One Less Piece Of Useless Plastic

Ever since doing the Ditch the Disposables and Bash the Trash challenges I’ve been thinking about giving up trash bags. I mean I don’t use plastic bags at the store, I use reusable bags and I don’t use plastic storage baggies, I use containers or the snack pouches my mom made. So the fact that we were still throwing away a huge plastic bag every week or two was really irritating me.

Now while it bugged me I had also resigned myself to “this is the way things are” and had just kind of stopped thinking about. Then about 2 weeks ago I was over at Recycle Your Day and Leslie had this post about going bagless, trash bagless that is. And now once again, I was thinking about it.

I started thinking about what goes into our trash and, more importantly, what doesn’t go into it. What doesn’t go into it anymore are coffee grinds, those go into a container and are used for various other things and produce scraps get, um, sort of composted. The biggest change in what goes into the trash is meat wrappers. I now only fix meat for the fam 2 dinners at most a week and I could just take the wrappers right out to the pick-up trashcan outside. So that really only leaves dry non-smelly stuff that goes into the trash.

I read the post on a Thursday or Friday and decided I would leave the bag that was in there until the next trash pick-up day, which was the next Wednesday. And then on Wednesday May 26th we went trash bag free. And it was awesome.

However, Sunday it occurred to me that we were having my grandparents, my cousin and her 2 boys over for a Memorial Day BBQ. I really didn’t want to worry about what got dumped in the trash that I would then have to clean so for Monday I put the bag back in. Yeah, I kind of feel like I wimped out on that one. I could have just cleaned the can out after and really, when I say “I” I mean Todd anyways. ;) And then since I had a bag in I left it in until garbage day again.

So now we’re re-starting our trash bagless adventure. And actually for the first days that we didn’t have a bag, we didn’t have any problems either. The boys were a little confused at first because we also have a trashcan for our recyclables and when ever they forget which is which I tell them “The one with the plastic bag is the trash, the one without is the recyclables”. The cans are 2 different sizes though so now that will have to be how they tell the difference.

I’m ridiculously happy with this new bagless freedom. And as you can see plastic wrapping still makes it into the house so I’m glad I could at least stop wrapping it in more plastic.

Now, if going trash bagless isn’t something you see doing in the near future then maybe consider some better trash bag options. For instance, Seventh Generation makes 2 sizes of trash bags made with recycled plastic. According to their site if every home replaced 1 package of tall 20 count bags with bags made from 65% recycled plastic we could save 39,000 barrels of oil.

Now while recycled plastic is better than virgin plastic it’s still plastic and will take thousands of years to biodegrade. So another even better (in my opinion) option is the bags from Green Genius. They combine an additive to the plastic that makes it edible for microbes. It’s a really interesting sounding process. So in the end, there’s no waste besides the waste that was in the bag. It would be great if all plastic were made this way.

Whatever you choose will make a difference, but I'm curious, could you go bag free?