally "swept under the rug." Even our language reflects this. The noun for material waste--refuse--is the same as the verb refuse, literally refuse is refused material, and we refuse it to the point of not even looking at it.

I also looked up the word "waste" in the dictionary. It has a number of different definitions:

• "to consume"--to progressively damage or destroy, as a fire slowly consumes a log of wood. Indeed the very term "consumer" implies that we are slowly wasting away the Earth, product by product.
• "to squander"--to spend or use carelessly, to allow to be used inefficiently or become dissipated.
• "to ravage"--to spend money or consume property extravagantly or improvidently.
• "to kill"--or to injure severely.
• "to lose strength or vitality", which is the result of consuming, squandering, ravaging and killing.
• "having no purpose"--to accomplish nothing by use.

Waste has a vital function in Nature. Every function in life occurs through a process in which there are inputs, a transformation, and outputs. For example, when we make a salad, we input some vegetables, transform them by removing inedible parts and chopping them into bite-size pieces, and then put them in a bowl and cover them with dressing to produce the output salad. The transformation also produces an output of waste. The bits and pieces of vegetables that are inedible to us we consider "garbage" but they are wonderful food for earthworms and are necessary nutrients to replenish the fertility of soil, which in turn transfers those nutrients into another round of food for us, or flowers, or a forest...

Every living organism must produce waste and must discard it in order to be healthy and functional. It's just the natural process. The amount of waste can be minimized, but the function of producing waste cannot be eliminated altogether.

Discarding this waste material is essential to the functioning of the organism. Failure to discard this waste material clogs the system and prevents function, whether in a body or a home or on a freeway. It would be difficult to enjoy your home and perform the necessary tasks of living if it were filled with garbage, or to drive down a road if it were blocked by crashed cars.

I think of my home as a system, where there is a continuous flow of bringing things in from the surrounding environment and sending things back out to the surrounding environment.

To me, my garbage is material that I am discarding, but it isn't useless at all. So the process of "taking out the garbage" for me is to direct valuable material to it's next useful place.

Reduce, reuse, reclaim, recycle

There are four major strategies for reducing the amount of garbage that ends up on landfills: reduce, reuse, reclaim, and recycle. I generally keep these in mind as I make decisions every day.

Reduce

I reduce the amount of garbage I create by simply buying less. This doesn't mean I go without things that I need, but rather I I only buy what I need and truly want and resist impulse buys. If I come across something that I might buy on impulse, I ask myself what purpose it would truly fill in my life and if I want to spend the money on it, or have that money available for something else. Then I continue shopping and if I still want to buy it later, I might. Often, by the time I've finished shopping, I've completely forgotten about it!

I also try to choose products that are made with efficient use of resources. It's not always possible to know how a product is manufactured, but just by looking at a product I can see if it has an efficient design or if there wasted material. I try to forgo excessive or unnecessary packaging, for example, whenever it is practical.

It is often recommended to buy in bulk or "family size" containers instead of individual serving sizes, and products in concentrated form to reduce packaging, but I don't do that. It would make sense if I had a large family, but there are only two of us, so I buy the right amount for us, elminating the waste of having too much that ends up not being used. If you can't use a half gallon of mustard in a reasonable period of time, there's no point in buying a half-gallon jar.

I generally avoid single-use disposable products that can't be recycled. However, I might buy a disposable camera, for example, if I was sure it would be recycled when the film is developed. Actually, I have a digital camera, which cuts down on the waste of film and developing and printing pictures I don't want.

Whenever possible, I use multi-purpose products instead of buying a different product for every need. Instead of buying ten different cleaning products, for example, I do most of my household cleaning with baking soda, vinegar and soap.

I also rent or borrow items I seldom use and loan things to my friends when they need them. I donate books I no longer want to my local library and often visit the library for research.

Reuse

I am always looking for ways to reuse things.

