And that's a wrap!

Over this, the last week of our first year of attempting to eliminate plastic waste in our lives, we generated another 8 oz in recyclable and non-recyclable plastic trash... and discovered a cache of another 2 lbs, 5 oz of packing materials from construction and repair projects around the house. 

Everything, everything around here needs repair!  And everything, everything, seems to come swathed in plastic.  Sometimes, when we need to special order hardware for things around the house, we get just what we ordered, plus a whole lot of plastic packaging.  It can get a little discouraging...

However this does mean we have a final weigh-in of 2 lbs, 13 oz of plastic waste for this last week.  And our grand total for the year that began on June 1, 2010, and ends today, May 31, 2011, weighs in at 30 lbs., 15 oz.

This puts us somewhere between 12% and 18% of the national consumption of plastic, per person.

It has been quite a trip.  (More on that tomorrow, over at No Unsacred Place.)

Things do do better with next year:

• Advocacy work with individual local and national companies, to get them to stop sending me so much plastic.
• Buying more of what we need locally, in order to avoid extra waste from shipping (as well as to better support local businesses).
• Buying less new stuff, period, while cultivating more ways of reusing and repurposing old stuff.
• Continuing to reduce food waste, and to find ways to encourage sustainable and local agriculture--including our own garden, and perhaps preserving more of our own food.
• Making more things ourselves in order to reduce packaging and buy local foods--starting with making our own cheese!  (Yom!)
• Communicating how much fun it is to become more earth-friendly in how we're living.

Almost a Year...

Since April 20, we have generated another 3 pounds, 5 ounces of plastic waste.  This means we're still running at something around 15--17% or so of the national average,  using a conservative estimate.

Actually, some of that plastic--most of it--will be reused.  This month, we replaced windshield washer fluid, Peter had to drink a plastic-jug of noxious stuff prior to a medical test, and we used up a bottle of ammonia.  All those jugs are heavy!

But we have started a garden.  And it turns out that one good poor man's version of a seedling cover, in case of frost, is an HDPE jug with the bottom cut out, and the top put over the seedling to protect it from cold.

So these jugs are actually not yet in the waste--or the recycling--stream--as yet.

More on the garden, as well as some reflections on a year of reducing our plastic use, next time I log on.