How Can We Reduce Waste at Home

Small increments are key. Nix or replace one thing at a time. Extra expenses in one category will be offset by efficiency in another.

By Matt Glassmeyer
Updated on July 3, 2024
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by Matt Glassmeyer
The author’s family uses a variety of bins and boxes to collect items for composting and recycling.

How can we reduce waste at home? Follow a family for two years to learn how they implemented accessible tactics to cut back on their trash.

At the end of 2020, I saw a photo online of a family holding a jar full of a year’s worth of their trash. Like a true nerd, I slanted an eyebrow, did some research, and then copied them. I filled a spreadsheet with 60 lines of various plastics and laminated materials, along with outlets for upcycling, downcycling, and recycling. An oatmeal container became our family’s trash can.

Now, for the first time in two years, our brown metro trash bin has returned to the alley full of 90 pounds of broken toys, plates, spent gum, and ripped flip-flops to be hauled to middle Tennessee’s full landfill, out of sight. According to J.R. Lind’s February 2020 article in Nashville Scene, Nashville residents average more than 2 pounds of trash per person per day. With just a little effort, our family’s project managed to decrease that by around 90 percent.

We’re not “zero-waste,” but we are “zero-sacrifice,” and our project is now routine. We do weigh on our environment, eating from non-recyclable chip bags, shopping at big-box stores, trick-or-treating, online shopping, and hosting parties. Our extended family enjoys our plastic gifts. Nicaraguan coffee beans are delivered to our house by truck, and we travel. Zero-waste? We’re as close to that goal as technology is to saving humankind from its environmental conundrum: never happening. We want to share our trash-diminishing experience to improve our city and empower other people, not to limit our way of life or sow guilt.

Given the space they require and the methane they spew, landfills are a preposterous concept. But completely avoiding plastic pollution today is a fool’s errand. And recycling, which can be wasteful in itself, is only the last line of defense. So, if you’re short on bandwidth but you want to shrink the size of your trash can, start with these four steps:

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