Ten years of trash, a retrospective

Tuesday last, I put out the fifth and final trash can of the year.   Then I hauled out the sewing machine, and I stitched together two empty dog-food bags to make the garbage can liner for the first trash can of 2022.   (If our current pace of trashiness continues, that first trashcan will head out to the curb sometime in March).

Landfill-bound garbage cans

In one sense, 2021 saw a huge (66% !!!) one-year increase in garbage production in Chez Enoughing-It.   But, eh, a year ago we had the choice of timing on a December/January trash can, and we January-ed it.   If we'd decided the other direction, both 2020 and 2021 would have seen four trash cans at the curb.   In other words, we seem to be leveling off, finding our garbage equilibrium.

The early garbage-reduction techniques were of course the most powerful.   A biggie was realizing we could recycle corrugated cardboard on our campus.  (Nowadays, we can curbside recycle it).  Moving the kids out of the house helped with our personal tally, too, although I guess in all fairness this means that there's a lot of garbage production that used to come from the Snoughlings that I no-longer measure, and so the drop in that graph above isn't anywhere as individually impressive as it might seem.  But my own lifestyle and buying habits have certainly changed in the past decade, and some of the drop-off in garbage production is a result of me living differently than before.

 The change in my purchasing habits has rippled out to affect not only what I buy, but also what other people buy for me.  This past Christmas, my friends and family got me things like . . . 

• bamboo toothbrushes packaged in cardboard,
• homemade cookies delivered in a wide-mouth canning jar,
• cast-off clothes ("hand-me-ups") from the more fashion-intensive Snoughlings,
• chalk-board canning jar lids, in cardboard boxes,
• a ten-minute sand timer (like an hour glass, but instead a 10-minute glass),
• a cutting board, packaged in a burlap bag,
• a hand-made, hand-warming mug, 

. . . and then also a few plastic-y things wrapped in plastic, because after all I do live in the world with regular people.   The first entry in the 2022 garbage can is, in fact, a plastic Soda Stream machine I nabbed many years ago off of Craigslist, but that no longer works.  The repair folks I chatted with on the phone assured me that their machines are recyclable, but my local waste management people don't have the facilities to deal with this (and recycling plastic is a lie anyway).  

What other things can I say about trashiness (or lack thereof)?  I remain intensely grateful to my next-door neighbors, who let us use a corner of their yard as a compost pile.  (That is seriously nice of them!)  I'm an on-going fan of "Free" piles, of yard sales, of Freecycle and Craigslist, and even occasionally of so-called Thrift stores, where we can get new-to-us items that come with no packaging.  I'm grateful for local merchants who let us bring cloth bags, pyrex containers, and canning jars for collecting more food.  

But even so, we still have a 30-gallon can in the basement (lined with dog-food bags stitched together), that will eventually fill up with plastics and a few other non-biodegradable, non-recyclable objects that nobody wants, not even us, and that we'll put at the curb, and pretend it goes "away".