Trash Audit - A.K.A. Does this Trash Make My Bin Look Big?

Happy New Year!

We audited our trash last week, to check in to see how we were doing, in our quest to make less trash.  We hosted many people for both Christmas and New Years, and I am happy to report, that even with the present opening, we still have room in our trash can!  (We forgot to put it our between Christmas and New Years.)  Here is what it looked like:

Trash:
8 plastic bags of assorted food packaging (crackers, bread, cheese, ham)
Three plastic tubs (cottage cheese, dip and spread)
12 candy wrappers.  Mostly paper and foil.
 One kitchen trash bag of paper (from a purge of old paperwork.  This all arrives paperless now, but we still had it from the past.)
Christmas Packaging - fit in one 10" x 10" by 8" box.  This was the rigid plastic around a toy each of my kids got.  There was also tissue paper that was beyond reuse, and had already served us well several times!  Santa wrapped his gifts - so there was a small amount of gift wrap  We were pleased that Santa used eco-friendly printed paper.  
One grocery sized bag of assorted tissues, floss, misc.  bathroom trash - collected from all the bathrooms.
Two paper soda cups that came home from eating out - no lids or straws.
Three pieces of fruit that went bad.
A decent handful of junk mail and envelopes from Christmas cards we received.
12 glass bottles of various types.  Did you know that glass can be recycled forever?  It never goes down in quality like other products. 
13 cans of cat food.   Our elderly cats can't eat dry food very well any more.  
4 soup cans.
Cat waste.

Diverted:
8 cans from soda.  They are being diverted to make soda can art, like this 
4 wine bottles.  Diverted to make these centerpieces.
Loads of gift bags and tissue.  We refold and put these back away for another year.  
Compostable plates from New Year's Eve.  They will go into the worm bin.
5 plastic cups - that were washed out and will be used again.
5 cardboard boxes that will be used for art at reCREATE.
Eco -Packing peanuts - which can be used for to make fun art sculptures, like this.


Not Among Our Trash:
Wasted Food from Christmas Eve.  We carefully calculated how much food was appropriate for our guests.  We replenished food as needed.  Result - virtually no wasted food after hosting 11 people.
Excess Packaging:  Among the adults - almost all gifts were either handmade or "experience" gifts.  I'm thrilled that we will be getting together with other family members to see theater performances, and attending some lovely fundraisers together.  Not only are we helping causes, we now have some dates that we know we will be having fun together.  My sister and her husband are taking our kids to see a show and keeping them overnight.  They can't wait!
Disposable Plates & Cutlery - We did bring out some paper plates for New Year's Eve- but we will compost them.  We used all real plates and cutlery for the rest of the time, and just cleaned up afterwards. 
Shopping Bags - We bring our own when we shop - so we don't have a drawer exploding with one use plastic shopping bags.  
Christmas Decor - I heard a story about a local family that put their Christmas Tree out for the scouts to pick up.  It still had on the lights and ornaments.  I can't imagine that!  Each year as we pull out our ornaments, we revisit memories of Christmas Past.    The result is that we reuse them every year.  We did buy a tree this year... but I know it will be mulched and made into compost. 
Much of the food we bought was placed in our glass containers, significantly reducing the amount of waste we generated.  

We are still learning, but are quite proud of our low waste holidays!  How did you do?

 

Touring Our "Away" aka... The Place Garbage Goes

Garbage wise, we live in an interesting area.  All of our household (and commercial) waste goes into one bin (referred to as our One Big Bin),   Sorting at home isn't necessary.  Our garbage goes to a place called a "dirty" Material Recovery Facility (MRF).  In short - that means all the sorting is done for us. 

I will tell you that when we first moved here from Alameda County - a county that had multiple bins for us to use, I was flipping out.  I called my garbage company several times, drilling them on the logistics of how our garbage is handled, "Are you sure you recycle all of our stuff?"  There are recycling bins around town, for newspaper, cardboard, plastic bottles, and  polystyrene foam (aka Styrofoam used in packaging things like new electronics.), for residents who wish to have a bit of control over the recycling process.

When I am educating students  (with ReCreate) about where our garbage goes, inevitably a teacher will ask why we don't just sort it at home.  What most people don't know, if that while you and I may be committed to sorting our garbage, not all waste is sorted in other regions.  Take that garbage can outside the grocery store, for instance.  In other regions, that garbage goes straight to the landfill.  Here in Placer County, it is sorted, just like our household garbage,

I've been to the MRF, many times, but was happy to be able to take my kids so they fully understood this zero waste journey we set off on.   In our region, each day about 1.5 millions pounds of garbage is brought to the MRF.  It is dropped on the receiving floor, and then tractors push it on conveyor belts starting the sorting process.
 

City of Lincoln truck on the receiving floor.

 

 On the other side of the wall, the garbage starts the sorting journey.  First people manually open the garbage bags.  Then the garbage goes through something called the Trommel Screen, which sorts garbage by size.  Large items go to people to manually sort them - picking out the recyclables.  Smaller items continue through the mechanical sorting process.  This  is pretty cool to watch.  Some work is done by people, but the machines do a lot to help sort the materials.    

Giant magnets grab the ferrous metals... I'm talking soup cans, paperclips, bobby pins, the smallest bits of metal don't get past this thing!  Here is a video of how it works.  

 

Aluminum cans also are collected in an interesting way toward the end of the garbage sorting cycle.  The garbage travels through an eddy current, and the result is that the aluminum cans float up, while the rest of the garbage drops down.  This allows the aluminum to be sorted for recycling. The entire process can be seen here, click on MRF

The one thing we do separate at our homes is yard waste.  Our lawn clippings, leaves, weeds, and other yard waste goes into our Green Bin and it is turned into compost.  It takes about 8 weeks for the stuff to decompose (with a little help) into high quality soil amendment. 

The compost is warm when you touch it because it is so busy decomposing!

My kids checking out the giant rows of compost.

Hare are some random pictures I took along the way to give you an idea of the volume of waste passing through the MRF.  

Good thing these plastic bottles are going to recycling.  A plastic bottle takes about 700 years to decompose in a landfill.

Paper baled for recycling

Final check on the paper line

Organizing bales

The kids checking out the model of the MRF. 

In the end, we decided the MRF does an amazing job finding the recyclable stuff from our waste.  That said, witnessing the sheer volume of waste our region generates got my kids firmly committed to our zero-waste adventure.  We'll keep you updated!

Want to see more?  Check out Eric Oddo, from the MRF on KVIE, here.