Ten Things You Can Do to Limit Your Weekly Trash

1. Utilize Your Junk Mail
Utilize Your Junk Mail So a Lot of It Doesn’t End Up in the Trash goes into detail of what you can do to utilize your junk mail. Keep in mind a lot of it that you are throwing away can be utilized for something.

2. Start Composting
A large portion of trash is actual organic decomposable items, such as scraps from your food, it ends up in the trash when they should be ending up in the earth. If you don’t want to compost blend up your food scraps, add water to the mixture, and pour it down the drain, as if you had a garbage disposal.

3. Use Plastic You Are Already Throwing Away to House Your Trash
If you have an empty bag from cereal that you have eaten you can add trash to the cereal bag rather than to another bag because you were already going to be adding the cereal bag into the trash. If you have to throw away something that needs to be wrapped up, like chewed bubble gum, you can use plastic, like what comes off of a yogurt container, that is going to be thrown away anyway. While a lot of the time you will need to use a traditional trash bag to house your garbage there are large bags that will work just as well. Bags that are wrapped around small appliances like toaster ovens and televisions can be used as large trash bags. An empty large bag of cat or dog food can work as well to house your trash.

4. Embrace Cloth Items
Use cloth napkins to replace paper ones, use handkerchiefs to replace Kleenex, if you have a baby use cloth diapers to replace disposable diapers. The more cloth your use the less paper you will throw away in the trash.

5. Limit Disposable Items
Now things like paper plates and plastic silverware can come in handy if you are moving or have a huge crowd to feed, but if you can limit the amount of items that you use that are disposable, you will have less trash at the end of the day.

6. Keep Track of the Food That You Have In Your Home
No one wants to waste food, however certain food items can go unnoticed and then spoil. Sometimes it can help to sort your food so it is easily seen or keep a list on your fridge or in the kitchen of items that you have that will spoil within a week. Unless you are composting spoiled food will end up in the trash.

7. Don’t Use a Bag if You Don’t Have To
Unless an item that you are throwing in the trash is moist there is no reason that it has to go into a bag. Rather than filling all of the wastebaskets around your house with bags just toss the dry trash into the wastebasket and then when it becomes full transfer it to a larger bag of trash.

8. Limit the Plastic You Use
In general, limiting the amount of plastic that you use will cut the amount of trash that you have significantly. Instead of using plastic wrap use reusable Tupperware or Corningware with lids.

9. Recycle
Newspapers, cardboard, glass and aluminum are all items that you can recycle. Be sure to rinse out your aluminum cans and glass bottles so while you are waiting to take them to a recycling facility they won’t attract bugs.

10. Reuse
Before you throw something away make sure you can’t use it. Yogurt containers, empty jars, even some little boxes can be used after they are no longer holding food.

The less trash there is in this world, the better.