Good Economic/Ecological Practices for Consumers

I'm maintaining a resource list of good books, websites, and blogs on my website at  http://www.timoey.com/articles/zero-waste .

While I have not posted in a while, we have made excellent progress overall and it really has not been all that difficult to achieve either -- mainly forming new habits. Currently we take our black 35 gallon trash toter to the curb once every three months. In 2015 it was usually once every two weeks. Our current goal is once per year. Our green yard waste container goes out about once every two months (same as in 2015). We take our green/blue recycling split cart toter (mixed paper on one side, glass/metal/plastic containers on the other) to the curb about once every two months -- used to be every two weeks like the trash toter but we have reduced our recycling as well as our trash stream since we are very focused on Reduce and Reuse.

One of the best ways to reduce waste is to bring your own clean reusable containers to stores.  This post expands on my previous one  No More Disposable Plastic! Some places like farmers markets, butchers,  Whole Foods , Sprouts, Zanotto's, and  Starbucks  understand the value of reusable containers (saves both them and you money, reduces waste, helps environment) but others do not yet. If we all keep pushing, this will become increasingly accepted. While cardboard ice cream containers are compostable in some municipal composting programs (but not in home composting),  composting them is still more waste than using a reusable container. Plus the cardboard ice cream containers do have some plastic in them. I am currently waiting for responses from  Baskin Robbins  and  Cold Stone Creamery  to see if they will allow me to bring my own quart containers to their stores to get fresh packed ice cream. Cold Stone also makes its ice cream ...

Unfortunately the future is plastic because plastic lives just about forever and will be the death of much of our environment, and maybe us. If you have not already, please see Wall-E  for what our earth may eventually look like. We must do as much as possible to greatly reduce the use of plastic! Here is a seagoing bird that died from ingestion of plastic in the middle of the Pacific: From:  http://ecowatch.com/2013/05/28/california-plastic-pollution-policy-tangled-up-committee/ See also  http://www.nrdc.org/oceans/plastic-ocean/ and many other sources you can find by googling. And read the fantastic book  Plastic-Free: How I Kicked the Plastic Habit and How You Can Too . So my household is eliminating our need for plastic bags and other disposable plastic. No more hard copy newspaper with its plastic bag (see my separate post about my newspaper ). No more disposable plastic grocery bags (thank you for the local plastic bag ban -- now we must m...

I'm a strong supporter of local news organizations -- they are critical for a community. However after a lifetime of enjoying a printed newspaper, I've kicked the paper habit. We no longer have a paper newspaper delivered along with its rubber band and (often) plastic bag. Instead I now get an electronic edition on my Apple iPad each morning. The delivery interface has improved tremendously from the early days of e-publishing, it was a surprisingly pleasant switch.  I really like the interface to the newspaper on my iPad: I: can still skim/see the whole page and its context (the resolution on the iPad is much better than the picture above), tap on an article to read it in a bigger/easier/clearer font, can zoom into pictures, navigate easily and quickly to links, quickly get to past editions as well as other Bay Area Newsgroup papers, no longer need to worry about non-delivery of papers (happens a few times a year), can now have the computer search for me instea...

I've found an even better way to dispose of dog poop than the one I documented in 2008 at  http://ecopractice.blogspot.com/2008/03/best-way-to-dispose-of-dog-poop.html It works by using a funnel-like attachment on your sewer cleanout so you can drop the dog poop directly into your sewer line without necessarily using any water! Here is a picture of me doing this: This is neater and easier than putting the dog poop in a toilet to flush. Saves water too. The sewer cleanout accessory we use is the Doggie Doo Drain Dog Waste Sewer Line Attachment . The reusable device we now use to pick up poop on walks (instead of using a plastic bag) is  Nature's Miracle Jaw Scoop . It is easy to carry and holds the poop in the little bucket its jaws create. The medium size model can hold dozens of small poops or a couple of big poops from a big dog (we have little dogs). There is also a jumbo size if you need it. If the poop is solid and not sticky, no water is needed as the poop...

We are a month into 2016 now and rather than leave out our trash every week or two for pickup, it looks like we will only need our trash picked up at the curb once every 2-3 months. We currently have the smallest trash service possible in Sunnyvale. We've made some huge leaps in waste efficiency (many of which I still need to blog about).  Again our goal is to get as close to to zero waste as possible for our household by the end of 2016. We now have a small 2 quart black bucket that collects the trash for our entire house. Here is a picture of it next to our 2 little dogs: And a picture of it next to our indoor kitchen compost and recycling collection bins: The liners in the compost and recycling bins you see are certified compostable. The one used for recycling is rotated and becomes the one for compost after we empty the recycling into our outdoor recycling bin. The compost one makes it easier to toss the collected compost into a larger commercial composting facility an...

After reading a number of recycling and composting sites that said paper ice cream containers could not be composted because of the plastic lining they use, I was very bummed. My wife and I like ice cream and I really wanted to enjoy it waste free. Thankfully it looks like some local composting facilities are able to handle them in San Mateo and San Francisco. Apparently this small amount of plastic can be handled ok. Yay! See: http://www.recologysanmateo.com/index.php/for-businesses/recology-compost-recycling-garbage#compost And: http://recyclewhere.org/item/ice-cream-containers?search=Ice%20Cream%20Containers&serv_aud=92&lz_nid=540&dz_id=985&latitude=37.779329&longitude=-122.419150&distance=7.5&city=San%20Francisco&zip=94102 Please note that Sunnyvale handles paper milk, juice, and soup cartons as part of its recycling program.  Recycling of these is more efficient than composting at this time and these often have some aluminum met...

While the City of Sunnyvale offers many recycling options (mixed paper, batteries, electronics, glass/metal/plastic containers, scrap metal) as well as yard trimmings composting, it does not yet offer food scrap and food soiled paper composting. My friends at Sunnyvale Waste and Recycling ( http://sunnyvale.ca.gov/Departments/EnvironmentalServices/Garbage,RecyclingandWasteReduction.aspx ) assure me it is coming and they have completed a pilot, but it still seems to be a year or two or more away for most residents. Several years ago I did maintain a compost pile, but it was a bit of work and I could not compost lots of things that commercial composting facilities could handle. After all the “reduce” we’ve done to avoid disposables and diligently recycling most everything else, food scraps and food soiled paper was until recently about 90% of the trash we were throwing out. Luckily, on my way to work and without going out of my way, starting this year I am able to drop off my f...

My household has already done quite a lot to conserve electricity and natural gas. So while we are not likely to improve much on this in 2016, here is a recap of where my household currently is. Lighting: Many years ago we went mostly to compact fluorescents. In 2015 with LED prices falling substantially and many compact fluorescents reaching their life limit, we converted these as well as most remaining incandescent and halogen lights to LEDs. The only incandescents that remain are special service bulbs in our oven and refrigerator. The only halogens that remain are some special hall ceiling lights and some micro spot lights in cabinets and bathrooms. These remaining halogens are all hard to convert to LED until some new specialty bulbs are developed and/or we are able to replace these built in fixtures. I really wish such fixtures used more common connectors. Replacing the fixtures would force these to be trashed/recycled and involve considerable money so I’ve settled on using t...