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Don't do it, Tess! Don't carry your trash around!

Hi Tess
I immigrated from India. I think India is the land that reuses everything.
We used plastic bags till they faded or ripped, even milk bags were recycled and this is 25 years ago.
We sold newspapers by the kilos, and a man came home and collected cans and bottles for a price he paid us !!!!
I am glad that the USA is finally becoming aware of the waste it creates. Surely one cannot expect another country to keep on accepting US crap.
I am sorry, India, as an action of progress is getting Westernised, using toilet paper instead of water and disposable cans of cola for example.It appears as if all have to go wrong before one realises what is right. C'est la vie.

Tess, I heard you were looking for a way to dispose of the food scraps you cannot put in your compost pile, such as meat scraps and bones. The best way to do that, I think, is by replacing meat/fish with other sources of protein such as nuts and beans. You can get omega-3 from avocado and by combining rice with your beans you can obtain a complete protein with the amino acids you need. Perhaps, this is another challenge you are interested in facing as a way to minimize waste.

Thanks so much for trying to raise awareness on this issue. I just happen to be reading Elizabeth Royte's book "Garbage Land"; it talks about many of the issues you raise.

I agree that few people give their trash a second thought once it's brought to the curb. Most folks are not aware of the toxins that our trash produces over time and the liners used in even modern landfills will tear and leak these toxins into gorund water over time.

I'm not sure how we as a society have come to view virtually everything we buy as disposable - food containers, electronics, even the cars we drive. I think most folks would be shocked if they were really made aware of the volume of trash they generate in 1 year's time. I would like to see every school child across America take a field trip to the local dump so they can see 1st hand the scale and impact of our lifestyle.

Keep up the good work; I look forward to hearing more about your experiment.

Good luck Tess....I'll be listening to hear how you make out

I have been considering sustainability and its impact on our economy. A year or so ago I decided I would do my part by not buying as many things. I am using up what I have (translated this means I am wearing old clothes til the holes turn up in embarrassing spots). I consume less and create less trash.

Later I saw a story about some folks in SF who took a year long challenge to do the same thing: buying used instead of new, or not buying at all.

What would happen if all of us cut down our consumption by 10%-25%? Since our economy is about 2/3's consumer-spending driven it seems like it would be important.

How much of the consumer economy is "stuff" and how would reducing our consumption affect the economy? What sorts of changes could we make in our spending so the economy becomes stronger and more sustainable?

What is the difference if I spend $50 on a dinner or $50 on clothes or toys or new yard equipment? And if the product is made overseas, how does that change the equation? Alternately, I could save the money I would have spent on "stuff" - or some of it, anyway. I still need to have some fun spending.

What to do about leftover meat or chicken bones or fish? I have no problem with that -whatever is left over I carry outside and scrape it off the plate or pot to the same spot in my backyard. Crows and coyotes will eat it, and whatever else will come when it's dark. I'm not kidding - Ii have made friends with a coyote. He checks by leisurely during the day, is in no hurry and strolls off when nothing is there to go for. We know and appreciate each other by now. So often it crosses my mind how crazy city life is, because out here there is always something that will devour the leftovers. Oh, I live on 40 acres, house is powered by solar and i collect and use the rainwater. Next paved highway is 6 miles from here.
Bernhard

For leftover meat and bones: soup. Leftover soup can be frozen for a free dinner later. Add a bit of vinegar to the soup water to get the calcium out of the bones. After that they can be composted.

As far as kitty litter: train the cat to go outside? I don't own a cat but the cats we had as kids were outdoor cats and we never used litter.

I agree with Bernhard about the meat scraps, feeding them to the wild animals. My grandmother had a farm and always did that.

I live in a major city and can not put my garage out for the animals. We would be over run with rats.

Anyother ideas for us city dwellers?

Recycling or reducing waste is a very subjective thing. Many saw this waste buildup coming back in the 70s when we had our first gas crisis and ZPG was first evolved.
What is ZPG? "Zero Population Growth" What it means is that every person who is born on this earth must produce some waste. So their thinking was that if every woman only had no more than two children, then the world would begin to balance off. I thought this was a rather right on idea! So back when I was a junior in High School, I decided that I would not have more than two kids. After my second child was born I opted for a tubal ligation.

My oldest has decided not to have any children as she can see where I had hormone imbalance from environmental sensitivities (poisons) and it showed up more amplified in her generation.
My second oldest is now 22 and not sure when he will have (grand)children but it will be when they are more settled in their careers and not have to take on the additional expense of diapers, groceries, plastic bottles and medical bills.
I wonder if I could calculate all the generations we didnt have to produce in our calculations of "going green?"

