Week 7
After a wonderful, whirlwind vacation, we’re back in town and gearing up to go back to work (Adam today, me tomorrow) and to pack up our house and move across town. Even without the Green Garbage Project, we’ve had a busy summer: two boys for a week, visiting my mom for a week, a great vacation to Ashland and Crater Lake, and now a move right on the tail of everything. Whew.
Our trip to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival for four days, then two days at Crater Lake was one of the best vacations I’ve ever taken and, though we adhered to our garbage rules, our trash-free lifestyle hardly interfered with what I’d consider a normal vacation routine.
In Ashland, the only trash we generated was from food, and 100 percent of this is recyclable. We probably looked like strange little packrats to our hotel’s hospitality service, but we saved every ounce of trash from restaurants all week long. We’ve come to the realization that practically every type of trash from restaurant meals is in fact recyclable or compostable – including paper soft drink cups, paper napkins, paper condiment holders, straws, and plastic silverware. As usual, it’s simply a matter of getting these materials to a facility that can process them. We saved all this, washed out drink or food containers with soap and water in our hotel room sink each night, and stored it in a plastic bag. Over the course of the week, we generated recyclables to fill one whole plastic bag, but that was it. The only restaurant items we had to avoid were single-serve containers for food items like butter or jam.
If there is a place to vacation trash-free, it’s Ashland, which is a community that wholly embraces environmentally friendly lifestyles. Even so, anyone on vacation could take similar steps to avoid generating vacation trash.
After seeing four plays in Ashland, we drove to Crater Lake and set up our tent in a campsite within the national park for two nights. Camping trash-free was a more unique experience than what we did in Ashland. Though it’s contradictory, car camping the way we do it generally produces lots of trash – perhaps more so than usual. It became a new challenge for us to adapt our love of camping to our garbage-free lifestyle. We did this fairly easily.
As always, it was a matter of planning ahead. We purchased bulk foods and canned foods – very easy to take camping. We ate ravioli from a can, corn on the cob, garlic bread, hot dogs and beans, and sandwiches for lunch and dinner. Breakfast was bulk cereal, donuts, coffee, and juice. In addition, we brought along our compost bin, which proved to be invaluable during the camping portion of our trip. Usually, camping trash is especially gross because it contains food scraps. This time, we had no trash and clean, dry recyclables.
We also swung by the Oregon Caves National Monument and toured the caves. While waiting for our tour to begin, we poked around the visitor center and I found, to my surprise, a small display that discusses the impact of trash in the caves. A fiberglass box held an array of trash items found in the caves, left by humans and impacting the cave environment and cave animals. Now that we’re living trash-free, messages about trash are almost everywhere.
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this is a wonderful site, found today. i am from seattle, and love the north west, but live in upstate new york. one site i would like to refer you to is http://www.tinychoices.com, my daughter is an environmental eng. and so i have adopted lots of these 3R things. one thing, she uses a menstrual cup to cut out that aspect of garbage, or homemade pads…so glad i am too old for that!
good luck
Hi! I’ve just found your site, directed from an article in TerraPass. I love what you’re doing. I’ll try to work your suggestions into my own daily life, and I plan to keep up with your blog in the future!
-Sarah
i really think every deli, restaurant, coffee shop, etc. should always have a compost bin. they produce so much waste that it just makes sense. and hotels should have a recycle bin available for guest, that is one thing that disappoints me every time we vacation. i suppose this sounds like a movement doesn’t it? good luck to you and i really hope that your school is inspired by your efforts. i know i am!
Traveling with a compost bin? Would love to hear more about that! Keep up the good work; you’re such an inspiration!
Have you seen the No Impact Man blog?
It’s a man and his family in New York who tried to go completely trash free for a year.
I think it’s great what your guys are doing. AND even more great that you are sharing your experience with all of us. My husband and I are trying to live a better life health and environmental wise. Thank you for providing us with great information and the inspiration as well. Let’s face it… it’s so much easier not to care! but the fact is that we should.
-Denise CA. palm springs