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People generate too much garbage and waste

posted by Russ, July 1 in sustainability with tags

2 comments

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?


Originally posted on Thursday, July 1st, 2010 at 6:38 AM .

2 Responses to “People generate too much garbage and waste”

  1. 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.

  2. How – sadly you can hear the glass and metal chinking as the bags are swung on the garbage truck. You can see the corner of a newspaper poking thru a tear in the bag. Which is dumped in a cardboard box …

    Our minimal amount of garbage is mostly the too flimsy for recycling plastic packaging which comes with everything.

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