What are you doing about used toilet paper? O are you switching to cloth for your two weeks?

check out
www.crunchychicken.blogspot.com

if you want to try the challenge while you're doing this.

for kitty litter try a natural alternative. we use nature's best (or something like that) and it is corn based, so when you scoop it you put it in the toilet. now i dont know the cost benefit of trashing versus flushing but that would be a whole other story in itself.
good luck!

I'm afraid that people who are interested in this story are people who already are "in the choir." I would like to hear from people who are changing their consumer/trash/recycling habits because of this story.

My neighbor drinks out of plastic glasses at home but bought lovely glasses for me to use when I'm there because she knows it's important to me not to generate trash -- while she still uses plastic.

Another friend asks me what difference it makes to add more and more trash to landfills. I am so dumbfounded by the question, I don't answer. It's like hearing someone ask: "Why do you need to breathe every day?" To me, it's required. To him, it's not even on his radar.

A Christian friend who practices his religion and prays to his particular God smiles condescendingly at me -- while dropping his recyclables in the trash -- when I tell him that my religion is Environmentalism.

These are the people I want to join the "choir."

I would like to agree with Shirley form India.

Poor countries re-use everything. I came here from Poland in 1992. When I grew up there, recycling glass seemed to be the norm. As far as I remember aluminum and plastic containers were very rare. Since it was a poor country, we didn't have resources to waste so we were forced to recycle. Same went for waste in general. We re-used things until you couldn't use them anymore. No market asked you "paper or plastic?". We had to bring our own cloth bags with us. Personally, I think stores themselves should be banned from distributing free plastic bags.

My point is that it is NOT hard to live like that. It may only be a minor inconvenience for the average person.

Good luck with the challenge, I'll be listening.

Dear Tess,

It's fantastic that you are running your trash challenge and bringing the fact of unsustainability of our lifestyle to the attention of the listeners. Most people have not even thought about it and are not aware that the current lifestyle in our country is not sustainable. If all the people on Earth adopted the average USA life style, it would take the resources of several planet Earths to support it!

As I am sure you are aware, reducing the amount of trash we produce is just the first small step. Recycling is also great and better than just throwing thing away into trash, but it is also costly and consumes a lot of energy.

To really solve the sustainability problem we need to fundamentally change our life style. We live in way too big houses, buy way too much stuff, drive too far to work in way too big cars, and so on. As the Earth Charter (http://www.earthcharter.org/) put it pointedly:

· We must realize that when basic needs have been met, human development is primarily about being more, not having more.

· For our civilization to survive, we need to change our culture and economy

· We need to stop wanting more and more things and find fulfillment not in possessing more and more material things, but in venues that do not consume so many resources (for example arts and culture).

Recent massive cheap production in the Third World countries surely made tons of products cheaply available to huge numbers of people, but most people who buy them do not realize that this rate of consumption will quickly exhaust the Earth's resources. The question that each one of us should be asking is not if I can afford to buy more and more stuff, but if the Earth can afford me to keep buying more and more stuff. The push for producing and selling more and more things is driven by the desire for short-term profits with no consideration of long-term effects.

The media are in a unique position, as they can make people aware of this problem and as they can present alternatives to our current consumer culture.

I sincerely hope that you will continue highlighting the sustainability on your program and that other media follow suit. How about making it a permanent weekly feature on your program, regularly discussing different aspects of sustainability and alternative economic and cultural models?

Thanks a lot for your attention to this issue.

Best regards,

Roman

It's really easy to deal with garbage if you live in the country. Everyone should own at least two chickens...(you don't need a rooster). They'll eat all the wasted food that your kids leave behind. They'll eat the meat off of the bones that you didn't. After that, throw the bones in the woodstove. Same with corn...throw the cob to the chickens, in a few days, after they've dried out, put them in the woodstove. Voila! All paper products go into the woodstove. In the summer, we save the paper to burn in the winter.
Compost pile, woodstove, chickens and recycling...that's all you need.

Sue, you are too cool. I'm a cloth pad and Diva person, not quite graduated to wipes. But I did think in the potty this morning that I bet this experiment doesn't include TP and such. It's sort of a hidden kind of trash. So is the fry container from which I mooched fries off of my friend today. So is the paper bib that my dentist used. I was not directly responsible for them, but they are built into the system of services I utilize. Then there are wastes that I will never see, on the industrial level. Trash runs deep...

While I dislike landfills at least as much as the next guy, I'm happy to report that lots of landfills are becoming generator sites. Your beef trimmings and lots of other biodegradables from the cities (where they can't keep chickens or coyotes) turn into methane and are burned to run generators.

