Reducing Waste in 2021

I often talk about the environment and how efficient it would be to change the urban design in the US to promote more efficient movement and living, but there are some ways where I’ve made little effort to changing and realized I need to start doing more towards more efficient living.

Now that I live in an even bigger metropolis than I did before, there are more options than ever within walking (and even train) distance that would help in this goal. These are my new goals.

Kitchen

There are quite a few aspects of the kitchen that can be changed to have a lower impact than I did in the past. From the food I eat, to how I get the food, and how the food I eat was received.

Packaging

So many items in the kitchen are packaged far beyond reason. For every jar of peanut butter, there is a an unnecessary amount of plastic thrown away. Same goes for jam, bread, tofu, and so many other items. I realized that there are quite a number of zero waste groceries near me that let you bring your own packaging and allow you to collect just the items you need without all of the packaging: paid by weight of the item. I have some leftover jars from my last couple of jam purchases that I decided to use for these instead of purchasing new jars for this usage.

Food

Food itself also plays a large role in how much damage is wasted. Animal agriculture has such a negative impact on both direct emissions and on poor land usage. There was a graph I learned about in middle school science that didn’t really make sense to me until much later in life showing the amount of energy needed to create a certain amount of energy at each level and eating animals came out on top since the animals eaten have to also eat a lot to get enough calories for a person to eat. No matter how you try to frame it, raising an animal to slaughter size will always require far more energy than it would’ve to have just used the plant energy directly. For this reason, I cut out everything animal related in my kitchen. I actually started this quite some time ago, but only started actively thinking about it relatively recently.

Bathroom

Soap

I realized that for showering, I end up using a ton of bottles for shampoo, conditioner, and soap. The easiest of this to change was the bath soap. Instead of purchasing tons of soap bottles per year, I started buying bar soap with no packaging so that I can maximize the usage of the soap without having to throw away a lot in the process. For shampoo and conditioner, I actually don’t use too much shampoo, so I still have the same bottle from nearly a year ago, but I’ll explore my options for that once the time comes to replace it. My (leave-in) conditioner is in the same boat as my shampoo and I have yet to determine what I’ll do once it runs out, which I’d imagine won’t be for many, many months.

Teeth

I bought a water flosser many years ago and I realized that often times the best thing to do is keep what you have, so I will continue to use my water flosser for the vast majority of my flossing and reduce the amount of string floss I use. From all of the dentist posts I’ve seen about water flossing, it definitely isn’t as good as string floss, but far better than no flossing at all.

Toothpaste is also a refillable option that can be purchased in certain places.

Clothing

I’ve managed to avoid purchasing new clothing for well over a year now, which is more often than not the best option, but I’ve realized maintaining clothes is often a chore of its own.

Washing

A few years ago, I started taking my athletic clothing out of the wash and hanging them up rather than putting them in the dryer since they felt weird. Gradually, I started taking more and more clothes out of the wash to hang dry. I realized dryers actually use roughly 1500-5000 watts of energy for about 45-50 minutes, meaning that my clothes were likely using more than 1.5 kilowatt-hours for drying, which is more energy than just about every non-necessity I have uses up in multiple weeks. I don’t have an in-unit machine and don’t have a large place, so I reserve the dryer only for bigger loads which include bed sheets and towels, which I save up for one large load rather than having multiple on a regular basis.

Repairing Clothing

Because of the widespread availability of cheap clothing, it’s become a little too easy to just go out and purchase a pair of new jeans when a hole appears in an old pair. That was my natural reaction and I assume so many people’s. When walking around my neighbourhood and noticed that there were a lot of dry cleaners in my area that also doubled as tailors. I hadn’t really considered getting my clothes fixed but now I can wear a lot of my older shirts that developed small holes at the seams and my favourite pair of jeans for much longer than before.

Repairing Shoes

In a similar situation to repairing clothing, a lot of my shoes could just use a nice cleaning and sole replacement every couple tens of kilometres. I should really clean them up much more than I currently do to maintain their look but I’m kind of lazy in that regard and don’t mind the beat-up sneakers look. I don’t have much of a resolution for athletic shoes since those usually just get naturally destroyed during activities like running and prolonged usage causes injury, but maybe there’ll be a better recycling process or companies could make them easier to repair/replace parts for the more casual exerciser. I would guess there wouldn’t be nearly as easy of a solution for more serious athletes.

Ordering Out

One of the biggest culprits of my trash bin in the last few years has been food. If you ever get takeout, you may notice that your rubbish bin is full of food packaging after the fact. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it was impossible to eat at a restaurant and use the dishware and silverware restaurants would normally have. Even when outdoor spaces opened, a lot of the places I went to would only give you plasticware for eating, which I assumed was more of a measure to make people feel comfortable rather than a scientific prevention method for preventing germ spread…thoroughly washing the silverware should be more than enough. I usually avoid getting a lot of takeout food for this reason. Even for getting coffee, I go to my local place that I know will let me use my own mug if I want to get anything. A lot of places give plastic utensils by default so If I do order something for takeout, I usually explicitly ask for no extra utensils.

I noticed for a lot of restaurants, even when reusable silverware and plates are present, disposable chopsticks were always given. I pointed this out to a friend once while eating and she said it may be because they aren’t easy to put in a standard dishwasher. I’d never actually thought about it, but I think from now on, I’ll bring my own set of utensils with me just to avoid throwing a lot more than needed into the trash.

Future

I’ll try to minimize as much as possible in as many ways as I can. I know I still have a long way to go but these are my initial steps for the things I have noticed are wasteful.