Waste Management Strike Ends, Garbage Still Piles Up

With mine and my neighbor’s trash sitting out on the curb all last week waiting for the strike to end, I found myself paying more attention to what I was throwing away.  In King County, about 50% of what we send to landfills is recyclable and an additional 30% can be composted. 

With the image of overflowing trash cans fresh in our minds, it may be a good time to look for ways to reduce our waste and help protect the environment!

I recently took the "One Less Bag Challenge" to reduce my trash and found I could eliminate nearly 3 full bags every month.  This has led to not only a smaller trash can from Waste Management, but to my family considering reducing our trash pick-up to every other week!  With food composting available in our yard waste bins and handy guides to show us what can be recycled, we can easily reduce the amount of stuff we are sending to the landfills!

Here are some strategies to help reduce waste:

• Avoid: The best way to reduce household waste is to simply avoid it in the first place!  Look for products that come with less packaging or buy more items in bulk. 
• Reduce: One way I reduced how much trash I was creating was by adding leftovers and vegetable peelings to the yard waste bin to be composted.  You can get a free compost pail for your kitchen from the City of Redmond here.
• Reuse: If you can buy it secondhand, that’s a great way to give an item a second life (and probably at a savings to yourself).
• Recycle: You may be surprised to learn all the things you can easily recycle at the curb-it’s changed to include more plastics and other common household items I had been throwing away.  According to the EPA, recycling reduces greenhouse gases by reducing methane emissions from waste decomposing in landfills and saving energy that would be required to make new products from virgin material.

You can take on the "One Less Bag Challenge", and receive tools to help you on your waste reduction adventure!