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All My Trash for 2021

I’ve been saving my trash in a “plastic audit” since October of 2019. I live a generally plastic-free lifestyle but I’m not 100% plastic-free…yet. So, to see where the last 1% of my trash was coming from, I started keeping track of all of it. At the end of each month, I look to see where I can improve.

A few reminders of the rules. This is just my trash not my whole family’s (although they don’t generate too much more than this). My husband is not as stringent on plastic as I am, so he buys a weekly tub of yogurt and occasionally some bacon. But again, my husband and kids don’t generate too much more trash than me.

Finally, the city I live in provides compost and recycling along with trash pick-up. Now, given the state of recycling, I only recycle metal, glass, and paper. This generally includes a few cans of tuna and clams a month, a glass mayo jar with metal lids, a glass bottle of olive oil, glass wine bottles, and junk mail. But even so, I try to reduce the amount of metal, glass, and paper we use.

So, now that we’ve covered the ground rules, let’s dive in! Here’s all my trash for 2021!

Here it is without the labels:

Overall, I’m happy with the amount of trash I generated. It was less than my trash from 2020, which is all I can ask for! Digging deeper into some of the different types of trash, we see that food packaging and online orders are the majority of my trash.

From butcher paper and plastic bags to chips, cheese, snacks, Panko breadcrumbs, and disposable items given to me while at a sit-down restaurant, most of the left side of the image above is related to food.

Most butcher paper is lined with plastic so I add it to my pile. I do however omit the plastic bag and count it in, since holding onto a plastic bag that held raw chicken seems really gross.

Over the course of the year, I did reduce our meat consumption. I used to cook with both ground beef and chicken during the week but now I just cook with chicken. I used to be able to bring my container to the butcher to get meat but since COVID I haven’t been allowed to do this.

So, instead, of buying the small amount that I need each week, I buy whatever I need for the month and freeze it. Here’s a post on how I freeze food without plastic:

Olivia for the Ocean - Plastic-Free Living

I went a little crazy with the chips this year. Chips are my weakness and they’re really hard to find not packaged in plastic. Before COVID, my office would cater from a place that would make their own chips. It was glorious! I would always scoop up the leftovers and take them home. Since I worked at home for most of 2021, I had to get my chip fix the regular way.

When buying things you know come in plastic, choose the largest bag you can finish in a reasonable time. You’ll reduce your waste in terms of plastic. But if you don’t finish the food in time, then you’re wasting food which isn’t good either. As you can see below, I went for the Costco-sized bag of chips, but then realized the cheese flavor was far superior. You can’t win them all but where you can, try to go for the larger size.

Panko Breadcrumbs are something I still can’t find in bulk or without plastic. I know I can make regular breadcrumbs but they’re not quite as good as Panko. So, like the Costco chips, I order the largest bag I can find online which is a 2-pound bag on Amazon.

Up until recently, the bulk bins were also closed, so I had to buy dried staples like rice and beans in plastic bags as well.

Having kids can be tough on your sugar intake. They are ALWAYS getting candy at school and of course, they’re going to pay a Mom Tax. 😛 I have a soft spot for Twix and while I never buy them, I’ll definitely snag some from my kids during Halloween!

I also have been doing a better job making sure that I have some chocolate in my cube at work. A few of the snack bags have been because I was at work and had a hankering for something sweet and the vending machine was my only option.

In general, I get mini chocolate peanut butter cups from the bulk section and will have one or two of those after lunch and dinner.

I’ve been trying to perfect a toffee recipe to add to the mix. So, next year, I should be able to cut down on my snack consumption too. Also, I’m hoping the rest of the bulk bins at Whole Foods will open back up, since they’re the only place I’ve seen fruit snacks in bulk. For my kids, of course. 😉

Cheese is another area that’s a struggle for me. I can get most of my cheeses from the deli, where they have actual paper instead of butcher paper. But they will also hand me the cheese so I can put it in my Stashers bag. But they only have a few cheeses I use like cheddar for mac and cheese or sliced havarti for sandwiches.

They don’t have parmesan or a harder Italian white cheese that would go well on pasta. So, I buy the large cheese wedges at Costco which lasts us a few months. Also, I don’t make pizza too often anymore, but when I do, like when my daughter requested for her birthday, I use the mozzarella from Trader Joe’s. It’s the best mozzarella for pizza so I didn’t want to skimp. I probably could have skipped the ricotta since we didn’t use a lot of it and it was way more plastic than the mozzarella.

Also, I used to buy a lot of snacking artisan cheeses that I would eat with my wine at the end of the day and that would come in some plastic wrap from Whole Foods. I’ll have to explore and see if I can find a local cheese shop that will hand me the cheese directly like at my local deli.

Rounding out the food purchased for home, we have an assortment of caps and seals. I buy a lot of things in glass bottles like milk, mayo, ranch dressing, hot sauce, olive oil, and on and on but oftentimes the caps are still plastic or there’s a plastic seal. For a while, I was able to get many of my liquid staples through an online zero waste shop but they went out of business during COVID.

Now, moving onto restaurant dining, I normally sit-down at restaurants to avoid the plastic packaging of to-go containers, but for the last few months of 2021, there were several times where I would sit down and get a mix of reusables and disposable items. The most common one being condiments like salsa or sour cream. This makes me think that there’s some sort of food health code in California that requires any sort of shared condiment to be individually packaged.

Moving away from food, the largest pile comes from online orders. I just never know what I’m going to get. Whether it’s a cardboard box with paper stuffing or a bubble mailer or mailer bag with clothes individually wrapped in plastic. It’s frustrating especially since most of the things I order can’t be found in the store. The best I can do is order less online.

Office-wise, I got a new computer at home and at work and I also got a tripod to film Reels. And since I always get my cords caught in the T-handles of my kitchen drawers, my husband bought me some Air Pods for Christmas!

Finally, in terms of health and beauty, there was a lot going on this year. As I talk about in this post, I lost 30 – 40% of my hair earlier this year, so I tried what seemed like everything under the sun to help my hair grow back. (It’s grown back now and I’m fine!)

Contacts are an area of my life that’s been hard to get around. Since the pandemic and working most of 2021 from home, I have been wearing my glasses more instead of contacts but I still can’t find contact solution that’s not in plastic.

I also took the COVID vaccine and booster shots and ended up taking a COVID test at home since I was feeling really sick. And since I swam a bunch over the summer, I ended up getting Swimmer’s ear and needed some medication to clear that up.

Overall, here are a few things I’ll be trying to reduce or eliminate in 2022:

Meat
Chips
Packaged Candy
Online Orders

To do this, I’m going to take another look at our meal plans, to see where I can cut down on meat. For many reasons, I’ll probably stop my “after the kids go back to bed and I get to watch TV snack” which oftentimes includes wine, cheese, and chips. I keep the wine and just skip the chips and cheese. 😛 And for candy, I’ll stick to the mini peanut butter cups and perfect my toffee recipe. And finally, I’ll review my online orders for the year and see where I can batch them into fewer shipments or try to find the items locally or just go without. Sound like a plan? You know how I love a good plan!