That doesn't forgive us adding plastic cups to the landfills, but don't worry too much: they'll be mined for raw materials when we've run out in another 50 years.

Buy used, fix what you have rather than replace, give to (and buy from) second-hand shops: all great ideas if you have time to drive around to a bunch of rummage sales. But then what's your driving doing to help?

I guess I'm on both sides of the issue - it's a tough one!

Good luck with your quest.

I am glad to hear that you are doing this experiment.
Being aware of what you use, waste, or pollute is the first step to using less or better using what you have, being more responsible in your purchases so there is less waste of your finances and our resources, and fewer problems for your children and grandchildren to have to clean up after you.

Good for you! Keep up the good work!
Laura Theroux

For kitty litter, use Feline Pine or the equivalent from Trader Joe's. It's compostable after use, and is a good brown addition. On the other hand, unless you have only one cat (and even then), you'll probably produce more litter than any compost bin can handle...

Tess,

We applaud your efforts. However, we can't understand why you need to carry the garbage around with you? Couldn't you weigh it and carry the equivalent weight (maybe a bag of rocks?) The extra plastic bags used to contain smells and germs seem counterproductive to reducing trash.

Our family of three, two of whom are teenagers, has reduced our trash to 1.5 pounds per week by steadily changing our habits. We keep trying to improve. Two of us work and are even geek-enough to bring recyclables home from work. One of my 'dream' goals (Theresa's) is to get my company to adopt some recycling efforts also.

By the way, can't fish skins be eaten? Aren't they nutritious? They wouldn't then need to be thrown away.

Love your show!

Hi Tess,

Well, I have taken your trash challenge. I started carrying around my trash on Saturday after your show aired. Our trash day is Wednesday, however, so I actually have one week's worth of trash with me now.

I am feeling pretty good so far about the small amount of trash that my wife and I have produced over the past week. I confess, as a person in the waste/recycling industry I was little nervous about how much we would produce at home. I have been encouraging people to reduce, reuse and recycle for a long time, but I never actually measured my own effectiveness.

So far, I was surprised to find that we use alot of paper towels. Perhaps we could switch to cloth rags and napkins. Such a switch would result in additional laundry. Laundry requires water, involves detergent and creates wastewater that, in our case, is sewered and ultimately handled at a wastewater treatment plant. In places like Southern California water usage and the disposal of sludge from wastewater plants is as critical an issue as waste disposal. Consequently, from a sustainability standpoint, I am not sure if the paper towels which will decompose in a landfill and potentially and produce methane that can be used to generate electricity, are better or if cloth napkins and towels are better. I am going to ask around.

Most of the rest of our trash is comprised of wrappers that are not recyclable and containers for take out food. Now that our kids are grown and gone we don't cook as much.

I am pleased to report, though, that we are doing a good job making sure that recyclables get to the recycling bin and greenwaste/yardwaste gets to the greenwaste bin. I am a firm believer that the easiest and quickest way to start living a greener life is to maximize the use of "green" services available right now.

Taking your challenge is raising some interesting questions in my mind. In effect, it is forcing us to consciously make decisions about what we are using and what we do with the discards after the using is done. Maybe "living sustainably" is actually a way of living more consciously.

I'll check in again in a few days.

Doug Corcoran

"what to do with chicken and fish bones? those ain't compostable", you say. but they could be! just came across bokashi, technology known for centuries in japan. it is a form of intense composting, using mix of wheat bran with molasses, water and microbes blend of yeasts and bacteria, the good ones - both aerobic and anaerobic. it reduces the smell and there are no bugs. however, after 2 weeks of fermenting, compost need to be buried in the soil. you better have one or befriend someone who has one!

tess, you are our dumpster diva, very proud of you!

Hi Tess,

This challenge is good for suburban families who spend more time at home, but what about families in urban areas who dine out regularly? Does having a restaurant or coffee shop (serving with earthenware) dispose of our waste produce less of it? Granted it may not be cost-effective for most of us to do this but we are essentially paying with the increase garbage for the convenience of prepackaged foods and disposable consumables that wasn't available in 1970. And while movements existed then and still do to reduce the need for the disposable lifestyle, the alternative is a labor intensive homelife of scratch-based cooking, gardening, etc.

Now, I'm a big fan of cooking at home, recycling, reuse of every packing material I can't avoid, but I see problems scaling my habits to the larger population:

1. A less convenient, more garbage-free lifestyle doesn't lend itself well to those with ambition who need the extra time to hon their career or business.

