It may be an ‘odiferous’ topic, but how you manage garbage, recycling, and composting can substantially reduce your climate footprint. Most homeowners today subscribe to the garbage pickup services, and pay ~$32 – $40 per month for the privilege. But if you want to maximize your recycling and composting, and minimize your landfill impact, you might find that ditching the garbage pickup service can help you achieve these goals — and saves you money!
In most communities in New York state, the old dumps are full and so have been converted to ‘transfer stations’, where one of the garbage service companies place dumpsters to collect garbage and ‘single-stream’ recyclables. You can bring your garbage and recyclables to these transfer stations every few weeks, and the cost will be way less than the cost of the pickup services; your recyclables are accepted at the transfer station for free! Garbage drop-off is not free, and the costs vary among the different communities. One example is Saratoga Springs, NY, where all garbage must be in a transfer-station bag which costs $4. The bag provided will hold three 13-gallon kitchen garbage bags. A typical household with 2 people might need to bring one bag every two weeks, while a family of 4 might need to bring two bags every two weeks. So this example shows a savings of $16 – $32 per month versus the pickup service!
Additional ideas related to this approach include:
- You can look at it as a ‘gamification’ of the waste management process; you may find yourself being more careful about cleaning and separating your recyclables, to minimize the amount of trash you’ll have to pay to dispose. It’s a fun activity 🙂
- Even if you don’t have a compost bin, you can take the fruit and vegetable waste out of the garbage and just start a pile in the forest; it will biodegrade there, and eventually you might even get a compost bin so you can transform that waste into fertilizer for the garden…
- Don’t use any hot water to clean the recyclables; just cold water, to avoid any added energy cost associated with recycling — but if you have extra room in your dishwasher, you can put any greasy recyclables in there, and it won’t increase the amount of energy to complete the load!
- Pay close attention to the ‘triangles’ on the plastic packaging; even beef and chicken trays typically have them, and if the plastic has a triangle, it’s recyclable.
- Be careful not to let any paper towels, napkins, fast-food drink cups, or plastic bags find their way into the recyclables — these just aren’t recyclable via ‘single-stream’ — but you can often clean and reuse plastic bags, and when they can’t be reused, gather clean bags in a container, and take them to a place like Aldi’s, which accepts them (right in their vestibule at the front of the store) for recycling.
- Think about reusing plastic restaurant takeout containers — they are typically quite well-built and should be reusable many times over before recycling…
- When you buy things packaged using twist ties, save the twist ties to seal the transfer-station bags. When sealing the bag, remember to grip the twist tie tightly, so that each twist squeezes the cinched bag tighter. With sufficient attention to sealing the transfer-station bag, you may find you can store it right in your garage as you accumulate waste, and the odor is quite low, and easily covered by an occasional puff of Fabreze 🙂 (But if you have any rodents getting into your garage, you’ll want to get a trash can to hold the transfer-station bags.)
This is definitely the ‘lowest-tech’ suggestion on this list, but you may find it makes a substantial difference for you, while using minimal effort.