Whenever possible, I buy durable goods that can be reused and repaired, rather than disposables. If I do have a disposable product, I look for ways to reuse it before throwing it out, such as using the backs of envelopes for little notes.

I started doing this when I learned, as a rule of thumb, for every ton of consumer garbage, there are five tons of waste at the manufacturing stage and twenty tons of waste at the site of initial resource extraction (mining, pumping, logging, farming). That's twenty-five pounds of garbage for every pound of garbage we throw away!

My husband is a "fix-it" and won't let me throw anything out until he looks it over and determines that it absolutely cannot be repaired. This is so ingrained in him that if we need to purchase something, he will look for a way to find that product in some condition that he can repair. Last month he wanted a bicycle. Lo and behold, within a few days abandoned bikes began to appear as he went about his daily activities and soon he had five bicycles that he happily repaired to be functional. He also repairs houses and cars and toasters...and anything else that needs fixing. I remember watching an interview with Paul Newman once in which he said he and his wife had been married for so long because they were the kind of people who repaired the toaster when in broke instead of buying a new one, so they also fixed their marriage when it needed it. We're like that, too.

We also frequently shop at flea markets, garage sales, storage auctions, thrift stores, antique shops, and salvage yards and look in classified ads and on community bulletin boards for products we need. My husband is a big fan of eBay. When we remodel, we use as much salvage material as we can. We've found many beautiful old doors and windows, slabs of marble for countertops, and other building materials that make our homes unique and charming.

When we have items we no longer need that are still serviceable, we give it to a thrift store (and take a tax deduction), hold a garage sale, or give it to a community service group. If we can't sell something we no longer want, we give them away to allow them to be of use to someone else. We periodically clean out our garage, cabinets, and closets, to put things back into circulation that we no longer use.

Continuing to reuse a product for its entire lifespan is more efficient than recycling because it doesn't require crushing, grinding, melting, purifying, or refabricating the recycled material. Simply doubling the lifetime of any product will cut in half the energy consumption, the waste and pollution, and the ultimate depletion of all the materials used to make it.

There are many, many reusable products on the market, We use dishes and glasses instead of paper or plastic plates and cups, cloth napkins instead of paper napkins, real silver silverware instead of plastic, baking pans instead of aluminum foil, rechargable batteries instead of disposable batteries, a French press coffee pot for making herbal tea instead of tea bags, and other reusable products.

I also seek out and buy good quality products that will last a long time. While they may cost more initially, I've found in the long run I generally have to replace the less expensive item two or three times in the same time period the better quality item would last. And each time the cheaper product is replaced, a new one has to be manufactured using more resources and creating more waste. I look for products with lifetime guarantees--if a company promises to repair a product for your lifetime, chances are it will last longer before it needs fixing.

Some products are remade through a process known as "remanufacturing," an industrial process in which products are reassembled using old restored parts and a few new parts to produce a unit that is of the same quality as, if not superior to, the old. My husband purchases remanufactured automotive parts, and we would certainly purchase any remanufactured product available to us.

Reclaim

We are also always watching for how we can reclaim things and put them to another use. This goes beyond reusing something in it's current form--it's reuse the material from a product, but in a different form for a different purpose. The basic material itself is not altered, but it may be re-cut, and then reused to make a completely different product.

Our foremothers reclaimed flour sacks to make dresses and then cut the dresses when they were worn to make quilts. Regularly, my husband and I will look around to see what materials we have that can be used to make something before we go out and purchase new or salvaged materials.

Recycle

And of course, we recycle everything our local community will accept and also buy products made of recycled material.

What I do with my garbage

Here are are the types of garbage I have in my home and what we do with it.

Food waste

We eat a lot of fresh vegetables, so we have a lot of plant waste. Because we have a garden, we compost all of it.

We used to have a worm compost box, which is a wonderful thing. Earthworms eat the plant material and produce the best compost. Even if you don't have a garden or even a fire escape, you can put a worm box in the cabinet under your sink, then offer the compost to friend or neighbors, or deposit it in a park. The best (and easiest!) book on the subject is Worms Eat My Garbage by Mary Applehof.

