Being “zero waste” means that we adopt steps towards reducing personal waste and minimizing our environmental impact.
Our community places a major focus on the 5 R’s: refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle, and rot. We practice this by reducing consumption, choosing reusable goods, recycling, composting, and helping each other improve.
We also recognize excess CO₂, other GHG emissions, and general resource usage as waste.
We haven’t used bin liners in years, it was really a pretty easy thing to stop. We try not to put liquids in, and in general don’t have any issue with smell. But the bins are plastic, if they smell we just wash them.
What do you do with it once it gets full?
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That’s convenient. I could probably get away with that in an apartment but if I got caught I’d be in trouble. All trash needs to be in bags in my city.
Yeah no, my can is way too heavy for that.
And no I’m not going to replace it and create more waste.
My solution doesn’t appear to apply to you, since you’re practically plastic free, but for others reading, i use my milk cartons and bread bags (where the sandwich bread is packaged) as plastic bags. I clean out the milk cartons with water and let them air dry. They don’t smell, and I’m not using additional plastic for trash.
Where I live they discourage that. They also don’t want you to use paper bags. The reasons as far as I remember are that more waste will fly away when emptying the dumpster and nastier dumpsters causing worse working conditions for the person driving the truck. The third reason (doesn’t apply to me personally) is sorting based on bag color.
Where I live they also don’t encourage loose garbage or even garbage in loosely tied or untied bags. The reason here is that uncontained garbage subjected to a brisk wind, which we have plenty of, becomes litter. And no one wants to award themselves a ZeroWaste badge when they are directly contributing to landscape litter.
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They make these corn based compostable trash bags that might be another alternative worth considering.