2. A more garbage-conscious society will certainly tank my retirement account which depends on the population consuming more and more.

3. Less garbages discourages the development of new technology or industries for dealing with the problem which also effects my retirement account.

To meaningfully reduce garbage in our society means changing our behavior in a fundamental way. It's not clear to me we are prepared to even after being made aware of how much garbage we generate by carrying it around with us.

-Brent

Don't believe those guys who tell you landfills are OK. If you live in a big city you are very much removed from them. Regulations and controls are inconsistent from state to state. Here on the East Coast trash haulers are cruising southern states trying to get rural and poor counties to take humongous amounts of trash from everywhere on the east coast. There is a plastic liner but it will eventually fail, that's what the EPA says. Trash is piled up at the rate of 5k tons a day for 20 to 30 years. Plastic is not going to contain that. Leachate (juice) forms in the bottom and has to be siphoned off and removed. Methane (greenhouse gas) is formed as well. It is combustible and fire departments have to put out fires routinely. These landfills take sludge (what's left over when sewage is treated in a water treatment plant (matches the baby diapers). Believe me you don't want one of these around in your neighborhood. Thanks for the consciousness raising, Tess.

Meat trimmings are some bones good scraps for the dog. Why should (s)he miss out on that yummy goodness?

Also believe it or not - you should get a pair of pet rats. Yep - their bedding is compostible and they just LOVE cooked chicken bones. Or you can find someone who has pet rats and just freeze the bones until you can drop them off to them! They are the only animal I know of that can safely eat chicken bones.

Hi Tess:

You mentioned quickly that a lot of food goes down the disposal. First step to reducing trash is not to generate it in the first place. Prepare only as much food as you need, save if you can, and compost the rest.

I am a vegetarian. The smelly garbage is gone. I keep a strainer in the sink made of metal to collect food waste and at the end of the day wrap it in paper and throw it away or garbage-disposal it. Buy a favorite vegetable soap and put sliver in a plastic bottle with water for liquid soap to clean. The plastic bottle could be eliminated by rubbing a wash cloth over the soap and cleaning. A tip I heard is sliver vegetable soap into the washing machine or sink for clothes and dishes. Salt water, lemon water, lavender water, are the herbs and citric acids endless for cleaning products? Baking soda and vinegar are great cleaning products. I try to eliminate the plastic. Salt is a fantastic dish washing product for the dishwasher. Eliminates the chemicals and kills germs.

everdaytrash salutes your effort!

Wow- this has me motivated, I can remember my grandmother (immigrant, and depression baby)
carry out her garbage for the week- it wasnt more than a coffee can size pile.

THINK WASTE REDUCTION !!!

I'm sorry, what's the point?

This "experiment" is an attempt to show what exactly? Why not do an experiment where you produce your own food instead of buying what has been grown, harvested, shipped, and/or prepared for you? Won't that tell you if you are living a "sustainable" life? The answer is no. It will tell you that you probably aren't very good at raising your own food! Doesn't mean that there's problems with our global ability to produce food, just means that you're not terribly good at it. Same thing with this experiment. It tells you nothing about whether your lifestyle is "sustainable" or not. It DOES tell you that you aren't very good at keeping trash to a minimum. Fortunately, humans have developed mechanisms to deal with trash. We're actually quite good at it! That's why you don't see areas of the US with trash spewing all over the place.

There is no landfill shortage... there's plenty of space for all the junk that we produce. Does that mean we ought not care about resource use? Not at all. But, this experiment can't show what you intend it to show. And, we really don't have a problem with "sustainable" consumption.

Bruce

Medical waste is a huge issue that I haven't seen addressed here by anyone. Our family has a child with serious health issues and the amount of medical waste that we produce makes us want to scream. But there are no alternatives that we have found to simply throwing a lot of things away. A prime example are feeding tubes and bags that have held formula. These are not designed to be re-used -there is no way for you to sterilize them even if you wanted to do so. So every day you throw one away and use a new one. Then there are all those medicines that are left over with no way to dispose of them "safely" or to "recycle" them - even when they're unopened.

I shudder to think of the amount of waste that's being generated by hospitals, doctor and dentist offices, clinics - anyplace that's providing medical care. The demand that everything appear to be "sterile" is absurd. In some cases, older ways that were adequate like cleaning a table instead of covering it with paper are still good enough IMHO. Making so many medical supplies in a disposable form will stop making economic sense at some point when the cost to throw it all away and the cost to produce it become too great. I wonder how much of the escalating costs of medical care can be tied to the adoption of disposable supplies and equipment?

Patricia