My October Zero Waste Challenge Continues - Week the Second
Monday October 9
Monday was Canadian Thanksgiving, and my family celebrated by spending most of the day apple picking at a local farm. It's a really great establishment with a lot of fun activities for families, but I'm not going to name it because I'm actually in the process of climbing on my horse to complain.
Okay, I'm mounted. Here we go:
- Active farm, growing crops: ✔️
- Petting zoo full of animals, including goats who are known to eat everything: ✔️
- Acres and acres (and acres) of space: ✔️
- Very large outdoor restaurant selling lots of reasonably healthy food that's prepared onsite: ✔️
- Use of compostable paper plates: ✔️
Given all those checkmarks, why in the HAY don't they have a compost bin for customers?? Surely a farmer would recognize the many many benefits of composting? I'll assume they have compost somewhere on that farm, given the manure of their petting zoo, the fallen apples everywhere, cores from their cidery and husks from their roasted corn cobs...but why not include a few bins for customers' food waste, too?
And (deep cleansing breathe) there was nary a recycling bin in site. The plastic forks that were given to us for our meals came home with me and were recycled.
Garbage Generated Today:
- Another tea bag (last one!)
- Wrist band from the apple picking farm
- Paper plates and napkins from same apple farm*
- Receipts from purchasing food from the aforementioned farm*
*I've just added an amendment to my Challenge Rules. I will continue to track this type of waste in my challenge, but I won't be bringing home waste like this for my mason jar.
Tuesday October 10
Today I bought fabric napkins for my family (win) and then ripped all the tags off, which are ironically not recyclable (lose). So into the jar they go!
Yeah, I know I could have made my own fabric napkins out of old tshirts and the like, but I live near a housewares outlet store and they were $0.60 each and the colours matched my kitchen.
I also shipped a few more orders out today, so more sticker backer paper 😣
Garbage Generated Today:
- 6 x labels with price tags on them
- 8 sticker labels
Wednesday - Friday October 13th
A few more days passed without much additional garbage. I did finish a pack of Fisherman's Friend that's leftover from last year, so unfortunately that little package ended up in my jar. A couple more product stickers and a bakery bag that came with a plastic film window (which I removed before putting the paper bag in the recycling).
Garbage Generated Today:
- 6 (?) product labels
- Plastic resealable Fisherman's Friend package
- Plastic wrapper from cheese
- Milk bag corner and broken plastic clip
Final Thoughts from This Week
My jar looks pretty full at this point but I know there's still quite a bit of room in there if I compact it.
I am also reflecting on how much garbage I've been able to reduce simply because I work from home and we don't habitually eat out. For those who travel to and from work everyday, the opportunities to create trash are significantly higher than what I encounter in my day to day, and would be more difficult to avoid.
