Tuesday, June 11, 2013

A Garbage Free Year

Last night my husband Matt presented me with an interesting challenge for our family. "Let's not throw anything into the garbage for a year. You could write a blog about it." My first reaction was to laugh. I'm a musician, not a writer. I've tried the blog thing before and was not very successful with it. But as the night went on and the idea percolated, I decided that it was a good idea after all.

A bit of background on me and my family. I grew up in the Waterloo Region, the home of the world's first residential recycling program. I still remember when our family got its first blue box. As a resident of one of the townships, we had to wait longer to receive this program than residents of the cities. As a member of the environmental club at my elementary school, this made me sad that I could recycle bottles, cans, and paper at school, but had to throw them out at home. The day that I came home from school and found the blue box sitting on our porch was a very happy day indeed. From then on our family recycled everything that we could. My parents also purchased a composter (this was before the Region gave them out for free) and we composted kitchen scraps. Recycling and composting, although sometimes inconvenient was a way of life.

When Matt and I got married, this way of life continued. In our apartment we stuffed our little blue bag full with recyclables and when we bought our first house we got a composter and happily composted everything we could. When our children arrived, we chose to use cloth diapers, even though disposables would have been more convenient. (I must confess that we did have disposables on hand, but very rarely used them) In our four person household with two children in diapers, we regularly put out only half a bag of garbage per week. We would look around at other people on our street who had fewer people in the house, and were amazed at how much garbage they would put out at the curb each week. Now that we are blessed with a green bin program, we regularly put out only a kitchen catcher sized bag of garbage each week.

Caring for the earth is part of who we are, and garbage reduction is but a part of that. We use our clothesline whenever we can. Laundry gets done on sunny days and hung outside whenever possible. We do have a dryer, and it is used during the winter, and if the weather is rotten and the laundry has piled up too high spring through fall. In the winter our thermostat is kept at 20ºC (68ºF), though we've discovered that since our thermostat shares an uninsulated wall with our refrigerator that the actually temperature within the house tends to be closer to to 18.8ºC (66ºF). It definitely is chilly, but sweaters and blankets help make that more bearable. In the evenings our thermostat is set to 17.5ºC (64ºF). In the summer we do use air conditioning, but try to use it sparingly. Midday it's set to 29.5ºC (85ºF), morning and evening to 26.5ºC (80ºF) and night to 24.5ºC (76ºF). The high midday setting is also due to the time of use electricity pricing, as our one income family looks to save money in many ways. We also try to grow some of our own food, which in the past has included tomatoes, peppers, strawberries and herbs. I make some of my own preserves (salsa, relish, jam, peaches, pears) using locally sourced ingredients, and shop at local producers whenever possible. There are times when practicality and monetary restrictions make this challenging, but we try hard to tread lightly upon the earth nonetheless.

We've been married for 11 years, live in a village without transit service, but have managed to survive for most of that time on one vehicle. We had a second vehicle for a short time when I was working part time, but gave it up when I decided to be at home full time again. This means some early mornings dropping Matt off at the nearest bus stop when I need a car for the day, or asking to borrow my mother's car if it's just a short errand. In the summer Matt also bikes the 15 km to work regularly. Our one car has made for some very wet and cold walks to school over the years, but I always feel guilty when I drive that one kilometre to the school.

Now that you know a bit more about where we're coming from, back to the garbage free challenge. Matt's idea came from the articles that have been written recently about the usage, or lack thereof, of the green bin program, and the projected timeline until our regional landfill is full. I know the region is tossing around ideas, including reducing the bag limit or even going to biweekly garbage collection, while keeping recycling and green bin collection every week. Before jumping into this idea of a garbage free year, I felt I needed to sit down and do some research into what the current practices are for recycling (to make sure I am following them correctly!) as well as other waste collection.

My first stop was the Region of Waterloo Waste Management website, specifically their Blue Box brochure. There has long been debate in our house as to what types of plastic bags are allowed in our recycling. The Blue Box brochure alluded to shopping bags being okay, and plastic wrap and baggies as unacceptable. But what about milk bags? We are in Canada after all, and that's the most affordable way to purchase milk for a family. I sent an email off to the Region's Waste Management department last night asking about the milk bags, as well as Ziplock bags and plastic packaging containing recycling symbols. First thing this morning I received this reply:

"Currently everything you ask about is recyclable, however,  it's not to that extent in our Region.  We need to have companies that will purchase certain grades of plastic from us.  We recycle retail bags because the company that buys them says they are consistent with what the content is made of and easily breaks down evenly for recycling.  Any other plastic bag, wrap, shrink wrap, bags with the triangle symbol (bread, salt softener, etc), ziplock and other clear plastic bags are not at this time taken in our region.

Plastic packaging such as those hard bubbles surrounded by cardboard are recyclable but the cardboard needs to be separated from it.   We like to suggest to residents to stick to household containers that are rigid plastic with a triangle symbol from 1 - 7 on it are all recyclable."

Thank you to the Region for their prompt reply to my question. It is a rather unfortunate reply, however, as this puts a wrench in our plans, and also means we've been "contaminating" our recycling by recycling milk bags, bread bags and other plastic bags when we shouldn't have been. 

When Matt brought up this idea, he went on to clarify it a bit more by indicating that it's likely impossible to live completely garbage free, but that we could "save up" our garbage by cleaning it and storing it for the year. This is where my idea of the "one bag, one year" comes in. Could we fit all of our garbage for a year into a 33 gallon garbage bag? Meat packages would have to be washed before being stored, and items like milk and bread may have to be procured in different ways. Bread could be made, and milk could be purchased in cartons, depending on the cost difference, as cartons are recyclable. 

The next few days at our house will bring about some more research and more discussions about whether or not this venture will work. If we decide it will work, I hope for a July 1 start date. I will then take the time to blog about our experiences about living as garbage free as possible, sharing our challenges and hopefully creative ways we've come up with to leave as small a footprint as possible on our earth.

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