Reducing Waste & Recycling at Home: Glad Waste in Focus

[GuitarStv]

FWIW, I have a couple water bottles at home that have been used and reused for years . . . so not everyone you see with a bottle of Dasani has necessarily just purchased that drink.

[Cpa Cat]

Oh, to its credit I think it was always quite safe. It's just that "earthy" might not be quite the taste you're going for when you reach for a glass of water.

Yeah, we have this problem too. In our city, at certain points in the summer, our lakes suffer from some kind of blue-green algae. Of course, by the time it comes out of the tap it's perfectly SAFE - but it smells and tastes so bad, it makes me want to vomit. "Earthy" would be a kind way of describing it - on a good day. It's somewhere between "rotting sewage" and "earthy."

And there's no carbon filter that will touch it.

Usually there's no warning either, one day you have a nice glass of water from the tap and the next day OMG WTF DID I JUST DRINK?!

[Prairie Stash]

Anyone else try replicating this at home? I'm onto week 2 of weigh ins.

So far about 30% is compost.  Another 30% is recycled. About 30% is diapers and the rest is regular garbage.  I'll try to go a month to get a good running tally.

[zataks]

Anyone else try replicating this at home? I'm onto week 2 of weigh ins.

So far about 30% is compost.  Another 30% is recycled. About 30% is diapers and the rest is regular garbage.  I'll try to go a month to get a good running tally.

Isn't the majority weight of diapers human waste?  I feel like that somehow skews the scales.

[fallstoclimb]

We have filtered water at work, but I still have a coworker who brings in bottles of water every day.  I can't even deal.  If I were a manager I would literally not promote someone on that basis (it is possible I would make a terrible manager).  Just use the goddamned filtered water!

There's not much that makes me angrier than filtered water.  Also there are a lot of plastic grocery bags in those pictures which no one has mentioned (at least I think that's what they were).  Get some reusable bags! 

[libertarian4321]

I think it may depend on where in the country you are. I'm in Boston now and yeah, I can't imagine buying bottled water regularly now. But I used to live down in Plano, TX a few years ago, and there you could smell a cup of tap water a foot away. So I drank bottled water at work (Brita at home).

I just did a bit of googling to see if this was still an issue, and came to a site with this quote: 'My father in-law came during Christmas and drank some tap water and exclaimed "That is the worst tasting water I've ever had in my life! And I've been face down in a crap infested rice paddy in Vietnam!"' I thought that summed it up pretty well :)

The water in Plano, TX is perfectly safe from a health standpoint.

However, there are some "contaminants" that, while harmless, can cause an odor or taste that some people find offensive.

Buying a simple home carbon filter (the kind that come built into many modern refrigerators) will remove the offending substances, and it's cheaper and more environmentally friendly than buying bottled water.

[alvey]

We have a vegetable garden in our back yard. Hubby and I started it a few years ago as an attempt to boycott packaged veggies from grocery stores. The veggies that we don't grow out back, we buy directly from farm outlets (no packaging). I sincerely hope this rubs off on our children when they grow up and move out. They are already showing a lot of enthusiasm towards recycling, especially scrap metal. I think it’s mostly because we let them keep the cash they get for the scrap. It keeps them motivated :) They found this great scrap yard called Sims Metal Management in Redwood City, they say their prices are incredible. And it must be true because the kids are practically beaming with pleasure after every trip to the scrap yard!

[deborah]

In 2009 Bundanoon in NSW Australia became the first town in the world to ban bottled water - see http://bundyontap.com.au/

I remember this happening because the bottled water companies decided that Bundanoon had water worth bottling, and wanted to bottle their water. As a result, they decided to have free water available throughout the area.

Why don't we encourage more towns to take up this?

[former player]

Later today I'll be on a regular volunteering gig to pick up rubbish from a local beach.  The plastic crap left behind by visitors from the land side is only outweighed by the plastic crap that comes in from the sea. 

The planet has already been comprehensively trashed by humankind, it's just that collectively we haven't quite realised it yet.

[Jennifer in Ottawa]

My initial thoughts are that Georgia and New York need to do a much better job of managing their recycling programs, a lot of stuff
that I see on the Landfill side could easily be recycled in my area.

My second thought is that the first few family waste a ridiculous amount of food.

When I introduced my husband to Mustachianism 3 weeks ago, he responded by telling me that if we were going to do it, we were going full bull, and made alterations to how we deal with waste.

We already recycled paper, plastic, glass etc, and have a compost bin in our backyard but we are now using the city provided green bin (soiled paper products, meat scraps, bones, uncompostable vegetables scraps etc.).  DH inspected everything the kids wanted to throw in the garbage for a week or so until he was satisfied that they knew how to separate and deal with waste.  We're down to half a trash bag of landfill every two weeks, and I know that once I make up some string bags for produce, we can get the plastic recycles down too.