Couple lives without a rubish bin (video)

Just thought I would post this video

How impressive. Some years ago, when Mr Ara and I were first married (well, quite a few years then), I used to be horrified at how much waste we produced every week. There was no kerbside recycling then so everything we couldn't re-use or compost went in the one bin. One morning I was cycling to work before the bins had been emptied and was even more horrified at how many households, many with only 2 occupants like ours, had bins that were overflowing so much that the lids were coming off. Since then, it seems that everything has more packaging and instead of producing less waste, we still throw out the same as we did all those years ago despite environmental knowledge being more mainstream nowadays. Note to self: must try harder.

I definitely can agree with the thoughts found here. After first getting 'established' with my home, I was shocked with the amount of waste that I was sending to the dump.

The compost pile soon followed as well as choosing to reduce single-use items. I try to periodically identify what is our highest waste items and try and see how to improve it.

Anything remotely biodegradable goes into the pit in the garden, eventually gets buried and planted on top. Wood, books and paper, kitchen waste, leaves. Whatever. My wife refuses to recycle my hair, and used nasal tissues, but pretty much all else.

Metal and plastic goes to the local central recycling bin. No curbside recycling in this town. The little stuff that doesn't quite fit those categories goes into a plastic grocery bag and once every 1 or 2 weeks gets left at a relative's house to go into their curbside waste. One, occasionally 2 small grocery bags worth, mostly non-recyclable or dirty plastic. We have no rubbish bin for curbside.

Yep, I live up on a mountain. 2.5 miles from a county Rd. We don't have trash much less recyclables collected. I have to take the trash to a transfer station then from there it goes to a dump. Recyclables I have to taken even further to a recycling center and they don't do glass because the nearest glass recycle is too far away to make it profitable.

Anything I bring up to my place either becomes part of my place, or I have to bring it back down.

Needless to say I compost and burn a lot, but I still have plenty of plastics and stuff I don't want becoming part of my land that I take back down. Especially while building a new house.

Thank you for posting this, Devin!

Many years ago, while I was between jobs, I took a class that was put out by our city, that gave us the title “master recycler”, coined, I guess, after the Master gardener one.

We learned that the city (of Portland, Or) had, and still has, this “hotline” where people can call with their questions about recycling. The lady that was answering the phone at that time was known to have a garbage waste the amount of a small grocery bag every three months. And she and her husband lived in the city! Very inspiring!

For a number of years when I still had an office job in town, every time I didn’t bring my lunch from home and had to get it at a store nearby my office, my way of choosing what to eat was based on the packaging it came in. The less and more compostable was always the choice, even if I felt like eating something else.

There is so much to say about all the garbage we all generate every day without even thinking about it.

In 24 years I have not had garbage pick up. I also found a dump site on my property that I have been slowly removing.  Paper gets burned.  Of course, there is composting. Metal cans get stomped on and bagged….eventually they go to recycling. Plastic is purchased as little as possible….what remains is recycled.   Glass packaging is carefully selected on the basis of what can be reused.   I probably throw away one bag of waste a month.

I know I have gotten the attention of one of my neighbors who asked me what I did with my garbage.  Giving him credit, he doesn’t have garbage pick up either.

For bragging rights, I started our town’s recycling center.  I stopped being actively involved with it in 2014.  It is still going strong.

[Disclaimer: I know Liam and Hannah, and the Happen Films crew, so I'm not trying to throw any shade on this project, but rather give a bit of perspective. My wife and I were just having this conversation last night because she had recently watched the video again.]

There is a structural bias against doing the "best possible" thing for the environment for many people, and the farther you go down the scales of socioeconomic advantage, personal agency, and indeed Maslow's hierarchy, the harder it is to live an idealised life. In Hannah and Liam's example, they are smart, well-educated, passionate, and well-connected people with access to social networks, land for growing food, and the willingness to pursue a goal despite the barriers imposed by our consumerist throwaway culture.

So yes, what they did is possible, but there are conditions that make it so. A single parent juggling a low-wage job, raising kids, living in an urban situation with no access to a garden plot, and (more than anything) stressed and time poor, would truly struggle to do a lot of this. The last thing I want to do is make anyone in tough circumstances feel bad because uncompostable waste lands in their bin. Add in any sort of disability, or additional caregiving (how often is the dependent parent part of the equation in families nowadays?) and you see how a zero rubbish lifestyle really does not make it onto the priority stack. And that's not the worst thing, because people in this part of our society are not the source of the problem.

What needs to happen is for the high-powered consumers, and more importantly the manufacturers of products that most of us consume, to radically shift into a mode of using, making, and doing less. Structural change is how we move the needle. Around the same time this video was being made, a bill was going through the NZ parliament to pretty much ban all single-use plastic packaging. Since it has taken effect, we now take cloth bags to the shops (and if we forget, they have paper bags for us) and there are all sorts of examples of source reduction in daily life here. It wasn't the end of the world. No one ever really needed a plastic bag for their onions.

Phil Stevens wrote:There is a structural bias against doing the "best possible" thing for the environment for many people, and the farther you go down the scales of socioeconomic advantage, personal agency, and indeed Maslow's hierarchy, the harder it is to live an idealised life.

They did mention in the video that not everyone had the same ability to reduce like them. Even they still had trash, mostly medical stuff.

I do think that is important, like Phil mentions not everyone has the same ability. There is no shame in not being able to reduce to next to nothing, especially if you're struggling to make enough $ to just get the things you need to survive.

I do think that it's import to think about, and do what you can. Ever little bit helps.