The proposed plan would do away with traditional dumpsters, residents would buy bags for their garbage, at $2.40 a bag, garbage collectors will only pick up the official city bags each week.  The logic behind this trash reduction plan is that people will want to save money by buying fewer bags, which would encourage less trash disposal and reduce landfill/collection costs.  Like tollways for drivers, paying by the bag puts the expense more directly on people using garbage collection and landfill space.  It’s sort of like “pay as you go,” but “pay as you throw.”  It equitably spreads the cost around to everyone living in Neenah, not just property owners.   Right now, the owner of a $150,000 home pays about $130 a year for garbage removal.   If that person throws out one bag a week, it would cost about $125. Two bags would cost $250 yearly.

Enviro Girl likes this plan because it directly taxes consumption as opposed to property taxes that have no bearing on how much garbage a household generates.  Enviro Girl demonstrated last week how her family throws away about  1 tall kitchen garbage bag per week, yet they live on 60 acres.  Is it fair for her to contribute more to garbage collection/landfill taxes than people living on a city lot throwing away three times as much garbage each week?

Fees make people aware of their behavior–just as with shopping bags (when charged for shopping bags, people will use fewer bags than if they’re offered a rebate for bringing their own bag).  She also likes the fact that this plan assesses the cost of garbage more directly to people using collection services.  Want to save money?  Throw away less stuff.  The incentives are inherent in the proposed plan.

Yet Enviro Girl lives in the country and every year she finds trash that people dump on her property because they don’t want to pay to dispose of their old tires or electronics properly.  There is a legitimate fear that people will dump their trash on other people’s property just to save money.

Enviro Girl will be curious to see if this innovative plan will become the rule in Neenah. Meanwhile, she applauds their creativity in addressing the problem of too much garbage consuming too many of our resources.

Tell the Eco Women:  What do you think of the Neenah Plan to Pay As You Throw?  Can it work?  Or will people cling to their trashy habits and reject the idea?

AP photo

Seattle officials are considering reducing weekly trash pickups to every other week. This would save the city around $6 million annually, as well as reduce truck traffic in neighborhoods. The initiative could potentially keep an additional 1,400 tons of waste out landfills every year, as well as help push the city towards a 60% recycling rate. At this point, approximately 53% of Seattle’s trash is recycled.

While this idea is still in the early theoretical phases, it could be tested in a limited number of homes this summer. Concerns that need to be allayed include whether or not trash cans will develop odors from being full for so long and if vermin will proliferate in these conditions.

While Recycla likes the idea in theory and knows that her family could easily get by on just two trash pick-ups a month, she knows this change could be difficult for other families.

What do you think, fellow Eco Warriors? Could you manage with just two trash collections a month? If not, where do you think you could make improvements to get you to that goal?

Thus far, they’re way below the 7 pound daily average.  The other piece of this exploration is what, exactly, we throw away.  To learn more about this, Enviro Girl has been tracking what goes into the wastebasket at her house.  Over the weekend her family threw away:

3 milk tabs, 7 q-tips, 2 wax paper wrappers from sticks of butter, 1 wrapper from a block of cream cheese, a mesh bag from a pound of apples, a bag from some chips, sandwich crusts, 3 plastic spoons & plastic cups (from a treat at Sunday School), 3 twist ties, 3 stickers from apples, a bit of foil from some cheese, 4 packages, 2 greasy napkins, a bag from some pretzels, several candy wrappers, wrapper from a tea bag, top from a can of concentrated juice, plastic bag from seed starter soil, the wrapper from a sleeve of crackers.

The tall kitchen garbage bag isn’t full yet.

Adding to their collective garbage count, however, are 5 plastic shopping bags full of trash.  Over the weekend they fanned out over their property (which includes 1/3 mile along a county highway) and cleaned up litter.  This litter included cans, bottles, plastic bags, cigarette butts, a mangled pair of surgical scissors, candy wrappers, snack wrappers, newspapers and broken bits of plastic.

Even when adding other people’s trash to their household count, Enviro Girl’s family came up far below the 7 pound/person daily average.

