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Sunday, January 6, 2008

Day 4 (A few days late)

We were out of town for two days with my parents who are visiting so this post and Day 5/6 posts are a little late. As I get into the groove on this little experiment, I think it's safe to say that Sunday nights I will be playing a bit of catch up. Having said that, the experience of heading out of town was an interesting one considering the parameters of what I am dealing with. We brought most of our own food as we were staying somewhere with a kitchen, but it was still interesting having to look ahead a few days at what my waste footprint would be.

So here was the haul for Day 4

  • 1 massive 50 lb bag of dog food which is made out of some plasticoated substance that fell from space eons ago. This goes into the headscratcher pile until i contact the company and find out more.
  • 2 plastic coated paper wrappers from the fishmonger which I tried to clean but didn't feel that i had done a good enough job, so these went into the trash. I was sort of bummed about that, but like I said, no public health hazards. I'm going to talk to the fish guys to see if I can bring a container from now on.
  • 1 cardboard food box - worms
  • 2 paper bags w/napkin - worms
  • 1 cellophane wrapper from condo soap - recycle but I have to check
  • 1 plastic sticker from wrapped soap - not sure about this one
  • 3 receipts - two saved for taxes one to the worms (in 7 years I'll feed the tax ones to the worms as well)
  • 1 waxy bakery style cookie handler - not sure what this is so it goes in the question pile for now
  • 1 plastic corn tortilla chips bag - recycle pile

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Some comments about your categories here:

1 cardboard food box - worms: Check on this. Is the food box shiny? If so, it's probably plastic-coated. Not sure it's good for the worms.

1 cellophane wrapper from condo soap - recycle but I have to check: I seriously doubt it's recyclable. Most plastic films are not recycled.

1 plastic corn tortilla chips bag - recycle pile: I'm doubting this one is recyclable either.

Please check into what types of plastic bags are ACTUALLY recycled in your community (vs. collected and tolerated.) Most likely, these are contaminants in the recycling stream.

Dave said...

Great tips Beth, thank you. As you know, the learning curve is HUGE. I fully plan on taking some of these things to the recycler when I go to ask what they do and don't recycle.
As for the box, it's surprisingly not coated (which is why I guess they use that waxy paper instead)