Week 26
Bubblewrap, garbage squatters, and New Year’s Resolutions – it’s been a busy week for the Green Garbage Project.
New Year’s Resolutions and the Green Garbage Project Halfway Point: Adam and I are both back to work this week after an enjoyable holiday. Tonight, the Christmas decorations came down and we’re busy setting our goals for 2010. We are excited that, right at the turn of the decade, we are just about the hit the halfway point of our project – quite an accomplishment! Next week, I plan to do a run-down of the garbage we have accumulated so far, because our official halfway point is January 6, which occurs this Wednesday. I’ll show you pictures of the small amount of garbage we have and write up an itemized list. I don’t want to do this yet because I have something in the works that may eliminate a good amount of the plastic garbage we have collected, and I’ll know whether this pans out by the end of the week.
Adam and I have spent a lot of time discussing our project as it exists right now, and we’re pretty darn proud of ourselves for the meager amount of trash we’ve accumulated thus far. But, as a Type A personality, New Year’s just wouldn’t be the same for me without some resolutions, so in that spirit, for the remainder of our project, we have resolved to:
- Test out one new garbage-free product each month
- Make one green change to our lives each month (in addition to our garbage-free-ness) – things like using my graywater to water plants
- Include more pictures in this blog
- Work to eliminate all non-essential, if recyclable, plastic from our lives
Garbage Squatters: In other, more absurd news, I have a story I just have to share. First, just to establish the appropriate mood, let’s review – Adam and I live garbage free. This means nothing goes into our garbage can except for meat scraps and used kitty litter. Since our landlord pays for our garbage, we do haul the bin to the curb each week with the aforementioned items filling about an inch of the can. Last Thursday (garbage day), I cleaned out the litter box before the garbage truck arrived, so I hiked out to the curb and dumped the litter in our garbage can. You can thus imagine my surprise when I opened the can and found … garbage. Almost a whole can full. I stared at the garbage for a minute in confusion, shut the lid, and decided that I must have opened the wrong can. So I looked around for our can and realized ours was the only small bin for three houses up or down the block (the other houses use bigger, family-sized garbage cans). What was going on? Reopening the can, I spent more time examining the garbage (I almost took a picture, but decided that might be taking it a bit far). The garbage consisted of stuff we never bought, even before the Green Garbage Project – paper snowman plates and holiday napkins, empty toy packaging, meat packaging. The only conclusion we could come to is that one family on our block, clearly unaware of our garbage-free existence, decided to use our can in what I can only consider garbage squatting. Oh, the irony.
Bubblewrap: I ordered a Christmas present for Adam that just arrived in the mail last week, and inside the package we found bubblewrap, something we’ve not been faced with yet. Just thought I would share that a quick Internet search tells us that bubblewrap is indeed recyclable with other plastic film/stretchy plastic as long as the bubbles are popped. As fun as it would have been to spend our time popping those bubbles, we have decided to keep the stuff and reuse it for future packaging needs. Reuse before recycle. Oh, and fun fact for the day: Bubblewrap was originally invented as a type of wallpaper.
Two days until we’ve reached the halfway point! See you on the flipside.
Our 2010 calendar, produced by AmericanForests.org. This is a great product we discovered - the entire calendar is paper and a couple of staples. Absolutely zero plastic packaging. For each calendar sold, the company plants a tree, and it's printed on post-consumer waste paper.
Two weeks' worth of garbage. The gold thing and the red thing are foil/plastic wrapping paper we were given, the plastic film is from a movie we received as a Christmas present, and the red plastic strand is from a bottle of sparkling cider that we thought was wrapped only in foil.
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Extra bubble wrap will gladly be used up by local Daisy or Brownie Girl Scouts. The girls will use the bubble wrap to make sit upons for their campfire sing alongs.