Zero Waste Challenge: Week 1 & 2
Well, my family and I are officially two weeks into the Zero Waste Challenge. Honestly, to this point, there has been little guidance on what to do other than how to provide our weekly report on trash totals. We are working with the other families in the county to find a time for our initial training from a county and Zero Waste Challenge representative.
So without a lot of formal guidance to go on, here has been our experience during the first two weeks.
We began tracking our trash (which is really our trash, organics recycling and recycling) on September 26, 2020. Each week is Monday to Sunday in terms of what we throw away.
Week 1
Our first week was fairly easy — we had zero trash — which will skew our baseline to some degree. We generally have one bag of trash every two weeks. This has certainly increased during the pandemic as we rely on grocery deliver a lot more than we did before.
Leading into March, we had regularly been shopping at Fresh Thyme where we had been taking advantage of a lot of bulk items. Since then, we’ve noticed that a lot of items that had previously not used plastic, are using it. Whether it’s a plastic film or a plastic container for items, it seems that the efforts for food safety has drastically altered how we operate during this pandemic. NPR even reported on this a few days ago.
During week 1, we sent organics and recycling to our bins only. Our recycling was on an off-cycle week during week 1, so it already had some items in it.
We had agreed to document our contents by taking pictures and estimating volume. I took photos of some of the items we brought out and recorded them. I forgot to take photos on Sunday before pickup on Monday to estimate our volume.
We had a few extra cardboard items, a large box from our CSA, and some packages from Amazon.
Week 2
Week 2 was our first load of garbage — a single bag and wires from the side of the house. One of the most interesting aspects of this challenge is that the county and prepared an online survey where we can submit our weekly results, notes, thoughts and photos of our contents we get rid of.
As part of that, there is a section for extra trash. So this week was an opportunity to share the details of our project on the house. We removed old exterior wiring for cable TV/ internet that we no longer use (thank you fiber internet!). We did the project ourselves — cutting the old wire, removing the wall-mounted hardware and patching the holes in our stucco siding.
We documented the wiring with a photo. Otherwise, the only other trash was a few bags (in compostable bags) of dog poop. We have discussed best practices for pet waste, but I don’t know what is the best. I hope this is a question we can ask our project leaders when we have our initial training.
This week we remembered to take photos of the inside of the containers before pickup, we then had to estimate the total volume to the closest 25%. In this case we said:
Trash: 25%
Organics: 25%
Recycling 1: 25%
Recycling 2: 75%
This post was originally published on Choosing Eco on Oct. 15, 2020.
