Reflections on 9 months of Reduce our Waste Living
October 17, 2018Fall is now in full swing: On October 1st, I reached a milestone: 9 months of “reduce our waste” living. I don’t like to call it zero waste living because that still seems too daunting. We have not been able to keep our garbage small enough to fit into a jar. That being said, we…
Weighing In on Waste
July 14, 2018As we have now reached the 6 month window of our year of zero waste, I wanted to know if we have further reduced our garbage. Facing a weigh in of garbage, I am a little nervous. I am not sure that we have made a significant improvement in our waste reduction recently. It is…
The Sad State of Glass Wine Bottle Recycling in Quebec
April 22, 2018I like, I mean love, wine. And like many people here in Quebec, I dutifully put my empty wine bottles in my blue recycling bin. I was recently horrified to learn that much, if not all, of the glass in the recycling bin ends up in trash. Why? Cross-contamination. When glass bottles break, the broken…
Zero Waste Jar Envy
April 17, 2018My brother has joined the zero waste movement and he recently asked me how much I had reduced my garbage. He has already reduced his waste 80%! Since we were already composting, I expected that the waste reduction that I would see after 3 months would be negligible. Plus, we have a cat (really not…
Reflections after 1 month of the Zero Waste-ish Lifestyle
February 3, 2018Today (well actually February 1st) is 1 month after the start of our 52 week experiment in reducing our waste. It has been challenging and interesting at the same time. Some of my observations: Not clothes shopping is easier than I expected. I have surprised myself. In particular, as a diehard shopaholic (it’s too early to…
The Big Weigh In
January 10, 2018The key objective of this challenge is to determine the reduction in waste that our family of four can achieve after 52 weeks. We will compare the amount of garbage that we create over a 2 week period at the start of the year versus the end of the year. Our starting point is January…