Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Many people know the Three Rs of waste management: Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. These are great foundations for responsible solutions to our ever increasing consumption habits. Many people also know that these fall into an order of preference, or hierarchy:

Reduce
Reuse
Recycle

To reduce our waste intake is clearly the best of the three, since it results in less waste being introduced into the system in the first place. Reusing is the next best, in that stuff has already been introduced to the world and now has continued use. Recycling is also good, but not as good as the other two, because in a way, it's waste, though in a way, it's also reusing, since we reuse the recycled material.

This project is, for us, all about reduction, and in a big way, specifically, of course, with regards to plastic. We are trying to eliminate it completely, in fact, but as you know, we are making the odd exception (where we cannot avoid buying plastic without harming our health) and we make the odd mistake as well (peek in our box of shame for examples).

For me, this project is about massive reduction in non-biodegradable substances (particularly plastic). The containers we buy during this project have so far included glass, metal, and paper. Paper, in particular, is something we are buying more of than we used to, but our volume of paper consumption is still far less than our plastic consumption used to be. Paper is biodegradable, and so we are not as fussed about consuming this as we are about plastic consumption, although we still understand that using paper means using trees. Trees are replenishable, after all, but we would still like to moderate how many we are responsible for killing. The paper bags that we use for buying bulk foods are often reusable as well. We buy the food in these bags and then take it home and transfer it to our reusable plastic containers, and then shake the bags out in case there are food particles in them. We write on the bags what was in them before, with the intent of reusing these bags for the same products again.

-Sheri