I feel like no matter what else we do to go green over at Erwin House, the single most important change we need to make is to reduce our waste. You wouldn’t believe how much trash we produce on a weekly basis. Our trash pickup occurs every Thursday morning, and the family joke is that the trash can is full again by Sunday night. But it isn’t actually funny.
Recently, the city council announced their new zero-waste plan, a 32-year strategy to reduce to zero the amount of garbage sent to landfills by reusing, recycling and composting materials instead. They are starting with improvements to the recycling program.

The City of Austin’s Solid Waste Services Department plans to unveil a new program this year that will expand what Austinites can recycle and eliminate the need to sort recycling into multiple bins.
The new program, set to begin in October and be rolled out over three months, replaces the familiar blue bins with 90-gallon carts that can be filled with new items, such as brown medicine bottles and cereal boxes, along with the cans, bottles, jars, paper and cardboard that are currently accepted.

I love the idea that my recycling can would actually be larger than my garbage can, and I’ve been keeping a close eye on our trash to try to figure out whether this new system might actually work.

Our number one waste material is paperboard–you know, the boxes that cereal and snacks come in, the 6-pack cartons, the excess packaging that surrounds our toiletries and new shoes and toys. Our city doesn’t recycle paperboard, and the local Ecology Action station downtown was so overloaded with the stuff that they asked me to just throw it in the landfill, thanks anyway.

Under the new system, recycling collection will occur once every two weeks, instead of weekly, which is expected to lead to savings on gasoline and reduce harmful emissions. Also, rather than workers lifting recycling bins manually, newly outfitted trucks will pick up the carts and dump the recycling inside.

I’m setting two ongoing goals for myself:
1. To keep track of what we throw away most at any time (currently paperboard), and
2. To focus for the next 30 days on trying to creatively reduce, reuse or recylce that particular type of trash (by purchasing in bulk instead of in boxes, for example).
With paperboard, I already know that recycling isn’t the optimal option… yet. And I’m not the creative type who saves toilet paper rolls to make into crafty little projects. The truth about crafty little projects around our house is that they end up cluttering toy bins or activity drawers or the floor and then they end up in the trash! The truth about paperboard is that we simply need to bring less of it into our home.
One small step I began to take last December: leaving the packaging at the store. It drove me nuts how much paperboard waste we ended up with after Christmas morning 2006. I decided I was going to unwrap everything in the parking lot, fill the bags back up with the waste, and take it back into the store for the store to deal with (and many thanks to the folks at Target who were very willing to take the trash).
I think the next step is to try to avoid packaging whenever possible. I’ll try to let you know how it goes.