Tips for reducing garbage?

[Daisygirl]

Well, the City of Welland has finally done it. they are now charging us to get rid of our garbage. They will take two containers of garbage. So of course, we have been heaping our two garbage cans. Well now they throw the ones that are over the edge of your can back in your yard. Aaarrrggghhh! I know they are just doing their job, but come on.

So now I am really on the reduce, reuse, recycle bandwagon, which, of course, I sould have been before. This week my neighbors are away, so I am using thier curb to get rid of the extra garbage from my basement purge and Christmas. After that, we WILL be down to two conainers of garbage. They charge you $1 per bag to get rid of any extra garbage! Yikes!

We are moving our recycle containers into the walk in pantry. I figure if we don't have to go out in the cold we are more likely to recylce it. But here are a few things I am wondering:

~ You have to flatten cardboard boxes, but do you have to flatten those juice cartons to get them to be recycled?
~ How do you reduce your garbage?
~ Does your community charge you extra for taking away garbage?

[Darlene]

We pay to haul away our garbage but take our recyclables to a transfer station for free disposal. We average about 1 bag a week.

~Cooking from scratch cuts back on alot of garbage. It's not hard to do, mostly it's about planning ahead & having a back up if the first plan doesn't work out.

~Make meal plans with using up leftovers in mind.

~Recycle everything you can.
~Start a compost pile for scraps, coffee grounds etc.

[larabelle]

I don't pay for trash. But I have friends who do.
1.) Reuse grocery bags as trash bags.
2.) Compost
3.) Eliminate newspapers (read them online instead) and magazines (read at the library)
4.) Cook from scratch
5.) Save all of those plastic containers (cottage cheese, coffee etc.) for frugal gift giving. Wash them out, make home made cookies and decorate them with gift wrap. They make great frugal gifts for teachers, bus drivers, gift exchanges at work etc.

[justpeachy92]

I think you will find that once you are actively recycling you will have less garbage. For times when you know you will have alot I would make sure to have really big trash bags. Would be better to pay $1 for a big bag instead of more $ for multiple small bags.

[FrugalMomof3]

We pay $80 a quarter for people to pick up our trash and we have a dignified container... yikes! (which never hold enough). If we need big thing taken like a dishwasher or something they charge us $5 extra BUT our local recycling center takes those and other appliances, toilet bowls, etc... we also donate good things that work to the Salvation army as well saving us money on paying someone to come pick it up.

We also recycle and the city charges us $7.50 per quarter and it's added to our water bill. Our recycles can only consist of bottles, plastic, cans, and glass, other items such as boxes we have to drop off ourself at the recycling center

[brainyblonde]

We have garbage (trash bags) pick up once a week and curbside recycling pick up once per week (alternating paper one week, bottles & cans the next). Our property taxes (and they are high) pay for this. Anything that doesn't fit in a trash bag must be taken to the dump. You can pay someone to haul it for you, or haul it yourself. I don't know that there is a limit on the number of trash bags they will pick up. When we removed a wall in our attic last year, and found nothing but trash and old clothes left by the previous owner, we had a lot of bags, and they took every one. There is a limit on the number of times a household can take a load to the dump. But, if you are working on a home improvement project, they will allot you extra loads and give you a "permission slip." (Commercial businesses have to pay by the pound, so they are trying to weed out abusers.)

Our paper recycling includes newspapers, magazines, catalogs, junk mail, office paper and cardboard. We cannot recycle pizza boxes, laminated paper (juice cartons, juice boxes, milk cartons) or anything waxed.

Bottle and can recycling includes glass bottles & jars, aluminum and tin cans, and narrow necked plastic bottles/jugs with threads at the neck, and stamped 1 or 2. Plastic (yogurt/margarine/peanut butter containers, plastic bags) and glass (drinking glasses, window panes etc.) that doesn't meet the guidelines goes in the trash. Tin or aluminum can be taken to a metal recycler for cash.

We also have a curbside Christmas tree pickup for a week in January, and twice a month pick up for bagged grass clipping in the summer and leaves in the fall. We also have a drop-off location for electronics recycling.

My kids grew up recycling, as before we had curbside pick-up, it was a volunteer program, and twice a month, we'd haul our stuff to the dumpsters set up for pick-ups.

I probably have about 5 kitchen sized bags and 1 trash bag a week. For recycling it is 2 boxes of paper and 4 kitchen sized bags of bottles and cans per pick-up. I flatten the cardboard, and bend the cans and plastic bottles. When my kids were younger, they loved to crush the cans into little discs, but those days are long gone!

[stinkbug]

We get credit for recycling! I think it's only 1.00 a month or something, but still...it's great. We curbside recycle with a provided bin. But, you have to seperate the plastic, paper, and cans. They do not pick up glass. We have one huge *dumpster* (also provided, the truck picks it up with forks) but they will pick up as much as you set out.

