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Altona CAN! Live within the new limits

    Change is almost always hard, and I imagine a few folks here in Altona might be wondering how on earth they will manage to live within the new limit of one garbage bag per household per week. There was a time I would have wondered this too. I personally do not yet have the discipline of living a waste-free lifestyle, but I’ve found that I can quite easily commit to diverting most household waste from the landfill by sorting my trash before it goes out to the curb. Tracking your improvements can also be quite motivating, and a trash audit is a great tool that will help you see where changes can be made. 

Trash audit 

A trash audit helps you see exactly how much of your household waste can be diverted away from the landfill. You will calculate the amount of trash and the percentage of the waste that can be diverted away from the landfill. You can track your progress over time to see how much you are improving! 

Collect the data 

  • Collect your household waste the way you normally do for the week. 
  • Get 3 receptacles for sorting your trash – one for compost, one for recycling, and one for the landfill. 
  • Put on a pair of gloves. 
  • Sort through all the trash. 
  • Count the number of items that you toss into each receptacle. (If you have kids in your home, have them help!) 
  • Calculate the total number of items in all three bins. 
  • Calculate the percentages in each category. 

Once you have your baseline data collected, you can repeat the process for a few weeks. I recommend involving everyone in your home to encourage all members to practice diverting trash appropriately. 

Here’s a sample from week 1: 

Volume:      There were 37 items in the trash.  

Sorting:     31/37 of the items were compostable

                 6/37 of the items were neither compostable nor recyclable, so they went to the landfill   

Results:     84% of the trash was diverted from the landfill because it got sorted. 

Trash

Week 1

Week 2

compost

31/37 = 84%

28/34 = 82%

recycle

0/37

2/34 = 6%

landfill

6/37 = 16%

3/34 = 9%

*soft plastics

0/37

1/34= 3%           

 

You can use your data to set goals – such as reducing the total amount of waste created in your home and/or focusing on reducing the percentage of waste that goes to the landfill.  As you can see in the example, there was a little less volume and an even lower percentage of items going to the landfill.

Keep at it!

I’ve been sorting my trash like this for a long time.  I don’t like the idea of policing what people are putting into my trash bins in my home – and I sometimes forget too, even though it matters a lot to me -- so I sort the trash each week to ensure I’m diverting as much as possible from the landfill.  

This may seem like a daunting task but if you get your family involved, they will soon begin to ask if they should be throwing trash into compost or recycling before it hits your trash bin.  It won’t take long, and you will soon wonder why the one-bag limit on garbage seemed like such a big deal.  

Track your data for one month and share your results with us on our Facebook page.  We can do this, Altona!

By Kelly Skelton 

 

  

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