Lifestyle Tweaks | Recycling and Composting

My community has a fantastic recycling program.  They give us a giant blue bin and we simply fill it with unsorted paper, plastic, glass and metals. And while recycling has been part of our practice, it occurred to me that we could do better.

So, I started looking at our "outflow." For two people living in a household, we still produced a lot of trash. Here is what we did to change that: 

Downsize the trash can.  By downsizing our trashcan to a small bin, we are reminded to make a conscious choice about what goes into the landfill.

Upsize recycle bins.  We started by purchasing some "recycle symbol" stickers to convert our regular kitchen trashcan. (pictured left). We moved our existing indoor recycle bin to John's office.

Start composting.  As a vegan, I have a lot of vegetable waste from juicing or simply peelings and ends of vegetables. We purchased a compost bin which John set up in the backyard. I also picked up a Scrap Collector Freezer Compost Bin which is a nice way to stash random pieces of veggies until you have enough to justify the walk outside to the compost bin.

So far, the strategies are working.  We have almost doubled our recycling and our trash output is 1/3 of what it was just a few months ago!