Trash Audit Stats:
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Name: Chris
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Living Situation: Family of 4 (+ 2 cats and 1 dog/dinosaur)
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Waste that showed up the most?: Non-Recyclable Plastic
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Biggest Surprise: Eco-friendly food doesn’t automatically = eco-friendly packaging
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First off, a little bit about our house. We call our place the Maple House because there’s a big silver maple out front. The house is a two family, but we’re a one family living in all of it. That means that we have two bathrooms, two kitchens, two of just about everything. We’re working on “unifying” the house but we’re not there yet. There’s four of us humans, and also two cats and a dog. We’re all eco-friendly folks that recycle and compost (we have a nice yard we can do that in), but we are far from perfect (as you’ll see below).
You should know this too… we don’t consistently cook in the same kitchen. In fact, my wife likes to cook in the kitchen downstairs, and I prefer to cook in the kitchen upstairs (there are silly reasons for this that are not that interesting). So when you see the trash pictured below, it’s not a total picture, it’s just the trash for the upstairs. The amount is not represented fully, but we all share similar values so the kinds of trash upstairs and downstairs is pretty consistent.
Here it is, laid out on the table which in retrospect was not the best place to stage this photo. Trash Audit Lesson #1 learned!
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Things I noticed:
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The audit is a great way to become more mindful of what you actually throw away. You know that you make trash, but the audit gives you a sense as to what the trash is and with that knowledge you can see how you can make changes. Here were some takeaways from my trash.
- Plastic! It’s all plastic…really. That’s not an exaggeration, every bit of trash we made this last week was plastic. There is one exception that didn’t make it into the trash can (more on that below), but otherwise it’s all plastic.
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. - Eco-friendly food is not immune to plastic:
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Just because it’s tofu or plant based sausages, there’s still plastic in the packaging. In the case of the tofu, a fair amount of plastic.
. - So this part is recyclable but the other part is not?
Take for example lids to plastic peanut butter jars. The jar itself can be recycled, but the lid isn’t the kind of plastic accepted in Cincy’s Rumpke Recycling Bins. Talk about confusing! Recycling can be tough to understand, and it’s further complicated by instances where some of the product is recyclable and other parts are not.
Just like Mo’s audit, we had a box of wine, which is supposed to be the most ecologically friendly way to package wine. The cardboard box can go in the recycling bin, but not the plastic sac that holds the wine.
. - Some plastic packaging can be reused… to an extent.
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All of the plastic tubs of cream cheese or bread bags can be reused, and we do at the Maple House, but only to an extent. After a bit they can get gross, or break or you start collecting so many that you run out of room to keep them in. If only one could take these containers back to the store to refill them. All of this also applies to plastic takeout containers (non styrofoam kind). We have sooo many of those at the Maple House. - Finally, not pictured here is cat litter. We have two cats and they make tons of litter. We have one of those diaper genies but for cat litter. It means lots of plastic bags filled with dirty litter. If I added this to the picture it would probably make up the most regular trash from our house, at least by weight. At least I knew better than to lay out the cat litter bags on the table.
That’s our trash audit! It’s not a total picture, but it gives us a good idea of what trash we regularly make and we are looking forward to trying ways to reducing our waste.
