I was out running the other morning, and it just happened to be garbage day. I couldn’t help but notice that close to half of the houses sadly had an overflowing garbage can, or even two, out at the street. This is absolutely amazing to me. How can one household generate that much waste in 2 weeks?
When I lived alone several years back, I wouldn’t even generate one plastic bag’s worth of waste. And I don’t mean a garbage size bag — I always used leftover plastic bags that found their way into my apartment, typically your average plastic bag that you would get from a grocery store.
Now that I live in a house with my girlfriend, we barely generate more waste than that. And now since we use reusable bags for shopping, we’ve turned to using other plastic that comes into the house for garbage bags. An empty bread bag or a produce bag does just fine as a garbage bag for a couple days, and also keeps the house from smelling and attracting flies since a regular size garbage bag would last all week.
But I’d say over two weeks we generate maybe two plastic bags worth, barely enough to fill up the bottom 20% of the garbage bin. So my thoughts are still the same, how does a single family home generate an overflowing bin of trash in two weeks?
Related posts:
- How to Keep 10,000 Plastic Bags out of Landfills by doing Nothing
- Too much waste in businesses and restaurants
- Quick Green Office Tip — eliminate cubicle and desk trash
Posted in: sustainability Originally posted on Thursday, July 1st, 2010 at 6:38 AM .
This post got me thinking! While we do recycle, our family of three (plus a dog and two cats) does generate a bunch of “trash”. Sounds like a project in the making. I love the idea of using reusable garbage bags each day.
I’ll report back if I come up with any stunning discoveries, but I think, like most things, we will just have to be more mindful of our consumption habits.