What would it take for you to really reduce your trash impact? Could you reduce your waste to less than 30.5 pounds of non-recyclable trash in a week? How about a month? Or a year?
Dave Chameides did just that — creating less trash in all of 2008 than an average American family throws out in a week. And more impressively, he did this without changing his eating or lifestyle habits to drastically.
“I didn’t want to change the way that I was living my life,†Dave told Sustainablog. “If I wanted to drink beer, I wasn’t going to say, well, I can’t find a way to drink beer without creating packaging, so therefore I’m not going to. Instead, what I’m going to do is look at the packaging in beer and pick the most ‘eco-friendly’ way to do it.â€
He’s got several cool videos on Vimeo, including how he composts food and junk mail with 6-7k worms in his basement (and it only takes up roughly 1’x1′ of floor space), as well as what he carries in his bag each day to help reduce his trash impact.
In the end, Dave amassed just 30.5 pounds of non-recyclable trash. However, that wasn’t the only stuff he piled up in his garage though — Dave decided to keep his recyclables for the year too, to show that “recycling isn’t the answer.â€
“If you look at the majority of the waste that I put out there, it’s recycling,†Dave says. “That’s gonna take energy, it’s going to take resources, it’s going to take all sorts of things. I think we’ve been trained in the U.S. to think that recycling is the answer. But statistically, only 10% of everything that can be recycled is recycled.â€
Check out his Vimeo stream or his blog sustainabledave.org for more ideas.