One week down, fifty-one to go!

We have completed week one of our "garbage free" challenge! The photo below shows how much garbage we accumulated this week. Not bad for a family of four for seven days. To put this into a better context, this is a deli bag, which is similar in size to a milk bag, so approximately 1.5 litres. And this is by no means compacted in any way. So we figure if we are able to produce this much garbage, or less each week for the next year, we should easily fit it all into one 75 L garbage bag. (And yes, this deli bag could have been added to our soft plastics recycling which will be taken to another region, but it was the easiest thing we had to put our garbage in!)

Our challenge didn't start out as smoothly as we had hoped. Between the last week of school, trying to finish up the renovation in our basement, and Canada Day celebrations, some of our garbage free alternatives didn't happen for this week like we had hoped. Both Matt and I also got sick this week, which resulted in some extra purchases and a few meals that were not well thought out in terms of garbage content. Even still, we managed to do okay.

Some of the things we found in our garbage this week:

• tops to yogurt containers - I will be looking for foil topped yogurt when grocery shopping this week
• cheese packaging - a necessary evil, but we don't finish a large block each week
• plastic seal around frozen juice can - I'm going to look into the cost difference between plastic bottles or large tetra packs versus frozen concentrate
• Swiffer dusters - not something I usually use, but I wanted to be able to throw away the dust left on the basement floor from the renovation
• fast food drink cups and apple slices packages - sometimes when mom and dad are both sick, you have to cave and buy fast food :)

I also did some more research about what is and is not compostable in Waterloo Region. I was very excited to find out that both parchment and butcher paper, as well as cotton balls can go into the green bin! The Region's Waste Managment has an in-depth list posted on their website. It's also exciting that this week marks the beginning of the use of compostable plastic bags in the Region's Green Bin program. Our family will personally continue to use paper products in our green bin, but I'm hoping this new initiative will encourage more people to use their green bins.