Do you have a lot of garbage to throw out every week?

Even with kids, that’s hard for me to imagine. I take a 30-gallon bag with a knot pretty far down from the top of it to the dump about once every four or five weeks. Granted I live alone, but when there were two of us it wasn’t much different.
Do you separate your recyclables, etc?
What the heck is in those bags?!?

I have very little because I recycle a lot. When I throw my little bag into the huge trash can that my garbage service provides me I feel like I’ve throw it into the Grand Canyon, there’s a echo.

We have a family of four. We have about 8 gallons of landfill waste 1½ to 2 weeks. We recycle and reuse, otherwise, this amount would be considerably higher. I wish we had a way to compost because then our waste would be even less. I feel like our family could be doing better.

@susanc stuff from all over the house like boxes and old toys and shoe boxes and some grease containers. i know, thats not good. just bulky stuff. bulk item cartons or cardboard, bottles, containers, just just stuff…

i keep telling my wife stop buying stuff in bulk.

@liminal i agree. we could do better too. we have two garbage containers that we set out on street. in the winter time the village allows us to use both for just garbage. but in the warm months, we are supposed to use one for garbage and the other for grass and clippings. they may or may not pick up that grass clippings can if regular garbage is in it.

the size of my family needs both just for garbage. i mulch when i mow my lawn and have no grass clippings so i use that garbage can for garbage. that can just may not get dumped.

We have a family of 4 – we have 4 containers (plastics, paper, garbage, compost) and our garbage gets picked up twice a week (Tuesdays – only garbage, Fridays – everything) and that which we compost, we use as fertilizer. Each pick-up day, we have full bags, yes but I’ve never thought ‘wow, we have a lot of garbage’ – I do think we have a lot of paper/carton that we throw out because we shop online a lot, lol.

No, we have very little trash compared to our neighbors. Even when we had seven people living here, we only filled one 40 gallon can per week, plus one 40 gallon recycle every other week.

@Simone_De_Beauvoir The paper and corrugated cardboard is pretty easily recyclable. Doesn’t the city require you to recycle it or is that just bottles and cans?

I flatten and recycle every possible thing they’ll accept. I did that prior to curbside recycling, but now that its curbside, it’s very easy. But because of that, and because of throwing all wasted food in the backyard in a pile, there’s no meat in there and it easily composts, instead of in the trash, our household uses up only about ½ a bin of garbage a week for 4 people.

Plus, no one here shops for anything except food and supplies, usually, which results in no packaging-trash, except from frozen food.

@lillycoyote no, just keep garbage separate from grass. i have more garbage than i do grass because i mulch. recycling is known here, but we dont have too many options to get rid of it the right way.

@charliecompany34 My trash service now provides single stream recycling now which is great because we used to have to separate all the recycling and take it to the states recycling stations ourselves. Garbage pick up is once a week, on Fridays and recycle pick-up is on Tuesdays and alternates weeks: one week it is regular recycle and the other week it is yard waste and I usually either don’t have any or very little. The state banned yard waste from the landfills about two years ago. But there are still things, recycle, that my trash service won’t take and I have to do that seperately.

@lillycoyote yeah, we do recycle it

It’s embarrassing how much trash my little family makes. I don’t know what it is. I’ve been trying to watch it and see what the heck we’re wasting..but we do a lot of recycling (cardboard, plastic water bottles, milk jugs), but recycling a lot is good, right? Ugh. I don’t know why we make so much trash though. We don’t have a garbage disposal where we are, so it gets smelly quickly, and I have two kids in diapers so that has to be taken out more than once a day (seriously, my kids are poopers..it’s gross)
Hopefully we can get it to a minimum.

Seems like it. We are three adults and while little food scraps go into the garbage, plenty of packaging does. We can go two weeks before putting out the regular bin but the recycle one is full every week.

Once we started to run a compost we hardly have any garbage and we are a family of 6. We don’t buy much besides food and most of that food are things that I have to make vs. being pre-made. Most weeks we have one and a half bags of garbage (24×27 inch bags).

I have figure I have less than half the trash my neighbor does, and I only recycle intermittently (I hate to admit). Many times my trash can is half full when I bring it to the curb (maybe about 2.5 tall trash bags worth) and they have a trash can and a half out there. In my home there is only the two of us. My neighbors are just husband and wife also, but they do have a cat and a dog. My guess is they have much much more plastic than I do. We very rarely drink from 12 ounce cans or 16 ounce bottles, I know they do. Not sure why else they have so much trash? She is very neat, maybe if I was so good at gettig rid of my junk mail and papers I don’t need I would have more trash too.

I vote that people with infants shouldn’t be required to even think about cutting down on garbage.

Removed by Answerer

Here in the UK our bins only get collected once every two weeks with a recycle collection inbetween. There are only 3 of us in the house but still we only fill 1 bin bag, maybe 1 and ½ every 2 weeks… we recycle everything and up until about a month a go composted food scraps (we got rats from a building demolition!)

Before the recycling scheme our rubbish bin used to over flow as we drink over 20 pints of milk a week (we get the big plastic containers) so most of rubbish bin used to be filled with these, now it’s our recycling bin that overflows!

We have a few couples on our estate and their bins overflow with rubbish, I don’t know how they manage it, I blame supermarket packaging and not enough home cooking!

Curbside recycling isn’t an option here. I only know of one place where you can drop things off to be recycled, and it’s a small dumpster at the police station. My husband and I try to turn in cans, but other than that it’s actually quite difficult to recycle where we live. I’d say we have the same amount of trash as our neighbors, occasionally more, occasionally less. All in all, I feel like we should be doing a lot more to reduce that.

@sakura Once every two weeks, wow. I would venture to say in the lower third of the US that would be very unrealistic because it is so hot out. I can’t imagine my trash sitting for 2 weeks in the 100 degree weather. I agree with you that packaging is partly to blame, and in the US I think it is worse than the UK. We have a lot of individually packed items which I find to be an awful waste.

@susanc I would have the same vote. They get a pass.

I’m always eating at the cafeteria or ordering take out, so all I really throw out are pizza boces and coffee grinds, that’s when I’m at home and not eating in between bus rides. We have a recycling box in the hall of the building, and I put a lot of things in there instead of throwing stuff out, I also take the time to clean things like cans so it doesn’t reek in the hall, therefore my garbage doesn’t pile up very fast.
And of course, all my beer bottles and pop cans get returned, so those don’t get thrown out either.