Create personal Zero Waste

I am thinking things might get a bit messy here in Vancouver over the coming weeks. The City of Vancouver employees are all on strike. That means garbage removal personnel, librarians, dog pound workers and summer camp staff to name a few. San Francisco East Bay workers have been on strike since July 02 and it sounds like it is getting messy down there.

I am particularly concerned about the dogs in the pound and the garbage lining the streets (we already have mice at my home and can only imagine what garbage piling up will do to the mouse population) This would be a good time to consider how to create less waste... anybody have any ideas? Thoughts to share about the strike?

for a complete listing of city services affected by job action click here

What kind of city do we want to live in during the garbage strike? What are you going to do? Just ignore the growing smelly pile of bags around your dumpster or refuge bin, as the crows spread junk over your alley?

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 :

While I haven't been doing exceptionally well on keeping my waste down as much as I hoped, it has been on my mind lately. Sometimes I feel so inadequate compared to EnviroWoman's journey against plastic :( :)

Some recent events to report ...

My Braun hand mixture just died ... it's tough making my banana, frozen berry and protein shake without it, but it still tastes the same lumpy. So, the next step is to contact Braun to see if they have a method of recycling it. I don't have much hope, but at least my question will let them know that disposal of their products (and short lifetime) is an issue for people.

Will I reach my goal to be garbage free?  enough to be on national tv?  Well, one couple in Toronto is doing it by being in G&M, CBC Gill Deacon Show and CBC The Hour ... that I've seen.  Their blog discusses many of the same issues I'm going through.  Although I haven't resolved many of them for myself YET, at least I know I'm on the right track.  I'm not going to extreme of avoiding recyclable items like her, but I am shopping around, buying bulk, avoiding [some] items with non-recyclable packaging, doing without some things, preparing my work lunches instead of eating out, and of course reusing bags.

Well, after the first few days I thought that I had failed at zero waste.  But then I realized that all those foil, plastic bags that are normally the only contents of my garbage bag, can actually be burned.  Because of this idea, my garbage remains empty!   Well maybe not completely empty.  There's the jar and bottle lids (I'm sure they're not recyclable.  Even www.terracycle.net that reuses old beverage bottles, is looking for ways to reuse the lids) and some old gloves that have served their time volunteering in local parks (holes in almost every finger).