Hi mar,

I don't know how I missed this back in January - well, January was not good.

I cancelled all the magazine subscriptions - the library has magazines, and I get the newspaper online.

I bought dh a thermos for his lunch, and now I put juice in it every day. The juice still comes in plastic bottles, but not so many - less plastic to juice volume.

Recycling is better than trash, but not having anything to recycle is even better.

I don't carry reusable bags. I used to take paper bags back to the grocery store for reuse, but then I found out the food bank has to buy their paper bags and they cost about 7 cents each right now. So, I ask for paper and then take the bags to the food bank.

Most other places I just say "I don't need a bag, thanks." (I don't shop much and buy few items at a time) But the few plastic bags that I can't avoid get used in the trash cans. Every week or so, one had to be taken back to the grocery store and thrown away.

Last night we went out to dinner with dd and sil. We went to a restaurant that recycles and uses industrial composting that will handle compostable plastics. The only trash was the plastic lid from sil's paper cup of roasted edamame, and the little plastic clam shell from dd's salad.

Dd said the little plastic clam shells are really starting to bother her, and that she almost gave the salad back when she saw the packaging. I told her to give it to me and I will take it to the food bank in a few months so that the garden volunteers can fill it with herbs or berries for a customer. I have a small basket of them I have been collecting.

I have also started collecting the twist ties from the bread again because we did a project in school and I needed them and I ran out and had to use string - which is less good. I was going to fill an empty spice jar and stop, but now I am seeing how many are coming into my life, and it is hard to start throwing them in the trash again.

Hi!

Subclinical, I'm much like you. I hate to waste and I'd like to recycle everything!

At home, we prefer reusable bags and sometimes, when shopping, I refuse they give me plastic bags (we have many of them and I don't want to have more!)

Also, disposable dishes aren't "disposable" for me. I don't discard them, but I bring to home and reuse them several times. The problem is they accumulate and then I don't know what to do.

We also reuse plastic bottles, but they accumulate too :-(

I have a lot of old newspapers and magazines, but I want to read them before taking them to recycle. I know it is very difficult, or even impossible, but I feel bad to let them go without having read them before. To let go of information which could be interesting or useful! I dislike!

Yesterday I worked at the food bank. I took home ONE trash bag of old bread for my chickens. (The old bread is purged every week and given out to volunteers to feed livestock). My chickens will eat the bag of bread before I go back on Thursday.

I also took a loaf of fresh bread which I will eat this week. It used to bother me when the volunteers took the "best" breads. Now experience has taught me that most of those breads will be in a bag for livestock in a week. The clients mostly want sliced white bread. So, since we had 4 loaves of rye, I took one. Odds are at least two will go unwanted.

I brought home a bag of case wrap and two water bottles to recycle. The foodbank makes coffee with bottled water instead of their tap water. I don't know why. I used to drink the coffee, but then I realized this and stopped. Not drinking bottled water is one of my goals.

I also took a volunteer two boxes of non-recyclable plastic containers that he wanted to use for her farm stand.

Next week I will return the empty trash bag for reuse. I will also recycle the individual bags that the bread was in - I know I am the only person who does this, so I have to see them as a "rescue" and throw away the twist ties, which were already destined to be trash.

Today I am going to pick strawberries at a u-pick farm. I must remember not yo get carried away. I will need time to process the strawberries. Hoarding creates waste because it steals your time. Some of the tiny trees I bought to plant this year died because I did not make time to plant them. Some of the seeds I bought for my garden this year will go to waste for the same reason.

One of my biggest hoarding triggers is waste. I hate throwing things away.

I am very aware of living on a finite planet. The concept of pulling resources from the planet, using them briefly, and pouring them into a landfill for centuries makes me ill. Polluting our water and air to make more and more crap - Ug!

I don't think that fighting waste is a bad thing, I think it can just go too far. Also, a lot of my issues have been solved by fixing society instead of "fixing" me - when paper recycling became available in my area, I was overjoyed. I recycled reams and reams of paper that I had been saving because it was used but still useful (for scrap paper, for art projects, for....) I was able to let it go to become new paper or cardboard - saving all those trees! I recycled old magazines and catalogs, it was liberating!

I want to save everything, fix everything, find a way to put every unwanted item on the face of the planet into the hands of someone who wants it, or turn it into something else.

As a parent and teacher, I despised those "recycling" crafts that took materials that could actually be recycled and combined them with other things in ways that pretty much guaranteed that the whole thing would become trash. I would carefully dissasemble my children's projects when we were tired of them.

My attitude hasn't changed much, but my environment has. I have easy access to goodwill, drop off recycling for plastics, metal, paper, glass and cardboard, a big compost pile...

I am learning to deal with a lot of the waste at the front end - if I can't figure out what I will do with it when I'm done with it, I try to avoid getting it at all.

I started doing a lot of baking to avoid the plastic packaging on "desserts"

In March I cancelled our trash service. My husband is still skeptical, but we still buy potato chips and nuts that come in plastic ziploc quart bags. I have been putting all of the other trash in empty chip bags or empty ziplocs and throwing it away at work (with permission) or in the cans at the grocery store parking lot/gas pump (seems fair, the grocery store sold me most of the trash). It's a couple of bags (less than a gallon of garbage) a week.

I am also trying to learn that I don't have to take responsibility for all of the garbage generated on the entire planet. Or even all of the garbage generated by my husband and children. Just me.

I try to see diverting other people's waste as "carbon offsets"

For example - I have been volunteering at the food bank. The food bank generates a lot of case wrap. The case wrap can be recycled at a drop off I pass weekly. So now, I take the case wrap home at the end of the day (and drop it off weekly! That part is important!) and when I am faced with the need to use latex gloves I think "it's ok. I recycled that giant bag of case wrap that was going to be trash. I can use these gloves and throw them away."