My Family is on a "Trash Diet"

Yep, you read correctly, a "Trash Diet", although not the kind of trash you would think. We are not going to be eating more junk food as a family but seeing how we can reduce the amount of waste that comes out of our home and into the landfill.

The city of Seattle has made a goal to divert 60 percent of its waste to recycling and composting by the year 2012; so we as a family have signed up to be part of the "Waste Less" blogger challenge and have partnered up with King County and GLAD products to learn more about where our trash goes and do our best to send less to the landfill and more to the recycling and yard waste/compost services!

The Glad Products company sent our family a great new garbage can that is motion sensored and divided so we can separate our trash vs. recycling more easily as well as a new compost/food scraps bin and a TON of various Glad products including trash bags, recycling bags and compostable bags to make our transition and goals much easier!

Check out our old garbage system below:

Just a can and a box or paper bag next to the can for our recyclables.

Now check out our new system!

I am so excited to start collecting our kitchen scraps into our little compost collector! This is always something I wanted to try out and now with our new bin it will be easy and not too stinky!

This program couldn't be coming at a better time actually. Where we live has just been incorporated into the City of Kirkland and our garbage service is changing over to Waste Management. We are very excited about this because not only is it substantially cheaper than our previous provider, they also will be collecting our yard waste and recycling on a weekly basis vs. a bi-weekly basis!

We also had a home visit from Tom Watson, who is a representative of the City of Seattle, the writer for the Eco-Consumer column for the Seattle Times and a green living expert on local TV stations!

Tom's visit was great. He took a look at our trash collecting set up and we talked for about 45 minutes on ways that we can reduce our waste as a family including: collecting our food/kitchen scraps for composting, what can and cannot be recycled, where our recycling and yard waste goes when it leaves our cans, where we can recycle our batteries and ways we can save money as a family by living green.

As I said before, I am excited to start collecting our kitchen and food waste for composting. Since I'm due with our 2nd baby any day now I am not ready to start my own compost pile just yet, but with our garbage service all we have to do is collect the scraps and put them in our yard waste bin, bag and all thanks to the compostable bags Glad provided me with! I was excited to learn that our yard waste actually goes to a company in Everett that does the composting for us!

Something I didn't know before was that we can actually put more than just fruit peels and egg shells into our collector. We can put meat scraps, bones, paper towels, napkins, paper plates and even compostable take out boxes into our yard waste.

I also learned that I can put my Starbucks paper and plastic cups into the recycling and that I can now take clean & dry Ziploc bags & any other plastic bags to my grocery bag recycling station at the grocery store.

Stay tuned over the next month as I post about how our families "diet" is going. The first time I emptied our new can our bags of trash and recycling were about equal size.

Over the next month I want to see if we can make the bag of trash about 1/2 the size as the recycling! I am also going to be doing some posts about how you can actually save money by living the green life!

Disclosure: The Glad Products Company has provided me with the products you have seen above and the home visit from the City of Seattle to help with this program. I was not compensated in any other way and all opinions posted here are 100% my own.