Reducing waste update

Well, I finally am ready to share my photo of three months worth of garbage (Jan 1 - Mar 31) I'm not going to show the contents because ... well it's kinda nasty. I emptied a few ancient items from my cupboard, plus I went through many tissues during 2 week flu. The "clean" items were the plastic/cellophane packaging. But I am proud to report that for April, I'm almost at literally zero in my garbage. Much better than before ... avoiding those bags of junk food really helps the cause ... in more ways than one.

I've recently been to two presentations about zero waste where some of our elected officials, NGOs and local government employees were present. Some interesting things to that I learned :

- GVRD is calling it a zero waste "challenge", rather than a goal. I guess they don't want to commit themselves. But they do have two trial projects for municipal kitchen waste pickup and composting which should lead to a broader region-wide program at some point.

- plastic garbage/grocery bags do make up 1% of the waste in landfills, but govt sees other things as a higher priority to remove from the landfill: ie batteries, construction waste, recyclables that aren't being recycled. (that's their excuse for not banning plastic grocery bags all together)

- only 12% of condo/apartment dwellers recycle consistently whereas overall it's 90% of people. It seems to come down to convenience and education ... the most difficult things to get people to overcome.

- several speakers reminded us that disposable items and excess package hasn't been part of our culture for that long. Probably most of our parents taught us "waste not, want not". Reusing containers used to be the norm.

One thing that I've done at work is to totally remove the waste basket from my office. I found that even if I have only one thing in it, the cleaning staff will still take the whole bag away and replace it with another. I've got the staff at the local deli trained to just place my regular whole wheat berry scone in my hand (with tongs of course) instead of in a bag. There has been a stomach flu outbreak at my work (hospital), so all the food in the cafeteria is suddenly individually packaged : the previous salad bar, self serve baked goods ... all in non recyclable plastic of course. So the caf is outa bounds for a while.

Tonight, I attended a talk by author of a new book on green living (Ecoholic by Adria Vasil). There were lots of questions and suggestions from the audience. One that I particularly liked was a lady who said she removes the packaging from items in the check-out line and leaves it with the cashier as a protest. Everyone cheered! The speaker suggested that writing letters to the manufacturer is a more productive form of action, but definately not as satisfying.

Now is the time to be bold!