Skipped Trash Day Again
It’s trash collection day today and as a family of five we are skipping it again. It’s not a recycling day (that’s the one we really can’t miss!), it’s wintertime…and the trash can sits empty. Sometimes when things are normalized as routine, they do not seem extraordinary enough to talk about, but recent conversations during farm workshops prompted me to share this blog post in hopes that these ideas can be helpful.
A mindset of practicing sustainability goes well beyond garden spaces for our home-based farming business. Reducing waste, creatively reusing what we have, and recycling are regular occurrences in our home:
Looking at things through a filter: use it, reuse it, and then reuse it again. Let’s look at this product’s lifecycle for an example. Product labels are needed for running our business. Labels are printed and peeled off for product packaging, and empty label sheets are used for printing shipping labels, coloring pages for our kids, signage for our market table set-ups, writing to-do lists, writing notes to customers or family members, etc. After they are all used up, they go in the recycle bin and are shipped off to create new products. There is value in that ‘waste.’
Make it convenient. A regular sighting in our kitchen and workroom is a box of recyclables. We set ourselves up to make this choice convenient, and then routine. If you don’t have access to residential recycling, you might be able to coordinate giving your recyclables a second life: map out convenient drop-off sites, donate recyclables to a teacher/art instructor for students to use, offer them up on your local Buy Nothing or Zero Waste Facebook group. There is likely a community near that will find value in your ‘waste.’ A recent visit to a local recycling factory was both mind-blowing and awe-inspiring. At this particular factory, they showed us the plastic lumber that they make from all of the tidbits that are recycled in orange bags.
“Mom, where is the chicken bucket?” We are fortunate to have space to keep chickens and build compost piles each year. We have very little food waste and have built a routine of setting aside food scraps for our animals. This reduced waste mindset can be applied in any home kitchen: set a goal of making ‘just enough’, eat up or recreate with leftovers, make soup stock with veggie peels, preserve what you won’t eat and enjoy it later, donate excess and share with others. For composting: learn to keep your own home garden compost pile, use a composting barrel/dome, take food waste to a local food hub that composts, join a compost club, or become a member at a community garden that composts.
Reflect and hold yourself accountable one step at a time. One of our new goals for this year? Learning to make castile soap which is what we use for our refillable foaming soap dispensers. It’s something we buy now, but we know we can do it ourselves and are ready to make the switch.
In the garden: many tools were purchased second-hand and the same equipment is reused year after year. Michelle doesn’t mow until she feels she ‘has to.’ We have successfully planted out about 1 acre of our 1.5 acre property. Roughly 3/4 of our growing space is filled with perennials that are not irrigated after the initial watering in, and there is no use of pesticides/herbicides in any form.
In the product workshop: packaging is reusable, recyclable, and/or made of recycled materials; some products are even offered as zero waste. Food waste after canning is fed to the chickens. Dried herb stems from processing herbs and flowers are broken down and incorporated into that year’s dried potpourri batches and mini dried flower bouquets (photo below). To ship orders, we use 100% repurposed packing supplies that arrive to us with orders of mason jars, spice jars, etc.
