Zero Waste Life

Have you ever thought how much garbage you produce in a day? We are busy with our life that sometimes we don’t care at all. According to One Green Planet, Americans generate 30% of the world’s waste population. Please understand that we are only 5% of the world’s population. We produce a lot of garbage and something must be done about it.

Photo credit: Heidi Hutner. The Coffin Butte Landfill, Corvallis, OR

Mahatma Gandhi, an Indian activist, politician, lawyer, and a writer once said: “If you want to change the world, start within yourself.” I could not agree more with him. A few years ago, my husband and I started to minimize our waste producing lifestyle. He used to buy coffee every day at Seven Eleven before he went to work. That’s 365 coffee cups a year. I used to buy bottled water once in a while when we go out, and we used to have five plastic bags of groceries once a week; that’s 240 plastic bags in a year not including a plastic bag every time we have to order a to go food.

Now, we have our own ways on how to live a zero waste life, one step at a time. I’d like to share how we contribute to minimizing waste in our everyday life.

**Buy your own coffee cup or water container:

The one on the left is my water container and the one on the right is my husband’s coffee cup. He brings his own cup now when he likes to get coffee at Seven Eleven. Sometimes, he makes coffee at home, too, and that saves us some money as well. And now I bring my water container everywhere I go and just refill it with water. After all, Oregon water is probably one of the safest water I’ve ever drunk.

**Bring your own grocery bags:

That’s one of my grocery bags. I always bring it with me when I go grocery shopping and if I forget it, I asked for paper bags instead of plastic.

**Recycle plastic:

Photo credit: americarecyclesday.org

For those around the Portland Area, there is a plastic-bag recycling bin at Fred Meyer. If you don’t know where it is, ask a sales associate to help you. And for those who are living in a different country, ask where and how to recycle a used plastic.

**Recycle: 

As much as possible, dispose your trash properly. 

Here is a link to One Green Planet for more tips on how to minimize your trash.

And here is a video of a woman who puts her 4-year worth of trash in a mason jar. 

These are very doable actions we can do in order to help minimize our individual waste production. It costs very little and even helps us save some money. We’re not going to lose anything by following these steps; we just have to change a bit of our habit for something that is more healthy and beneficial to our environment and to ourselves.  

Leave a comment below and share your thoughts. Thank you.

#sustainability #folkgreen #recycle

Sources: One Green Planet, Heidi Hutner