The average American produces about 4.4 pounds (2 kg) of garbage a day. That’s 29 pounds (13 kg) per week or 1,600 pounds (726 kg) a year. And that’s only the waste we produce in our households — it doesn’t even include the much greater amount of waste produced by industries and businesses each day. That’s a lot of waste, which means there’s a lot of room for doing things better….
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Let’s Get Started!
Reducing waste is not rocket science. Getting started simply requires bringing back some of our parents and grandparents everyday household practices. Here are three first steps we suggest:…
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1. Ditch Disposables
We Americans use many items just once – from paper towels and food containers to coffee cups and cutlery — then throw them away. In the U.S., we use 60,000 plastic bags every 5 seconds and Americans buy half a billion plastic bottles of water a week, enough to circle the globe five times. Disposables like these have become synonymous with ease and convenience, but they often come with a big price tag, both for the environment and our wallets….
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2. Pay Attention to Packaging
All the packaging we bring into our homes is just future garbage. The more we can avoid extra packaging, the less waste we make. We have all seen those ridiculously over packaged items, like the single tomato on a Styrofoam tray wrapped in cling wrap or the small plastic gadget in a 6-inch clear plastic case….
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Join the Community
Those three steps alone won’t solve all our waste problems, but they are a good start. As you work towards reducing waste at home, you’ll soon see that some of the stuff in our waste stream can’t be easily repaired and reused, or was designed in a way that it can’t be recycled and composted.
The solution to this stuff lies beyond our grocery store and kitchen; we need real leaders in business and government who are committed to making sure that our products are designed to be healthy, safe and sustainable.
The members of the Story of Stuff Community work together to bring about these changes.
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