[krbshappy71]

We are charged $5 for recycling bins, whether or not you choose to set them out on the curbside. Good incentive, eh? We have a blue one for paper products, they are very lenient with paper, we do get to put in pizza boxes, and a green one for plastic, metal, and glass. They are very specific on the plastic, metal, and glass bin and will not take yogurt containers, cool whip containers, etc. Oh, and just this past year they started accepting ALL cardboard as long as you break it down to 4x4 ft pieces. Those can be placed under the bins so they don't fly away, placed in a larger cardboard box, etc. I am so thrilled they take all cardboard right from the curbside!

For convenience I keep the paper recycling bin under my desk where I sort the mail. The plastic/glass bin I keep in the garage right next to the door to the house. I'd prefer to have it closer but haven't found a place I am willing to give up for it, yet.

I use the garbage disposal for plant waste (don't have a compost pile) and we buy in bulk which usually cuts down on our packaging-wrapper waste. \

Want to take a look at what is in your garbage and post it? Maybe there is stuff in there we can help you avoid throwing away. The idea for "use containers to regift" is a fabulous one. I keep hot chocolate canisters and Country Tyme lemonade containers all year long for giving away cookies at Christmas. We reuse Cool Whip containers for our homemade whipping cream. (boy those cool whip containers are hardy!)

Keep up the good work, you are aware of the situation and trying to solve it, that is a big step in itself.

[noodlesoup]

cardboard containers for food take up the most room in a trash can. Recycling those will automatically save a lot of trash bags

[inneedofhope]

I pay $20 per month for trash pick up, and we don't have the curbside recycle here, but can haul it to the recycling center. It'd be neat if I could pay less than the set amount if I had less garbage!! LOL
When you are buying stuff, look at the amount of packaging it is in. For example if I have a choice between Vanilla extract in a bottle inside a box or just the bottle, it makes more sense to me to pick up the bottle, what do I need the silly box for?? You often get better prices on items with less packaging as well.
The boxes from cereal, etc, I tend to add to the kids craft shelves. My friends dd comes over and creates some often stuff with the supplies I leave for her. It's even better when the craft goes home with her mom, too, since it will ultimately end up in the trash anyway.

[Daisygirl]

Lets see, here is a list of things we have thrown in the garbage the past couple of days:

Some styrofoam meat trays
Plastic wrap off the meat trays
little bags from those lipton sides (could have been recylced)
Fruitopia cartons
icky food that went bad ( no place for compost at this time)
craft garbage - paper, little pieces of photos, empty gle stick tubes
A couple of broken toys

Those are the highlights of my garbage pail. Just looking at the list, I could have recylced the craft paper and the lipton sides bags. Not sure about the plastic wrap and styrofoam. Also not sure what to do with the fruitopia carton.

[krbshappy71]

Lets see, here is a list of things we have thrown in the garbage the past couple of days:

Some styrofoam meat trays
Plastic wrap off the meat trays
little bags from those lipton sides (could have been recylced)
Fruitopia cartons
icky food that went bad ( no place for compost at this time)
craft garbage - paper, little pieces of photos, empty gle stick tubes
A couple of broken toys

Those are the highlights of my garbage pail. Just looking at the list, I could have recylced the craft paper and the lipton sides bags. Not sure about the plastic wrap and styrofoam. Also not sure what to do with the fruitopia carton.

The only item that jumps out to me (besides those styrofoam meat trays which TWG says she saves) would be to reduce the Fruitopia cartons. Can you buy a big jug of juice instead and then recycle the jug? My kids like Juicy Juice and it is 100% juice. Perhaps buying frozen concentrate juice (recycle the cardboard of them) and mix up pitchers instead? Just a thought. Some weeks we have more stuff than others, it comes and goes.

[Daisygirl]

Yeah, the Fruitopia thing is a rarity to us. They were on sale far cheaper than I could make it from concetrate so I got about 8 of them.

[monkeywrangler71]

Your juice carton probably goes in the recycling. The city should have provided you with a list of what goes where. If you can't find one, check in your phone book a lot of places print one in there. If not call them and ask them for a list.

We squash our recyclables to make more room (cans, cartons, etc.) but that wasn't allowed back home, so I guess it depends on the city.

We are allowed 4 bags every two weeks. Extra bags are $1. Honestly, I've never had any problem meeting the limit, and that's with two kids in diapers. Nearly everything is recycled or composted.

I think the main key to limiting what goes out, is limiting what comes in.

[Lady_V]

We have dumpsters here (which the town is now going to charge 38K a year to empty -- even though we pay the same real estate tax rate a free-standing house pays... and they get the trash picked up 'free') -- trash is a sore subject for me lately.

The villagers have all had great ideas and I was wracking my brain trying to figure out what else I could add...

Foam trays - can be bleached and used when you are doing crafts, anything with glue or beads, they can be used as packing materials, or if you are painting a wall, they are great to lay the rollers and brushes on... I can't count how many times I lost a brush in a paint tray!

Jars - can be used for the 'in a jar' gifts, or to hold the odds and ends of crafting.

Junk Mail - Remove your name from bulk mailing lists (in Canada) http://www.the-cma.org/index.cfm

I also came across this link - How Do We Reduce Garbage?