By tracking her household’s trash, Enviro Girl has learned it’s primarily comprised of food packaging.  Even though her family diligently recycles plastic, glass, metal, paper and cardboard, they generate a significant amount of trash through snack food packaging.  The only way to further reduce the amount of garbage they send to the local landfill would be to change their diet.

When Enviro Girl considers how people might reduce their garbage as a general rule, she comes up with a couple solutions:

*Municipalities could charge by weight, which might encourage more recycling.

* Smaller garbage containers might encourage people to throw away less–kind of like how smaller plates make people take smaller servings of food.  We have super-sized our trash containers, and Enviro Girl believes it dulls our perception of how much waste we generate.

Tell the Eco Women:  how do you think Americans could be encouraged to throw away less garbage each week?

1 package from coffee grounds, 2 milk caps, 2 broken Nerf bullets, sandwich crust, 2 napkins, a bag from a box of cereal, 2 Twinkie wrappers, a straw (from Enviro Girl’s night out at book club–she had a Naughty Frappe and that required a straw!), a chips bag (which she used in lieu of asking for a to-go box for the half of her sandwich she hadn’t finished eating) and 1 pair of Latex gloves from Enviro Girl’s shift in the school cafeteria.  She also disposed of a skull from some fresh animal carcass–Enviro Girl doesn’t want the dog messing with it since it costs $40 to give the mutt a bath, so she wrapped the skull in a plastic bag and tossed it in her dumpster outside.  Sans skull, her kitchen wastebasket still doesn’t register on the bathroom scale.

The leading source of household waste continues to be from food packaging and Enviro Girl is curious to see if her family’s weekend activities significantly alter the contents of their kitchen wastebasket.

Stay tuned–and keep your own trash tales coming in the comment box!

1/4 peanut butter & jelly sandwich, 12 yogurt tubes, 3 greasy napkins, 3 candy wrappers, 2 pair latex gloves (from school cafeteria–Enviro Girl threw them away there, but still counts them as her trash), 1 pretzel package, 1 q-tip, 1 seal from peanut butter jar and lid, packaging from raw chicken breasts & thighs, 1 miscellaneous wrapper, 2 stickers from apples, 1/4 Nutella sandwich, 1 lid from jar of Nutella, 1 seal from jar of Nutella, a wad if used duct tape, some crumbs and pencil shavings.  (How are you so accurate, Enviro Girl?  She’s writing down each item on the back of an old envelope before she throws it in the bin.)

So far the majority of her household waste is still food packaging.  While considering the issue of trash, Enviro Girl tries to imagine generating more and struggles to comprehend how her lifestyle would change.  She thinks about her neighbors whose household consists of 2 people, no pets, children and grandchildren living in other households–they generate a large dumpster full of garbage every week.  It strikes her how much of her household trash is generated through consumption–in her family’s case, food, but what other consumption adds to people’s waste?  It’s tempting to dive into her neighbor’s dumpster and try to figure it out…

Keep the comments coming–the Eco Women like reading your trash inventory and how you deal with your waste in various parts of the world!

Yesterday Enviro Girl threw away a q-tip and the seal on a bottle in the bathroom wastebasket.  Their kitchen is where most trash gets tossed and in the kitchen they threw away: 1 bag from a cereal box, 1 bag from a package of cookies, 1 Twinkie wrapper, a milk cap, the plastic cap to a carton of oatmeal, 2 butter wrappers, an unrecyclable plastic honey container & lid, some moldy cheese, a greasy napkin, crumbs, the plastic seal off a container, the butcher paper off a pound of ground beef.

One day into this experiment and it’s obvious that food packaging is the dominant category of garbage at Enviro Girl’s house.  Although this could be considered “household trash” since most of it came from the family eating a snack, dinner and breakfast together, Enviro Girl will credit it to herself and believe it weighs in at about 2 pounds total.

Tell the Eco Women:  What’s in your trash can since yesterday?  Are you above or below the national average of 7 pounds of garbage a day?

