How Much Trash Do You Throw Away

The other day I was watching Planet Green and there was a segment of G-Word about a man who collected all his trash for a year. This got my boyfriend and myself thinking: Hoe Much Trash Do We Throw Away??

So we have decided to tally the amount of bags that we take to our trash dumpster a month. We live in an apartment complex and therefor our trash is collected in large dumpsters scattered around our complex. There is no paper collection or recycling in our complex. We have to take our paper products to the yellow and green paper collection dumpsters at a local church. We take our plastic bags to the local Giant Eagle. We still have to find a place to take our glass and plastics.

We also have decided to tally how many ties we use the dishwasher. We have recently cut our use of paper plates in half. Way to many people use paper plates as their main form of plate. We used to. I have been pushing the end of our paper plate usage for a while but the energy costs for us were higher at our other apartment. I think in the long run the money we will save by not purchasing paper plates will be greater than the cost of running the dishwasher.

I plan on posting our progress in our journey of being more trash conscious. By the end of the year it will be interesting to see how much trash we send out and how much money we save by using re-usable resources.