Our 2020 Waste Audit

Don’t let the “2020” throw you off here – I promise you (unlike so much of 2020) THIS IS A GOOD NEWS STORY …

Our family has been living pretty low waste for about a decade.

• We buy very little, preferring to thrift, DIY, swap or borrow where possible;
• We are dedicated to supporting local – receiving weekly farm deliveries, promoting and supporting farmers’ markets;
• We avoid plastic and packaging as much as possible, bringing reusables or refilling in bulk;
• We spend a lot of time in the kitchen making plant-based meals and snacks;
• We grow a garden, have honey bees and even grow mushrooms; and
• We compost like nobody’s business!

With all of these eco-friendly (and economical) habits, our waste production is pretty minimal. In years past, we typically only put out our garbage bin once a month – or even less – and have significantly reduced our recyclables!

ONE BIN, ONE YEAR CHALLENGE

BUT, in 2020, we embarked on a whole new challenge – inspired by British eco-duo, Ander and Adam of GoxuBoys – the One Bin, One Year Challenge! I wanted to show that it can be done – even as a family of 4, living a pretty typical life (2 working parents, 2 school-aged kids, commuting and running the “daily grind”) in Canada’s capital city.

In 2018, I had already removed the trash bin from our kitchen, so the biggest obstacle now was to actually track our monthly waste (i.e. weigh it, analyze it.. and prevent my husband from putting it all to the curb for a full 12 months!!)

Instead of a hidden-beneath-your-counters trash bin, we have been keeping a cookie jar in plain sight beside our kitchen sink to collect our monthly garbage (note: we gradually moved away from the cookie jar to a single clear chip bag – easier access and containment).

PRELIMINARY RESULTS

Here is a sneak-peak of our results so far, plus a couple highlights (full report to come early in 2021):

• On average, our family of 4 produces about 300 grams of kitchen trash per month (typically about 1/2 a grocery bag full)
• The biggest ‘culprit’ for our household is chip bags – to counter this, we have invested in a small “plastic packaging” Terracycle Zero Waste box so that once our tracking is complete, we can still send these chip bags somewhere other than our precious landfill! Also of note, we opt to source our chips locally from Against the Grain, a heritage grain farm near Ottawa. While their chips still come in plastic, we appreciate that our snacks are locally-made, chemical free, and not transported all over the world to get to our plates.
• Our trash output reduced by about 60% during the summer months – likely because we were growing a lot ourselves, and/or sourcing from local farms/markets while crops were in season (thanks to Funny Duck Farms, Hidden Trails, Just Food Farm stand, among others!)
• We have never used the City of Ottawa’s Green Bin (compost) program – rather, we collect our own compost in our backyard to generate soil for our garden; however, if you’re interested in doing a waste audit yourself, composting (in any format) will be your biggest ally – as soon as you eliminate food and organic scraps from your waste stream, your trash is significantly reduced AND you decrease greenhouse gas emissions, automatically, JUST by composting!
• We regularly pick up trash in our neighbourhood, and on the biggest 2 trash collection days of the year (Earth Day in April, and Cleaning the Capital in September) collected approximately 3000g and 5000g, respectively (Note: these totals were NOT counted in our household waste tracking report, but thought it would be interesting to monitor them as well.)

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SO, WHAT’S NEXT?

With less than 2 months to go in 2020, stay tuned to get the full breakdown and report of our waste output! Spoiler alert: we are totally going to meet our #1bin1year goal 😉

DO YOUR OWN WASTE AUDIT

With many of us spending more time at home due to the pandemic, this is a great opportunity to try a waste audit of your own. Need any tips or tricks? Send me a message!

And if you need more motivation to reduce your waste, here are a few mind-blowingly sad (but motivational!) statistics….

DID YOU KNOW?

• Canadians produce an estimated 3.3 million tonnes of plastic waste per year. About 2.8 million tonnes of plastic waste ends up in Canadian landfills every year – equivalent to the weight of 24 CN towers. (Source: Oceana.ca)
• The average person creates over 4 pounds (almost 2kg) of trash every day and about 1.5 U.S. tons (1360 kg) of solid waste per year (Source: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency)
• The use of single-use plastic packaging, which is largely not recyclable, has grown from 120,000 U.S. tons in 1960 to 12.7 million U.S. tons in 2006 (Source: EcoCycle Environmental Facts)
• About 86 per cent of Canada’s plastic waste ends up in landfill, while a meager nine per cent is recycled (Source: Oceana.ca)
• With just 5.1% of the world’s population, North America consumes 24% of the Earth’s resources (Source: EcoCycle Environmental Facts)
• Canada ranks in last place out of 17 countries and gets a “D” grade on the municipal waste generation report card (Source: The Conference Board of Canada, Waste Generation Report 2013)
• Canada’s estimated total waste generation is the highest in the world. Canada produced 1.33 billion metric tonnes of waste, or 36.1 tonnes per person (Source: USA Today “Canada produces the most waste in the world” July 2019)

As Canadians, we have a lot to be proud of – but our environmental track record and waste management is NOT one of them, sadly. We can do better. We must do better.

LESS of THIS…

And MORE of THIS!!!

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AND THIS!!!

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Thanks for reading! Please follow our ongoing journey on Instagram and feel free to reach out if you have questions about our waste audit 🙂