Enviro Girl lives in a household with one husband, three sons and a large dog.  She knows their collective daily trash disposal weighs in far less than the national average of 7 pounds per person.  Even if they account for garbage thrown away at office/school/other places, it’s evident that they manage their waste efficiently since they fill their garbage dumpster with the equivalent of 1 1/2 tall kitchen garbage bags each week.

Enviro Girl’s family doesn’t have some magic secret–what they do is reasonably easy.  They:

Recycle all plastic (including bags), paper/cardboard, metal and glass.

Reuse containers for food and fabric for cleaning.

Reduce their consumption by carefully choosing household products, food and entertainment to minimize packaging.  A specific examples include buying powdered dishwasher soap in a fully recyclable cardboard box (plus the powder washes more loads per package than liquid soap), avoiding individually-packaged snacks and opting to dole out servings into reusable containers, renting DVDs and video games.

Donate used goods to a local thrift store or directly to people who can use them.

Compost food scraps, paper and yard waste.

This morning, before she wrote this post, Enviro Girl took stock of what her family had thrown into the garbage can.  She threw away one straw, a lid from a jar of peanut butter (recycled the jar), and the top strip of a juice pouch (the rest of the pouch got washed and will get recycled via a program at her children’s school).  She composted some food waste, including an apple core, a paper napkin from her son’s lunch box and grape stems.

For the rest of the week Enviro Girl will examine what gets thrown away on her watch, and she encourages readers to do the same.  She imagines that by writing down her trash, it will further raise her awareness, much like writing down one’s spending habits or diet habits.

Tell the Eco Women:  what did you throw away this morning?

1.  Make your kids go outside.  Quit sending them the message that being outdoors is dangerous (think of how often we do!  Insect bites, rashes, allergies, sunburn–kids get inundated with the message that it’s safer to be indoors, in an environment sanitized for their protection).  If children have no relationship with the earth, the Great Outdoors, nature, they’ll feel no obligation to protect it.  You protect what you know and love and the best way to know and love nature and our planet is to get out and experience it.  Whether you take your kids camping, hiking, fishing, Geo-caching, to the local playground or to a National Park, get your kids outside.  Outdoor activities can include swimming, biking, gardening, playing kick the can with neighbor kids or gathering dandelions.  The more time a kid spends outside, the more they’ll notice things, like how ants persevere to lift something five times their size or how all flowers begin with symmetrical shapes. They’ll learn to appreciate fresh air, fireflies, sunshine, lilacs, raindrops, birdsong and snowflakes.  All love of nature begins with being in nature, so slap some sunscreen and bug spray on your kids and kick ‘em out the back door!

2.  Hold your kids to your environmental ethics and explain why.  “Turn off the lights!  We need to save electricity.”  “Help me get these clothes in off the lines–line drying is free and better for the planet than using an electrical clothes dryer.”  “We have to pick beans today so we have some for supper–our homegrown beans always taste better than the canned ones.”  Model behavior, and talk about it.  Just as we explain “Don’t touch a hot stove, you’ll burn yourself,” we have to explain why we bring our own shopping bags, pass on bottled water and buy organic food.

3.  Demonstrate to your kids that less is more.  Any analysis of the big environmental issues–pollution, diversity, land use, shrinking resources–boils down to our habits of consumption.  If we’re serious about addressing environmental protection, we need to use less, consume less, buy less–we need to embrace a simpler lifestyle.  Turn off the TV, get off the computer/phone/video game, get out of the shopping malls, quit spending and getting stuff.  Lower the bar–a kid will enjoy a trip to the library and baking cookies at home just as much as they’ll enjoy a trip to Barnes & Noble and a trip through the McDonald’s drive thru.  Quality matters more than quantity.   Start framing your children’s world in experiences instead of things–it’s easy enough to do.  Start by asking your children what they’d like to do  to celebrate a holiday instead of what they want to get.  Make a list of free and cheap pleasures to pursue over summer vacation.  Enviro Girl could go on and on about how indulging in a materialistic and consumption-based lifestyle is bad for both the environment, our economy and our character development, but she wants you to keep reading.  Perhaps she’ll expound more in a different post.  For now, she urges you to try it and see how kids can be just as happy to stay up late to read a story together as they are to stay up late to watch TV.

