The Waste Audit

After the relatively straightforward energy and water audits, figuring out how to do a waste audit was a pretty big challenge. Living in a condo, we don’t even keep a large trash can in the garage that gets taken to the curb each week. Instead, we walk our trash across the hall and whoosh it down a chute, never to be seen again.

Not only did I need to understand how much trash we generated in a week, but I also needed to understand its makeup. When considering the plan, I walked over to our kitchen trashcan and took a look inside. There was all manner of interesting garbage in there, but it was all coated in a beef stew sludge from the food scraps that we threw  away last night, rendering it impenetrable to any realistic examination. The answer was clear. In order for this to work, not only would we need to keep our trash around for a week, but we were going to need to separate it out too.

I devised a system. In order to prevent on-the-sly trashing, I took every trash can in the house and moved it into the kitchen. Each trashcan got a label over it indicative of its intended contents: cardboard, paper, glass, aluminum, food scraps, plastic, and miscellaneous (for all of the trash I hadn’t thought of). 

When my husband got home from work and saw the mess, he groaned mightily. He hates exposed trash (and unnecessary process). But I was surprised how easily he and I fell into the system.  It was easy to take trash generated from the bathroom and other places into the kitchen and put it in the right bin.  Bodes well that we might be able to change our trash habits.

At the end, we definitely had some mighty smells developing in our home, so I quickly weighed and catalogued the refuse.

Let’s examine what was in our garbage, starting with the lowest volume stuff and working our way up to the highest volume.

The Break Down of our Trash:

1. Glass

Weight: 2 pounds

Volume: .167 sq ft

I almost wish we used more glass. It’s so pretty and fun. But alas, we only drank four beers during the week. Pretty good assortment though.

2. Aluminum Cans

Weight: 1.5 pounds

Volume: 1.5 sq ft

My husband and I are huge Coke addicts. It’s our one vice (clearly, we’re not drinking much beer…). And we don’t recycle any of these cans. Pretty appalling, when you see a week’s worth of drinks accumulated in one place.

The bag that these were stored in was the second most disgusting garbage bag out of the bunch. Most of the cans had to be pried off the inside of it, so coated was it in toxic, sticky sludge. In the latest recycling material I’ve read, they request that you rinse cans and bottles out. I can certainly understand why.

3. Miscellaneous Trash

Weight: 1.5 pounds

Volume: 1.8 sq ft

The miscellaneous bag had a lot of weird stuff in it.  Some was cardboard or aluminum food containers that were unrecyclable. A lot of it was used packaging that didn’t seem to fit any of the major categories (what would you do with a dried out highlighter or empty deodorant?). Some of it was bathroom rubbish like q-tips, hair from my brush, and Kleenex. 

I’d had an encounter with a black cat while wearing a white sweater that week, so I have loads of lint roller sticky things in the pile. 

There are also three beer bottle caps. Hey! Only three? Didn’t we drink four beers? 

On the whole, this is largely stuff that qualifies as real trash, stuff that is past its practical usefulness, that needs to be thrown out.

4. Paper

Weight: 9.5 pounds

Volume: 1.8 sq ft

Paper towels and snail mail were the two culprits here. Look at how many catalogs there are!  In just a week! The biggest culprit was Victoria’s Secret with four catalogues. Honestly, I’m not so hard up for bras that I need a reminder every other day.

And no, we didn’t catalog our toilet paper usage.  Gross.

5.  Plastic

Weight: 1 pound

Volume: 2 sq ft

The plastic in our garbage either came from food containers or packaging materials. While it was light, it was also pretty voluminous. A lot of the plastic was contaminated with food stuffs as a result.  In fact, some of the Lean Cuisine containers you see in there were downright hairy with mold by the time this photo was taken. 

Note the huge take-out containers in the front.  We pretty regularly have one or two of those on a weekly basis.

6. Food Stuffs

Weight: 8.5 pounds

Volume: 2 sq ft

I couldn’t get a picture of our food stuffs because the second I opened the bag to inspect it, my husband, who was standing 20 feet away, instantly yelled “OH MY GOD!  GET IT OUT OF HERE!”. He grabbed the bag and sprinted down the hallway before I could catch him. So suffice it to say, it was foul.

This bag consisted of what you’d expect. Pasta we didn’t eat, moldy bread, eggshells, wilted lettuce, etc.

And the prize for most garbage goes to:

7.  Cardboard!

Weight: 11.5 pounds

Volume: 4.3 sq ft

We are big online shoppers, so it’s no surprise that cardboard represents a significant portion of our garbage. Luckily, the cardboard from our packages is the one thing that we actively recycle today (mostly because it often doesn’t fit in the trash chute).

