We’re actually pretty average, to tell the unremarkable truth. We are a married couple, one of us (thankfully!) with a good full-time job, one of us has been out of work for the past three years, actively looking for work for the past two, able to find some part-time, temporary stuff for the past six months or so. We have a (completely amazing) 17-year-old daughter who finished high school early and started college this past fall. All of that means that money is definitely tight.
Like many Americans, we have pets, including both dogs and cats, with all the random expenses and products involved there. One of the dogs and one of the cats need prescription foods, so we aren’t exactly free to switch around if their food is packaged in non-environmentally friendly ways.
Our house is oldish—the oldest part built (not too badly, but not with the greatest attention to quality) in the ’70’s or ‘80’s, with a new and absolutely bizarre extension built sometime in the past decade by someone who was, to judge by both the design “decisions” and the execution, quite insane (more on that later, I’m sure). The floors are tile in the kitchen and bathrooms, and wood (cork) that we put in everywhere else. On a regular basis, it seems, something else will go kaflooey and need major repair or replacement.
We live in an area where you have to set up and pay for your garbage service, and where there is no such service that handles recyclables. To recycle things, we have to sort and take them ourselves to the recycling center, which is quite limited in what it will take: only #1 and #2 plastics, only clear glass, and of course cardboard, paper, aluminum and steel. So we probably don’t have it any easier than you do, with respect to getting things recycled—so I’m hoping this will be a fair estimate of what would be involved for pretty much any American who wanted to try to do what we are doing.
Most importantly with respect to this experiment, we are also people who have become acutely aware that there is no “away”—as in, “throw that away”—that expression is just pure nonsense. Anything that you do not constructively reuse or recycle builds up as pollution in YOUR air, water, or soil. The Earth is a closed ecosystem, and it is getting smaller all the time.
As a result, we are people who are actively working on reducing the trash our household creates to ZERO by the end of the year. Wish us luck, and next time you have the choice to trash up the world even more or make a little extra effort to get that can, bottle, paper, or whatever into a recycling container, I hope you will do the right thing. I don't know about you, but when I was in kindergarten, I was taught a basic principle to always "leave your space nicer than you found it" (LYSN TYFI--something I’ve started calling the “Listen Tiffy Principle” in my head). Just think what would happen if everybody left the space they occupy in life even just a LITTLE nicer than they found it! That’s what we’re up to, anyway. Wish us luck!
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