Green Living: Sustainable Practices for a Greener Lifestyle
In January last year I started weighing the trash. Not out of virtue — out of irritation, because we were taking the bin out twice a week for two people and I could not work out what was filling it.
Twelve months of a kitchen scale and a notebook later, here is what was in there.
Where it was all coming from
By weight, over the year:
- Food we bought and did not eat: 41%
- Packaging, mostly from groceries: 27%
- Garden and yard waste: 18%
- Everything else, including the genuinely unavoidable: 14%
I had assumed packaging was the story. Packaging is the visible story — it is what makes the bin look full. The weight was food, and it was not close.
The four changes
We started shopping twice a week instead of once. This is the whole thing. The big weekly shop was optimistic in a way that our actual appetites never matched, and the optimism rotted in the crisper drawer. Two smaller trips cost marginally more in time and cut food waste by roughly two-thirds.
We started cooking from the fridge, not from a plan. Looking first, deciding second. Obvious, and I had it backwards for fifteen years.
A compost bin. This did not reduce waste so much as move it, but it moved the wettest, heaviest, most unpleasant portion of it out of the kitchen, and the garden is visibly better for it.
We stopped buying anything in a bag inside a box. Not a principled stand, just a rule simple enough to follow while tired in a supermarket.
The rules that worked were the ones I could apply without thinking. Every rule that required a judgment call at the shelf got abandoned by March.
What did not work
Beeswax wraps, which we own four of and use never. A bread machine. A scheme involving glass jars that lasted nine days. Refusing plastic produce bags without bringing an alternative, which just meant loose tomatoes rolling around the trunk of the car.
Where we are now
One bin a week, occasionally not even full. The compost is on its second year and went onto the beds in March. The grocery bill is down about $40 a month, which I had not expected and which is, I suspect, the reason this has lasted where the jars did not.
