What's in our garbage?

In the past year or two, I have been slowly transitioning into a "Spaceship Earth" mentality. I have become exceedingly aware of how much garbage we produce - both Josh and I as individuals, and our society as a whole.

Until fairly recently, all refuse could be either composted (food scraps, old clothes, bodies of noisy neighbours) or reused/repurposed (broken tools, bricks, only somewhat used clothes). The idea of garbage as we know it surfaced when we came up with things that don't fall into these two categories - TVs, oil filters, car tires...

The amount of waste is just staggering. The average Canadian produces 777 kg of garbage a year (=1713 lbs); assuming 60 years of adult life, that makes 46,620 kg (=102,780 lbs) per person's adult lifetime. The only time we see it, is when there is a workers' strike (see examples from Toronto, Vancouver, Amsterdam, Naples). If you think "oh, I recycle, it's OK", consider the resources required to pick up the recycling, separate it, re-process, send it to the factories, and make things out of it again. Is it definitely better to recycle than to throw it out, but  it is best to either not have it or to reuse it...

As we transition to an off-grid mindset, we're trying to reduce our garbage stream as much as possible. Guesstimating by weight, compost accounts for ~ 75% of our refuse, recycling for ~ 15%, and garbage constitutes the remaining 10%. As a result, Josh and I have about 1 kitchen catcher bag of garbage every 3 weeks or so (21 L bags, we're guessing at ~ 5 lbs when full). That's considered very, very little (annual guesstimate average of 43.5 lbs of garbage or 65.3 lbs of garbage + recycling for each of us, an equivalent of 3.8% of the average Canadian). However, using this average, over the course of our lives together we'll produce > 4 tons of garbage (next 50 years =  2600 weeks = 866.7 garbage bags = 4,333 lbs of garbage for the two of us).

We decreased our garbage output by several steps. Recycling was a given, and composting using our back-yard pile was a huge step forward (composting isn't hard and doesn't require city pickup or much space, take a look here!). We compost anything that isn't meat (= 99.99% of our diet), as well as paper products - Kleenex and paper towels. I moved completely to reusable feminine hygiene products (no, it's not gross, and it's WAY better and cheaper). To store leftovers, we use containers instead of plastic wrap or foil. We stopped using parchment paper (granola and nachos don't stick if you stir/move them immediately after baking). What's left? Mainly packaging from breakfast cereal and nachos (Josh's 2 remaining sources of processed food), packaging from tofu and cheese (about 2 packages / month, on average), packaging from meat or fish that we buy (~ once a month on average), glass jars and bottles from the occasional sauce or condiment (BC, why you no recycle glass??).

While Josh is (rightfully) happy about the huge decrease in garbage output, my ultimate goal is to reduce both our garbage and recycling to almost nothing. How? Use cardboard and newspapers in the garden for sheet mulching, grow, store, and make anything we can, buy in bulk anything we can't grow. The day we stop buying packaged food altogether, I might throw a party. Let me know if you want an invitation :-)