Kitchen and Grocery

Family Context:

My mom is the one who buys all the food in the house so this was surely going to impact her the most. My family is also your typical American family in terms of schedule. Both of my parents work full time and my sister and I are both dancers. Between the two of us we are at the studio every day for several hours at a time. This doesn't allow for much down time which means we need to be able to make meals and snacks quickly (ie. prepackaged).

My Plan:

Bea Johnson had many recommendations, but I chose the ones that best suited my family. This includes:

• Make your own foods as much as possible
• Declutter the items found in your kitchen
• Identify what can actually be recycled and what can't be
• Make a physical grocery list accessible to all family members
• Shop at bulk stores
• Compost
• Implement rotational staples

I also made a new log as a way to try and relieve some hassle of logging the waste. This log includes categories for items based on the items I saw recorded in the baseline week.

What actually happened:

Not all of my plan was accomplished but most of it was. The biggest problem that stopped completing all parts of the plan was time. As mentioned our busy schedules don't allow for time to do anything except what's already being done.

Composting:

• I think the most important (and exciting) change I made was choosing to compost. Learning that 40% of garbage in America is food was unbelievable to me, so I found a local company called Blue Earth, that for $30 a month would give you a four liter bucket lined with a eco friendly bag that you could put all food scraps and paper towels into. They then pick it up and replace it with a new one every week and three times a year you can choose to receive your composted soil or donate it. During our two week free trial my family produced 23 pounds of food waste. I opted to sign up for Blue Earth because starting my own compost pile would be difficult so late into fall and due to the animals in the area I live in I wouldn't be able to compost meat and bones.

Decluttering:

• Over the weekend I cleaned out the pantry, looking for expired food, and the cabinets, looking for items we don't use. We ended up donating an entire garbage bag full of items to Goodwill and throwing out a lot of expired food. (These items were not included in our weekly total)

Lists:

• I put a list on the fridge where my family could write down items they want. This allowed me to research the most waste free way of purchasing these items and helped my mom not to over buy foods that could end up going to waste. I also added lists of items that can and cannot be recycled and composted. This eliminated the guesswork when it came to disposing items.

Shopping:

• I was able to find a store in Avon called Garden of Light that sold bulk food items. The first time going in I brought containers and bought a few items since I wasn't sure what exactly would be there. After walking through the store I saw many staple items like pastas, flour, sugar, and snacks that my family would happily use. I tried to go once a week to buy a few items however my mom still prefered the cheaper, packaged items at ShopRite.
• My mom also refused to give up ShopRite From Home, once again due to time. She asked for them to use paper bags since they use an excessive amount of plastic bags, but they did not accommodate our request. I did convince her to recycle the plastic bags every time she goes back and to stop buying plastic water bottles.

Packaging:

• For lunch my mom packs us sandwitches that she used to put in a ziplock bag or in plastic wrap. I asked her to put them in a tupperware container to eliminate plastic. She also uses ziplock bags to pack snacks, so I also started to reuse the ziplock bag if I was going to pack the same snack the next day.

Disposables:

• I got my mom to stop using disposable plates and napkins on out lazy take-out nights. She also bought special cleaning rags to use instead of paper towels and the paper towels that we still used could go into the compost bucket!

Data Analysis:

Within the first week we were able to cut the number of garbage bags in half this week by only throwing out TWO bags! No habits were made, but just by being conscious about what you're throwing out makes a huge difference. Having to record everything I think is what made my family be careful about the things they used. For example we went from throwing out 38 individual food wrappers to 13 and plastic bottles dropped from 11 to 2. Overall I was very pleased with week 1.