But I was stunned at how much of our food packaging uses perfectly good cardboard that we normally throw out. This was a real revelation for me.

The Summary:

Overall we generated 13.5 square feet of garbage in a week (~101 gallons).  That’s 35.5 pounds of trash.  And all of it going to the landfill.

And how do we stack up? The Environmental Protection Agency reports that every American generates about 4 pounds of trash per day. In this case, we’re doing a little better than the allotted 70 pounds/week (for the two or us), but our household is still generating 1800 pounds of garbage a year.  That’s nearly a ton of stuff exiting our doors.

As a footnote, we also had about 2.5% classification errors in our garbage. Plastic in the paper garbage can, and vice versa. If we can make that many mistakes while we're trying to be good about it, I wonder what types of weird crap recycling facilities have to put up with.

After going through this exercise, I have little doubt that we’ll be able to cut this down by half, if not to a quarter of what it is now. 

Comments

[Amy]

This is really interesting stuff. Please keep it up.

[Amelia]

Yikes, that really is a lot of coke cans. I thought my Sprite addiction was bad...

[Bridget]

This is fantastic! You're doing something good without being snobby (I can't stand Level Four Vegans), and this is educational without any sort of test or grade at the end. I hope to read more soon.

[leep]

Sorry if I've missed this point, but...

Is there a reason you don't recycle the cans and some of the other recyclable items? (Even things like that pizza cardboard can probably go into the yard waste container.)

[bravenewleaf]

Bridget-- great question.

First off, I'm brand new to being green. So no, I didn't really recycle before. Shameful, I know, and now that my perspective has shifted, I'm already cringing at the waste. But the old me is probably more representative of the US population than we're willing to admit. This blog is about me trying to change that. To shine the light on my bad habits and see that it's not all that hard to change them. Definitely, recycling is an important (no-brainer) first step.

Second, living in a condominium complex, we don't have all of the recycling options available to us that single family house would. Yard waste containers, for example, aren't offered, so I'll have to figure out whether there is another way to deal with food contaminated cardboard and scraps.

Next article in this series will cover the recycling system I've devised for our home, so hang on! :)

[Amy]

A related article: http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?slug=ecoconsumer14&date=20070714&query=Composting+in+Seattle

We keep our foodscraps in a stainless steel container that we found at the storable container store in U Village. It's attractive to sit on the counter; air-tight so there's no smell issue; and easy to rinse. we opted for a smallish container (size of a milk carton) so that we weren't keeping a lot of rotting food on the counter. Even though it hasn't caused a problem I just think there are limits to having things decompose in your urban living quarters.

So much of the stuff that goes in the trash can be recycled, or is even biodegradable, but it often doesn't get a chance to biodegrade b/c it's locked into plastic containers. So, anyway thanks for showing us how to really take the trash out.

[G in INdiana]

We freeze our food waste. That way when we take it to the compost heap it doesn't smell.
We also recycle everything except plastic that is not 1 or 2. Even paper towels and napkins get dampened and recycled (did you know pill bugs and earth worms love that stuff!!!)
We have 1 pound of garbage a week. If I could find some place to take that stuff, I would do it.
We have a great recycling facility in Osgood Indiana and it is fantastic for everything. They even have a new service that allows you to take clean, used stuff you don't need (even construction things like windows in good shape or used computers that work) and they will "sell" them to folks who need them and cannot afford to buy new.
I can't say enough about the folks who work there and how hard they are trying to get Ripley County residents to recycle.

[mattro2.0]

Condos can have yard waste containers. They're $5 a month. You could either appeal to the association or maybe pay for it yourself. The pizza box and other food soiled cardboard can definitely go in yard waste. Go to the SPU website at seattle.gov/util

Good effort so far!

[Sean]

This is great! Good luck with your project. One thing that might help you to reduce the paper you get (recycling is great! not getting things that go immediately into the bin is better!) is this website: http://www.ecocycle.org/junkmail/index.cfm It provides a bunch of recommendations for how to stop getting junk mail.

[Beth Terry]

I'm really enjoying your blog. Here's some info for you to peruse. You said, "If we can make that many mistakes while we're trying to be good about it, I wonder what types of weird crap recycling facilities have to put up with."

I did a series based on several visits to recycling centers. What I learned was truly life-altering. Here's the link to the Recycling articles on my blog. If you scroll to the bottom, you'll probably find the posts from September 25 and October 8 very useful:

http://www.fakeplasticfish.com/labels/Issues%20-%20Recycling.html