My waste reduction effort
This is about 8 weeks of waste. Not in this photo are the steel cans that are recycled and paperboard food packing this is composted and used as mulch. The key is eliminating products that only come in hard plastic containers. I've also cut out glass.
jabel This is amazing. So much food, even what I would consider staples, comes in plastic. Do you consider your diet simple? Varied?
Denny Henke @jabel Probably a pretty simple diet but healthy.
Breakfast is almost some form of oatmeal that comes in paper tubs: Normal bowl of oatmeal with fruit or oatmeal peanutbutter banana smoothie or oatmeal peanutbutter chocolate chip "cookies".
Lunch is winter is almost always some variation of vegetarian soup with beans and macaroni. Alternated with hummus/pita or some sort of refried bean concoction with corn tortillas or potatoes.
Dinner is either similar to lunch and/or popcorn or oatmeal again. Oh, also pasta sometimes as an easy junkfood kinda meal. 🤣
In the summertime I go for stuff that doesn't need to be cooked as much or at all... no soup in summer. Any cooking in summer is in the microwave or in my little outdoor kitchen.
Peanut butter is made from bulk peanuts. Super easy, only takes a few minutes to make a jar.
That probably covers 80% of my calories. The rest being other similar stuff. My main calculation comes down to is that it be fairly healthy, fairly easy and containers that are recyclable, compostable.
Scott Little that’s really good. We’d like to be there, but it is too hard to find some of our main staples in reasonable containers, milk being the biggest issue. Why do you avoid glass though, it is just as recyclable as metals?
Denny Henke @littleknown @mcg I'm in rural Missouri and the nearest small town doesn't offer glass recycling. As with plastic I just don't buy products that come in glass. It greatly limits options but even so I still get everything I need. I've gotten creative for a few things like peanut butter. I buy peanuts in bulk and blend my own peanut butter. Upside is that it ends up being cheaper, the peanut butter I make is creamier and it only takes me about 5 minutes to blend a jar of it.
Scott Little surprising that there is no glass recycling. First time I have heard of that despite remoteness. Makes sense for you though
Denny Henke @littleknown @mcg For a lot of small towns in rural areas recycling costs are too high in general. that was the reason given in the town I refer to. I suspect that glass, being heavier, likely to break, and glass colors needing to be separated out, is one of the more complicated materials to recycle. Harder to manage and more expensive to transport too.
Tracy Durnell @littleknown @mcg I worked in the recycling industry and glass is very expensive to recycle. Even here in the Seattle area where we had a local glass recycler to process the material, so it didn't need to be shipped far, they lost money on glass.
In the big picture environmental scheme of things, a lightweight packaging material may be a better choice 🤷♀️ Depends what you care about -- definitely true for climate impact. Look up lifecycle assessment if you're curious, Oregon DEQ put out some interesting analysis on water bottles and other types of packaging a few years back.