Tell the Eco Women:  are you doing any or all of these things with the next generation?  What ideas do you have for bringing up the next generation of Eco-Activists?

In honor of Earth Day 2012, the Eco Women are giving away an assortment of Southern Exposure Seed Exchange seeds to two winners. What better way to celebrate our Earth than by getting a little earth on our hands!

All you have to do to enter this giveaway is leave a comment on this post. You don’t have to say anything in particular, but feel free to tell us about a new eco action you’ve been trying or something you’d like for us to talk about here on this blog. This giveaway is open until noon on Earth Day, after which, we will randomly draw two names and contact the winners.

To learn more about Earth Day and what you can do to help Planet Earth, visit the official Earth Day website.

Fortuitously, Enviro Girl found herself in that same 3rd grade class the following week.  That afternoon they cracked open their Scholastic News Weekly and read about Nike’s Reuse a Shoe program and two student views on the debate over banning plastic shopping bags.  The “Yes” argument for banning plastic bags referenced the 3rd grade’s lessons about nonrenewable resources.  The “No” argument mentioned using those plastic bags as garbage can liners and art project that require plastic shopping bags.  Enviro Girl asked the students which side of the debate they agreed with.

Half the students felt plastic shopping bags were good!  Enviro Girl was gobsmacked.  She knew a few days ago they’d studied how oil was a nonrenewable resource and that plastic came from oil and that plastic shopping bags were wasteful.  Why were they now telling her they liked keeping plastic shopping bags?  She asked them, after paraphrasing the previous week’s lesson on renewable and nonrenewable resources.

Lightbulbs went on over the students’ heads.  Aha!  “Okay, so you guys remember that plastic bags are made out of oil, a ‘once and done’ kind of resource.  Raise your hand if you think plastic shopping bags should be banned to help conserve this resource–you agree with the ‘Yes’ side of this debate.”  All but one child raised their hand.

The students did not make the connections on their own.  What Enviro Girl gleaned from this moment is that like renewable resources, our classroom conversations about the environment and related issues must happen more than once.  We cannot offer children an afternoon assembly on not littering and feel we’ve covered pollution adequately.  We have to circle back to these issues frequently, in proper context, and relate environmental education to the Big Picture.

(Oh, and Enviro Girl pointed out all the other ways people could find plastic bags for lining their garbage cans and making art projects.  Trust her, she reassured the lone hold-out in the class, there are plenty of plastic bags to be found even if we deny ourselves plastic shopping bags.  But that’s a topic for another post.)

On the back of Scholastic News Weekly the students had to read a graph explaining various items thrown away and breaking down how much got recycled and how much got placed in landfill.  Again the class had an opportunity to discuss how we individually can reduce waste streams into landfills by recycling more.  The students identified the process of recycling and items their households could recycle but didn’t.

All great persuasive arguments end with a Call to Action, so Enviro Girl broke the students into small groups and instructed them to brainstorm ways they could actively “save the planet.”  The students listed things like “don’t litter,” “recycle more stuff,” and “bring your own bag.”  Then each student created a poster for Earth Day, suggesting one or several ways people could actively “Save the Planet.”

Enviro Girl can see more opportunities here–reading books, picking up litter on the school yard, a recyclable materials scavenger hunt–to teach these 3rd graders how to identify wasteful uses of our natural resources and ways we can keep our planet cleaner.  One or two lessons isn’t enough.  A teacher could devise an entire unit or work environmental issues into the weekly rotation and incorporate writing, math, science and history with little effort.

Environmental education has to be integrated frequently and intentionally.  Tell a kid not to litter and they’ll perceive another Rule to Obey.  Make a kid clean up litter in a park or along a road and they’ll comprehend more fully why littering is problematic.

As parents and teachers we have to model an environmental ethic, explain the ethic and finally engage children in practicing the ethic so they can take ownership for themselves.

