My Story: Cutting The Trash Cord

Over the last few years, we've taken "baby steps" in our quest to live a more natural life. The word "green" just sounds overly trendy to me, and most of you know how much I hate trendy. ;) I prefer "gothic hippie tree hugger" - but DH just rolls his eyes at me.

Let me back track a bit and mention that when we move, we ultimately hope to purchase a piece of land that's as far in the middle of nowhere as we can. We plan to build our home, and do it as environmentally friendly as we can - not just for environment, but more because A) recycled materials are cheap and B) see the phrase "gothic hippie tree hugger" up there. ;) We have two different houses that we've planned on, depending on how the land we purchase ends up working for us. One is basically a hobbit house, like this:


which anyone who knows me is laughing. I have to share this background on me - my first year of college, my two English classes were with the same professor. She was evil. EVIL. The first class I took, we had to match the entire Narnia series to the Bible. (This was long before the current movies) I spent nights on the phone with the Priest from my family's parish trying to figure it out - he couldn't even come up with it. The second class, she choose the Lord of the Rings series to torment us with. My task? To show Gollum/Smeagal's good characteristics and portray him as a good guy.

By the time the movies came out years later, I still refused to even look at them - even though I know half of you are thinking the movies are perfectly up my alley. I finally broke down about two years ago and watched them with my DH, because he ADORES them.

And yes, I still cringe every time I see Gollum. Anyways... where was I?

Oh, the houses! The second one is pretty similar, but built into the ground using concrete. We call it the cave. It's not a bunker - it's rounded like the Hobbit House.

Both would rely completely on solar and propane power, along with a whole host of other earth friendly - and pocketbook friendly ideas. Each of the baby steps we take, brings us closer to our ultimate goal of basically living off the land.

Back in October, I cut our trash and recycling pick up off. I felt that it was an unnecessary expense for our family. Three months worth of pick up cost us $55 - and half the time my DH would forget to put the trash out so it wasn't getting picked up anyways. I was tired of waking up, panicking over whether the can was outside or not, and it also became one less bill I had to pay. It was a win-win situation, let me tell you.

The closet trash drop off and recycling center was actually right on the way to one of the dog parks, so we didn't have to go out of our way to get rid of it. Recycling was free, and it was less than $4 per trash can's worth to dump. Unless we suddenly had double the amount of trash we usually had, we would be coming out ahead by disposing of our trash our self.

As the weeks progressed, I found we had less and less trash to throw away. The recycling center actually took more items than Waste Management picked up from our home - and we weren't charged for it like WM did! I found myself paying more attention to the items we were buying in the store, and checking out the packaging it came in. If I saw an item with those awful plastic bubbles, I tried to avoid it if I could. I didn't find myself spending any extra money to do so.

Suddenly, a single trash bag was lasting us almost two weeks! I was saving money by not having to buy as many trash bags, too! It took over a month for our trash container to be full, and that included pet waste. The worst offender are those awful Styrofoam meat trays. :( I try to buy from the butcher whenever possible because the outer paper can be recycled, (or burnt) but sometimes it's not always wallet friendly to do so - it can be twice as much as the pre-wrapped from other stores.

Now we compost food waste (excluding meat, of course), so I don't have to worry about trash cans smelling. For anyone else considering taking the no pick up plunge too, keep that in mind. As for the recycling, we simply dropped it off once a week on our trip to the dog park.

So what was costing us $55 now came to less than $12! And we are much more careful with our waste, too.