Guest Author - Colleen O´Malley Weber

Last week I wrote an article called Recycling is the Last Resort. The response has been tremendous, thank you.

It was a big ‘a-ha’ moment for us too, when we realized that recycling is not the best solution (or even a good solution in a lot of instances). Zero Waste is a much better solution – meaning, shifting from a consumable, disposable mentality to one of not producing waste.

Zero waste is a relatively new concept, but involves asking yourself a series of questions about the products you are thinking about purchasing:

a) Can you refuse the product (not use/accept/purchase it any more)?
b) Can you/someone else repair the product if/when it breaks?
c) Can you reduce the amount of product (limit quantities or packaging – i.e. buy in bulk)
d) Can you reuse the product in another way (i.e. those Styrofoam meat packing trays would make great ‘tombstones’ for Halloween)?
e) Or can this be recycled (creatively, i.e. FreeCycled, donated, sold, etc.) or reclaimed through the ‘blue bin’?

Probably the best example I have of this is the BBQ we were thinking about purchasing this past summer. We had a BBQ, however, it needed a new burner and it was a bit limiting. We couldn’t really control the burners, so even if we only wanted to cook something smaller, the whole BBQ had to be lit.

We discussed whether or not we could choose not to purchase or use a BBQ anymore, however, we love sitting outside and cooking. Plus by not using the oven and stove, it keeps the house cooler in the summer.

After weighing out the repair costs and the features we wanted, we decided to purchase a new BBQ. Not only did we get the BBQ of our dreams, we realized that we also now had tons of Styrofoam packaging and a huge cardboard box. It was incredibly disturbing as Styrofoam isn’t recyclable in our curbside program, and there isn’t much you can really do with huge pre-molded pieces of it!

We also had the dilemma of what to do with the old BBQ. In the past we would have considered putting it in the dump, as ‘we’ didn’t need it anymore. Now we are starting to realize that maybe ‘we’ don’t need it, but others might want it. We put a sign on it “free to good home – burner needs replacing” and left it out on the curb. Within an hour it was gone. We were elated!

We still had not resolved the Styrofoam issue. I called around and learned about a local company that will accept clean Styrofoam for the production of cups they make. All we had to do was drop it off during business hours. I felt better knowing that it wasn’t going to the dump, however, I was still distressed by the fact that I was still contributing to the production of a cup that wasn’t recycled through many city recycling programs.

Someone suggested I take the packaging back to the store where we bought the BBQ and let them know that it was excessive and unacceptable and ‘force’ them to deal with it; ideally they would let their supplier know and the supplier would hopefully stop using so much packaging.

Either way, we had two options that reduced waste, unfortunately we did not achieve zero waste. At the very least, it’s a great goal to work toward, and no matter what, we are reducing our trash and recycling output.