Reducing Waste Archives - The Curly Butterfly

What to do with plastic once you start your zero waste journey.

I will be the first to admit that I will probably never get rid of plastic from my life altogether. My inner Frannie wants to go all in all at once and live in a tiny house out in the mountains and live off the land. However, before she starts to throw everything out and go join the hippies to start a zero waste revolution, let’s start with the most obvious problem. PLASTIC! What are the statistics on that? Why is it such a problem? What are companies doing to help with this problem? And before you go filling up the oceans with all of your unwanted plastic, think through how you can reuse or recycle what you currently have.

Why Plastic is Such a Problem

According to an article on Science Direct, Americans increased their bottled water intake from 29 gallons to 42 gallons in the ten year period between 2007 and 2017. That’s a nearly 50% increase! A study by the EPA states that only 8.4% of plastic is recycled each year. However, many local waste companies don’t recycle all plastics so just because you chunk all of your plastic trash into the recycle bin doesn’t mean it’s getting recycled. Every year, 8 million metric tons of plastic end up in our oceans. 80% of that comes from land-based plastic (plastic found in landfills, on the ground, and that can’t be recycled). So after checking with your local recycling center on what their rules are, what can you do with all that plastic?

Company Recycling Programs

While the first and most obvious way to deal with plastic waste is to refuse to accept it when you are out and about shopping, Frannie often gets in such a rush that she just grabs what she’s used to getting and then realizes her mistake when she starts seeing her husband throw it in the trash can! Plastic is in so much packaging but luckily some companies are starting to help reduce the plastic that goes into the landfill in the first place.

TerraCycle – Working in the school system for almost 30 years, I have been a participant in many recycling programs. One that I was introduced to several years ago was TerraCycle. Founded in 2001, this company has many recycling programs that you can participate in. Some are local and others are send in. You can even earn points that you can donate to charity. This one is great for researching a lot of plastics not accepted in your local bins.
Canon – We live in a world with electronics, but before you go buy the latest printer or camera, check with Canon’s recycle program. They take many electronics, cameras, and even those pesky tiny empty ink cartridges (now stop throwing those in the landfills!!)
Kroger – Since 2018, Kroger has recycled 52.2 million pounds of plastic. In addition to the 1000 plastic bags I collected for my husband’s “lunch boxes”, you can recycle bread bags, plastic overwrap and even bubble wrap! Now I just need to remember to bring my big ball of bags to the store with me!

Image of multicolored plastic bags spilling out of a black plastic bag on a white wooden background.

Reuse or Recycle

When I started becoming more aware of my surroundings, I was appalled at the amount of plastic in my environment. Even now, after 2 years of making small changes, plastic can be found in almost every cabinet in my kitchen. Tupperware, bread bags, MORE plastic grocery bags (they’re worse than rabbits!), medicine bottles, fruit and yogurt cups. Arguably, I am not going to be getting rid of all plastic any time soon (I have autistic kids). However, as I’ve made changes, I can to make conscious decisions about where I put it when I’m done.

Reuse

First, think about how you can reuse it. When it comes to things like Tupperware and food storage containers, I plan on using them until they are unsuitable for food. Scratches and heating cause leaching, and even if they are BPA free, any plastic leaching is questionable in my opinion. So when they get scratches or a lid goes missing, I try to use it for storage of other household items like medicine, office supplies, toys, and bathroom organization. DVD and CD cases make great storage for colored pencils and markers for my kids as well.

Second, if you are really crafty, you can save your trash for an art piece. You can find plenty of inspiration on Pinterest for art and craft projects to do with the kids. Many artists have made huge statement pieces all over the world using recycled materials. Please feel free to go all Kenny Scharf on me and show off your recycled plastic art! (Unfortunately, Frannie, you don’t have time right now. You cannot save the broken plastic cup to make a tile stepping stone. It’s time for second breakfast with the kids who broke it. Ha!)

Recycle

Finally, when all else fails, check with your local municipality about your recycling rules. Now if someone can help me train my husband to do this, we might be on our way to a waste free home! At least I have managed to reduce the amount of trash we have going to the landfill each week.

What do you do with the plastic you have in your house? Share in the comments your tips on reduce, reuse, recycle.

Reducing waste in your home can seem like a daunting task initially. What does that mean anyway? Do you stop using trash altogether? Do you join a commune and only live off the land? Well, here at The Curly Butterfly, my motto is “Clean Living in the Real World”. That means I strive to live somewhere between zero waste and all the plastic floating in the ocean.

Grocery Supplies

When I started on my journey, I did an analysis of where I was producing waste (yeah, I’m a data nerd). After looking at where I had the most waste, I immediately made the most obvious change. Reducing waste in my home kitchen was as easy as swapping out my grocery bags. I was bringing home upwards of 20-30 plastic bags for an average weekly shopping trip! Now, while my husband calls these his “lunch bags”, I don’t think I need 1000 of them. So I made the investment and bought some reusable shopping bags. Big surprise, I can fit more groceries in one reusable bag than in a plastic bag! Bonus: less trips inside the house, and I get a good weight workout at the same time!!

Green apples in a reusable white cotton bag on a gray background. — Photo by Ramil Gibadullin via Adobe Photostock

The next investment I made was the produce bags. I like my bags from Norwex, which I talk about in this post. But you can also pick some up from Package Free Store or this cotton set from Amazon.

Streamline Paperwork

Now that EVERYTHING is online, there really are very few things you need to keep in a physical file. Marriage and birth certificates, licenses, leases/mortgages, and taxes may need paper copies (just in case everything crashes). These things I keep in my emergency red “Go Folder”. But almost everything else can be found and kept online. As I was going through my bills each month, I started slowly switching to paperless accounts (I just need some system of remembering all of my passwords!). Now, I get very little mail except for junk mail and the occasional mail for my kids school related paperwork. That’s a whole filing system in itself!

The next thing I did was started cleaning out my old file folders and throwing stuff in the recycle bin (or shredding it if it had sensitive information). When I cam across my file with all of my home manuals (oven, refrigerator, Kitchen Aid mixer, etc), I started wondering if I could find those manuals online instead. Sure enough, I was able to find almost every single one in a PDF file that I saved on my desktop. I mean, how many times do we actually use those things anyway?

Swap Cloth for Paper Towels

One of the biggest changes I made was to stop using windex and paper towels. Let me rephrase that, my husband is the OCD house cleaner in our family and for 18 years he was obsessed with cleaning everything in the house with windex and paper towels. I mean, we would go through 1 bottle of windex and a big 6-8 pack of paper towels in a week! Now we use microfiber cloths and water. I go into much more detail about our cloths in this post if you want more details.

Sort Your Trash

Picture of items to be recycled next to a picture of the items in the trash with a red circle and line through it. Caption says Do This Not That.

Finally, one of the easiest ways to reduce waste is to sort your trash. This may be intuitive for some people, but I really have to put some effort into this thinking. Even though I am a science teacher, there were a lot of things I didn’t know about basic recycling and have learned over time. First, just because it’s plastic or glass, doesn’t mean it can be recycled. Contact your local waste company to find out which things can go into your recycle bin. Second, compost food scraps if you can, or check to see if there is a compost drop off in your area. Litterless is a great site I found that lists where to compost, where to buy bulk groceries, and so much more in your area in the United States.

What tips do you have for reducing waste in your home? I love to add tips to my list, so share with me in the comments below!

Getting Rid of Plastic