Day One: No More Garbage

Today I'm starting a journey to help reduce the environmental foot print of myself and my family. This blog is the documentation of that process. For years I've felt that global climate change was a problem too big for me to do anything about personally. At the same time, I've watched humans slowly pollute our world to toxic levels and we pump more and more carbon into the atmosphere every day. Climate change is something too big for any one person to tackle, but at the same time, if we do nothing, we won't survive.

This environmental blog will focus on everything that I do to help reduce my carbon foot print. I'll also focus some on reducing the use of pollutants and opting for my environmentally friendly methods and materials.

The First Step

I've been making advances in reducing the amount of energy I've been using over the last year, but the first big step that I'm taking in conjunction with my blogging is to eliminate my contribution to the landfills. I live in upstate New York were we have great recycling programs. Our local government picks up plastic, metal, paper and cardboard for recycling. I'm also able to dispose of computer electronics for free 1 weekend of the summer/spring months. The only problem was the recycling of plastic wrap and plastic bags, which local companies like Walgreens are now recycling for free. So when I put all of those pieces together, I'm able to recycle or reuse everything that I consume; there shouldn't be any need for garbage.

With all of that in mind, I've gone out and paid for a nice set of industrial grade bins which I can use for sorting my recyclables. I was VERY surprised to find out how difficult it was to find something that fit my needs. I couldn't have huge 30 gallon garbage cans, which were easy to find. But I wanted this to be easily accessible as well as keeping things tidy on my back porch. After literally 2 weeks of searching, I found exactly what I was looking for: the Suncast heavy duty stacking bins are perfect! I bought 4 and labeled them for plastic, glass, metal and paper/cardboard. On top of that, I'm using my old garbage can for refuse which I can use for compost (more on that to come later) and I reuse plastic shopping bags to store my plastic wrap and bags in to return for recycling. It's definitely more work that throwing everything out, but anybody with such good municipal services should be able to do exactly the same thing.