Creating a Garbage-Free Household
by Fred Horch, Principal Advisor at Sustainable Practice
In a sustainable goods economy, we can close landfills and incinerators because we compost and recycle the materials we use. But until we reach the goal of 100% sustainable goods and 100% rates of composting and recycling, we’ll need sanitary landfills to store our garbage, or incinerators to burn our garbage plus landfills to store our incinerator ash.
The good news, shared in last week’s newsletter, is that more than half of the garbage we’re currently burying or burning — all food scraps, paper, cardboard, yard trimmings, and wood — we can sustainably compost instead. And we can recycle metal — including lithium in batteries — and glass repeatedly with no loss in quality.
You are making progress on the pathway to a sustainable goods economy if you collect compostable and recyclable materials, actually compost and recycle them, and keep all organic waste out of your trash bags. But what about plastic and other synthetic materials that cannot be physically composted or practically recycled? On average, we use more than six pounds of plastic per week (at 139 kg per capita per year — not including fiber and rubber polymers — North America has the highest per capita plastic consumption in the world).
Sustainability Step: Minimize Plastic
Plastic is a synthetic material, typically derived from petroleum, that is generally lightweight, waterproof, and easy to form into shapes. Many rigid plastic containers are marked with a recycling symbol (three chasing arrows) and a number from 1 to 7. This gives the false impression that seven types of plastic resin can be recycled.
In fact, about 95% of post-consumer plastic waste in the United States is not recycled for very good reasons. Recycling plastic creates microplastic particles, which are pervasive contaminants in our air, water, and food supplies. Rather than trying to recycle as much plastic as you can, it’s much more sustainable to avoid buying plastic in the first place.
The most critical number to associate with plastic is zero. It is a good day for sustainability when you buy zero grams of single-use disposable plastic.
How to Minimize Plastic Waste
Plastic is convenient, but humans have lived for millions of years without it. You can choose how much plastic to bring into your life.
Drink More Tap Water
Beverage bottles are an easy category of plastic waste you can completely eliminate from your life. It wasn’t until 1967 that Nathaniel Wyeth started working on his invention that changed the world: the plastic soda bottle. Before carbonated sugar water was conveniently packaged in plastic, people drank much more plain tap water. The more tap water you and your family drink, the less thirst you’ll have for beverages packaged in plastic.
If plain water is too boring, buying beverages in glass bottles or metal cans is an okay choice for sustainability. However, many six-packs are held together by plastic rings which were recognized as a problem as far back as 1977. The best choice for personal hydration (and personal finance) is tap water and a reusable stainless steel water bottle.
Eat More Plants
In general, meat is packaged in plastic. You have more plastic-free choices when buying legumes, nuts, fruits, and vegetables. For one thing, you can bring your own reusable mesh bags rather than using plastic bags when picking out produce. Your local health food store probably has a section where you can buy staples like rice, beans, oats, and lentils from self-serve bins using kraft paper bags.
Buy In Bulk
With the rise in online e-commerce, it’s now easier to avoid plastic garbage by buying products like toilet paper by the case. You’ll save money buying products that come in a cardboard box rather than a plastic sleeve.
Support Your Local Farms
You can avoid plastic when you buy milk in reusable bottles and fresh produce in reusable pint and quart containers.
Talk to Local Businesses
Many restaurants have made the switch to paper products for takeout containers and straws. If your favorite diner is behind the times, let them know you’d prefer paper to plastic.
Examine and Measure Your Plastic Trash
I don’t know what’s in your trash, but you do. Take a look at the plastic items (if any) you’re putting in your recycling bin and trash bags. Did you need to buy them?
Once you’re aware of every piece of plastic you are buying and tossing, you can begin planning how to avoid doing that in the future.
If you’re super serious about sustainability, start a garbage journal to measure how much of your waste you are composting and recycling each week. How close to the goal of 100% can you achieve?
Recycling Plastic in the Future
It may be possible one day to recycle plastic well. Until then, safely storing plastic and synthetic garbage in sanitary landfills is a sustainable strategy. Burning or attempting to recycle plastic using today’s inadequate technology is not.
By carefully separating all organic material from plastic and other synthetic waste, we can help make sanitary landfills work better as plastic storage facilities. Nothing stinky should go in the garbage! If it stinks, it composts. Put stinky things in a compost bucket. (Or maybe wash them down the drain — if your sewer or septic system can handle it.)
A wise choice is to admit that we just don’t know how to recycle plastic today. Let’s think more about how to do that. If we carefully wash off and seal up all of our plastic trash and put it in the ground, we’ll know exactly where to find it in the future when we have better recycling technology available.
Meaningful Sustainability Metrics
I’m building a website where we can measure our progress toward important sustainability goals, such as living free of garbage. We can take practical steps on the pathway to using 100% sustainable goods that can be composted and recycled. When we achieve this goal, we can close landfills and incinerators and retire garbage trucks.
If we record the volume of garbage we send each week to bury or burn, we can calculate “people per acre of landfill” and “people per garbage truck” sustainability metrics. The more people each acre of landfill and each garbage truck can sustain, the better. Improving on these metrics means more people can live on Earth with fewer landfills, fewer incinerators, and fewer garbage trucks, leaving room for more nature and peace.
Taking meaningful measurements empowers us to quantify and compare our sustainability along seven pathways.
Questions? Ideas?
If you still have questions about eliminating your plastic trash after reading all this, please leave a comment!
And if you have any ideas or tips that have helped your family or organization reduce your own use of plastic, please share!
Sustainable Practice
This post is republished from a weekly newsletter called One Step This Week from Sustainable Practice. Sustainable Practice is a company Peggy Siegle and I launched in the summer of 2023 to help sustainability leaders and individual champions in households and organizations implement excellent sustainability practices that make the world better for everyone now and far into the future.
Thanks for reading. I hope the information and ideas we’re sharing help you achieve goals on your own journey to sustainability!
