Being a family of four, I’m amazed at how much garbage we produce during the week.  I don’t think it’s anything more than the average family, two to four 13 gallon bags, and that amount is in addition to about the same amount of recycling.   If you were to ask me what the contents of the garbage are, I would be clueless.  It could be food, it could be materials that should be recycled, or it could just be we’re not compacting/crushing things we’re throwing out, so that mass isn’t that great, just the volume.

One of my goals for this year was to reduce my contribution to landfills and Earth day seems the right day to start this goal.  Being a consultant, of course the approach that I want to take for this is the same approach I would take with a client who wants to reduce waste or make improve efficiency, etc, but taking this project through the phases of analysis, plan, implement and repeat the cycle until the desired goal is met.

The first step I will be taking is analyzing my garbage for the next few weeks to understand the content.  The result of this will directly impact the strategy to reduce waste and the outcome.  For example, if a majority of garbage is food, reducing the amount we cook or order will not only reduce waste, but can also lead to more savings.  Unfortunately we’re dealing with garbage and I have absolutely no plans to go through what we throw out in detail, but I do plan to make a visual record of what we’re throwing out.  This will consist of category and quantity.   My current plan is to record this on a daily basis, but knowing myself, it’ll probably happen more randomly than that.

The currently categories I have are: food, non-recyclable material, recyclable material and mixed items.  Currently I’m not sure what other categories our waste to consist of.  As I see patterns, I will add additional categories.  For each of these items I will also track large/small space to determine if the garbage bag gets full just because items being thrown out take up a large space, but don’t contain a log of material.

My next step after I collect this information will be to analyze ways to reduce the amount of items thrown out, either through decreasing consumption or converting garbage to recycling, etc.   For now, my next post on this subject will be after I have collected four weeks of data.

If you have taken on a similar endeavor, I’d love to hear from you