50 Acts of Green: Day Thirty Two - Trash Audit

One of the most intimate ways of determining how environmentally friendly you are being is to do a trash audit. A trash audit sounds pretty much like the name suggests. You gather up all your household trash from a specific frame of time, put on your cleaning gloves, sort through your trash and start categorizing it. Usually its helpful to do a trash audit with another person so that one person can be writing things down and another can be sorting through the trash. 

Once you have a sense of what is in your trash, you can start asking yourself questions and brainstorming more environmentally friendly ways of doing things. Are you throwing away recyclable items? Are you throwing away a lot of food items? Start with the largest categories of trash, you'll notice the biggest impact and it will feel like you're making a difference faster. If you are throwing away a lot of paper towels, switch to using dish towels or bamboo reusable towels. If you throw away a lot of food scraps, go back and read the posts about leftovers and composting! Q-tips or cotton swabs are trash because of the plastic stick, but there are companies that make the stick part out of paper and those can be composted! 

A trash audit is not something you should only do once, your trash changes on a weekly basis. Keep looking in those trash bins! Thankfully though, as you start cutting down on the amount of trash you have, it will be easier to see what is in your trash and it will become easier to brainstorm new trash cutting ideas. 

I will throw in the caveat that there will always be a few things you have no choice about. Medicine containers may be a source of trash (though many are recyclable!), but your health comes first. 

One small act of green, one positive impact on landfills!