Tell the Eco Women:  how do you model an environmental ethic, explain it and engage your children/students in practicing it?  What suggestions do you have for incorporating an environmental ethic into family life or classroom?

In honor of Earth Day 2012, the Eco Women are giving away an assortment of Southern Exposure Seed Exchange seeds to two winners. What better way to celebrate our Earth than by getting a little earth on our hands!

All you have to do to enter this giveaway is leave a comment on this post. You don’t have to say anything in particular, but feel free to tell us about a new eco action you’ve been trying or something you’d like for us to talk about here on this blog. This giveaway is open until noon on Earth Day, after which, we will randomly draw two names and contact the winners.

To learn more about Earth Day and what you can do to help Planet Earth, visit the official Earth Day website.

Researchers found that, when surveyed decades ago, about a third of young baby boomers said it was important to become personally involved in programs to clean up the environment. In comparison, only about a quarter of young Generation X members — and 21 percent of Millennials — said the same.

Wow.  Depressing, right?  Especially for those of us who teach or parent children.  All of our canvas shopping bags, highway clean-ups, recycling and reducing don’t seem to be making much of a lasting impact when you read this news.

Enviro Girl had the pleasure of teaching 3rd graders twice in the past week.  On the first day the students got an introduction to renewable and nonrenewable resources via their Social Studies textbook.  This led to listing nonrenewable resources, which naturally led to oil which Enviro Girl naturally linked to plastic.  To demonstrate the cavalier attitude people have towards plastic (a non renewable resource, which means it cannot be replaced, once it’s gone, it’s GONE), Enviro Girl grabbed the classroom garbage can and began pulling things out of it.

Plastic wrappers.  Plastic bags.  Plastic pens.  A broken plastic trinket.  The students quickly saw via her visual demonstration in their own classroom garbage bin how much of our waste is plastic–a nonrenewable resource.  Never one to back down from  a golden opportunity, Enviro Girl asked the students what they think they could do to help solve this problem.  The students began listing ideas–reuse water bottles, reuse bags, recycle plastic containers and so forth.

It’s interesting to note that Enviro Girl’s son was one of the students in the class and he did not volunteer a single answer.  Eventually, Enviro Girl pressed him to give some ideas.  After all, his mom’s an Eco Warrior, right?  This should’ve been easy.

After much prodding, Enviro Girl realized that while her son knew they used canvas shopping bags, bought milk in reusable glass bottles, stored food in glass and metal containers, never bought individually wrapped snacks or plastic baggies, never bought bottled water or other beverages in plastic bottles, used metal water bottles and refused plastic trinkets, he never associated this with “being kind to the environment” or “reducing our use of plastic, a nonrenewable resource.”  In other words, Enviro Girl learned she was an Eco Warrior that her own family failed to recognize.

Why was that?  How does growing their own food, restoring native prairie, cleaning highway ditches and line-drying laundry not sink in?  Enviro Girl suspects it’s because she never really talks about it.  Sure, she does many environmentally friendly things, but she almost never mentions how her actions are deliberate choices.  She came to understand that while actions speak louder than words, she still has to SPEAK about what she’s doing and instill the reasons for her behavior into her children.  If she doesn’t, how can they understand that valuing the environment is a family value, a moral choice in their world?

Tomorrow Enviro Girl will continue this tale, but today she leaves you with these thoughts:  ARE you talking about your environmental values and choices to the next generations?  HOW are you discussing these things?  Or are you like Enviro Girl and taking for granted that they’re learning about it without your explicit instruction?

In honor of Earth Day 2012, the Eco Women are giving away an assortment of Southern Exposure Seed Exchange seeds to two winners. What better way to celebrate our Earth than by getting a little earth on our hands!

All you have to do to enter this giveaway is leave a comment on this post. You don’t have to say anything in particular, but feel free to tell us about a new eco action you’ve been trying or something you’d like for us to talk about here on this blog. This giveaway is open until noon on Earth Day, after which, we will randomly draw two names and contact the winners.

To learn more about Earth Day and what you can do to help Planet Earth, visit the official Earth Day website.