Loadingā¦
25
Rant: I thought I was green because I recycled, then I tracked my actual trash for 30 days in Phoenix
I always felt good about recycling. Blue bin every week, rinsed out the cans, the whole thing. Then in March I got curious and started weighing my trash before putting it out. I kept a little notebook by the door and wrote down the number every pickup day for a month. The first week was 41 pounds. I thought that had to be wrong so I weighed it again on a bathroom scale. Nope, 41 pounds. When I added up all four weeks it came to 138 pounds for one person. I sat down and sorted through one bag and honestly most of it was food I never ate and packaging from stuff I bought without thinking. The recycling bin was almost empty by comparison, which made me feel like a clown. I switched to buying loose produce at the farmers market off Roosevelt and cooking what was already in the fridge before buying more. Two months later I was down to about 55 pounds a month and it was not even hard. What is the one thing in your bin you keep buying and never using? I know mine was cucumbers.
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
thompson.christopher22d ago
Tracking your trash for a month is a solid move but the number on the scale is not the whole story. A lot of what people toss is stuff that rots, like food scraps and yard waste (mine is watermelon rinds, every single summer). That weight breaks down fast in a landfill and turns into gas, but it is nothing like the plastic you buy once and bury forever. Chasing pounds can make you feel bad about the wrong things, since a heavy bag of veggie scraps is way less of a problem than a light bag full of shrink wrap. So I see it different, weighing is a good start but how long the stuff sticks around matters more than how much it weighs.
7