Anyway, back to our worm box...It was working fine in California, but I think it may be too hot for the worms here in Florida, or at least we haven't figured out how to make it work in this climate. But we still, by habit, put our vegetable matter in the worm box and it's composting on it's own without the worms. Nature does find a way to take it's course...

Through the winter I make chicken stock weekly and so we end up with a pot of exhausted vegetables and chicken bones. We had been sending this to the landfill until one day our friend Winston came over and saw it sitting on the stove. He told us we should bury it in the ground along the drip line of our fruit trees. We did, and immediately we saw an amazing improvement. Larry has been planting our chicken stock waste around the roots of our banana trees and they are growing huge leaves--at least twice as big as before--and look very vibrant and happy. This just shows that "chicken soup is good for everything". :-)

Aluminum and steel

We don't use a lot of aluminum and steel, but that which we do use, we recycle. We have no aluminum cans, for example, because we don't drink soda or beer. We have no foil food trays because we don't eat frozen dinners or take-out. Occasionally we'll have a piece of foil or a can from olives, but that's it.

Glass

We do have a few glass bottles. Unfortunately, our community no longer recycles them (they told me recycled glass no longer has economic value because virgin glass is more cost-effective). So we have no choice but to send glass bottles to the landfill. I wish our recyclers would be more creative and take a cue from Broward County, Florida, where they are looking into recycling glass into sand for beach restoration projects. Why not? Glass is made from sand. Why not return it to the beach?

I would love to see more artisan glassblowers utilize recycled glass for dishware and glassware, such as Recycled Glassworks, Fire and Light, and Green Glass.

Paper

We don't read newspapers (we get all the news we need from radio, television and the internet), so we don't need to recycle them.

I have a fair amount of office paper, magazines, and junk mail that gets recycled in paper grocery bags curbside, but first every clean backside gets reused. I have a box next to my desk that holds paper for reuse. I use it for scratch paper and also in the printer for drafts. I also cut it up into quarters and use them for little notes and telephone messages.

Plastic

Our community does recycle plastic, so our plastic containers from yogurt and cheese go in the recycling bin.

Reusables

Everything else

We are always looking for ways to recycle and reuse anything and everything. Only as a last resort do we send things to a landfill. The garbage collection comes twice a week and usually we don't have more than a half a can or less.

Garbage recepticles

I just want to say a word about garbage recepticles, because so many of them are plastic.

We have trash recepticles in every room. All of them are woven baskets made of natural materials. Not only are they renewable and biodegradable, they are also more visually appealing.

In the kitchen, we put our vegetable waste in a beautiful copper box with a lid that was actually designed to hold bulbs and seeds, but it works perfectly for our compost. Packaging trash goes in a paper grocery bag--we ask for them instead of plastic at the checkout stand--and the very few cans and plastic containers we have go in the plastic recycling bin provided by the city.

Our garbage collection service provides garbage cans that are picked up curbside by a robotic arm and dumped into the garbage truck. So we just pile our garbage in the can without putting it in plastic trash bags.

Large brush such as tree branches are collected curbside as well. Also no plastic garbage bags.

I can't think of the last time we used a plastic garbage bag.

Household hazardous waste

Giving back to nature

My husband and I are both very aware that we live within an ecosystem. Even though we live in a suburban area, our garden is filled with plants, butterflies, birds, lizards, snakes, and even a little bunny that just appeared one day, obviously an escaped pet. So when we are discarding things, we think about what we can give to our flora and fauna too.

One thing we both do is put our hair in the garden. When I clean the hairs out of my brush, and when Larry trims his beard, we put the discarded hairs into the garden. We know they will biodegrade, but before they do, a bird may use it to build a nest, or some other critter may find a use for it. It's a small thing, but it makes us feel connected to the larger web of life from which all our material benefits come.