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 few glass jars of olives or mustard with metal lids, 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 the month of August!

The biggest thing this month was my MacBook Air died. 🙁 I’ve had it for about 8 years and it would randomly crash or not turn on…so it was time for a replacement.

After taking my last trip and updating my emergency bag, I wanted a really large capacity USB, so I would have a backup of important photos and documents with us on long trips. I don’t necessarily think we will need the documents on our trip, it’s more if our house burns down while we’re away. I know this makes me sound like I have lots of anxiety about my house burning down, but it’s really seeing what easy things I can do to prevent myself from worrying.

I bought a 256 GB USB from SanDisk. I like it because the capacity was the same size as my external hard drive and it is password protected.

I’ve also been having some health issues including an ear ache which I now realize is swimmer’s ear and some hair loss. I’ll talk all about my hair loss experience in a future blog post, but here you see I started taking some collagen and have the seal from the tub. Most likely the plastic tub will not make it into a future trash audit because it’s a good size tub for my kids to play with in the front yard. They love to mix “potions” with water, leaves, compost scraps, and spices.

The other update is I’ve started buying milk again for the kids. They usually have milk at school but they’ve been wanting cereal and an occasional cup of milk with dinner. So, here it is again. I buy a half gallon glass bottle and I think it should last us two weeks.

Now let’s compare this month’s trash to August 2020:

August of 2020 is when I started to get to a really minimal amount of trash. Since then the only things I’ve changed were I switched to an olive oil that doesn’t have a plastic seal on the cap and I stopped buying premade sauces and salad dressings in glass bottles. They usually have plastic tops but they also contained various seed oils which aren’t the healthiest.

What do you think? Are you interested in doing a trash audit? Maybe for a day or a week? Tell me if you do in the comments!

For related and random posts, check out:

• All My Trash for 2020
• My Top 10 Favorite Swaps Since Going Plastic-Free