How much garbage do you generate?

I’m curious how much garbage people here generate in an average week. For our family of four, we generally have one black bag or less. A couple bins of recycling and about 3/4 of a green bin of organics.

I’m always amazed on garbage day looking around at our neighbours…a young couple across the street (only the two of them) usually have 2 full bags and next to no recycling. Our direct neighbour however, is an indian family, and there must be 6 or so adults living there, and they throw out next to nothing…half a bag of garbage and one blue bin of recycling…I don’t know how they do it!

It’s amazing sometimes what people throw out.

There’s a house of more than 6 people, we live in the basement, and the three of us put out 2 cans every 2 weeks.

Now, our city has decided that one can is the limit and each home owner needs to buy one($400 per year).

It really sucks.

I recycle as much as possible so my garbage ends up being mostly from the cat’s litter tray! I do get really annoyed when I see how much people send to landfill without even thinking about it. I believe in some countries like Holland and Germany it is mandatory to recycle household waste.

My household of 4 produces, on average, one supermarket carrier bag full of rubbish destined for landfill each week. This is mainly plastic wraps, one disposable nappy per day (I use washables during the day but a dispoable over night). All recycling (mainly tetrapaks & food tins) gets taken to the recycling bins each time I pass. All food waste goes to the animals or to compost and paper & card waste either gets used as animal bedding, fire starters or compost.

I think the best way of getting households to take responsibility for their rubbish would be to make them pay for it’s disposal by volume. Unfortunately there are those who will always get around paying by dumping it, and I’m not sure how you could get around that.

Our house is pretty good about only having one bag of landfill garbage per week which is decent considering that there are five of us living here. We do generate a decent amount of recycling and compost but at least our landfill garbage is never very much.

If worse comes to worse(and we DO have to pay for our trash now), we will dump our garbage at the grocery store across the street. I just hope it doesn’t come to that.

I think the majority of things I accumulate for trash is recycled. Once I seperate everything I hardly have an trash but a bag full of recycle material.

I think we would come up with a garbage bag’s worth of trash. We recycle all paper, cans, plastic, and glass that we can, and we usually leave out any food or milk that’s gone off for the cats of the neighborhood.Right now our local recyclers take only aluminum cans. Do any of you get to recycle steel cans?

We have one trash can and it is not full on an average week. We are a family of 5. Our littlest one wears diapers, but we use cloth.
Our trash service recycles everything, so we do not separate the trash.

little more than a bag a week for my wife, me, and 3 dogs… plus about 2 bens of recycleing a month. also a good pile of compost. i burn almost all cardboards and paper in my wood burner during the winter…

really impressed with some of your results!!! keep it up, especially the few of u with kids, amazing!!!!

We average about a bag a week also. We are a family of four. We separate and recycle quite a bit though.

Not a lot of garbage as we recycle more than anything and we have been requesting another recycing container as we recycle so heavily.

It’s really good to see how well many of us here do. It’s also heartening to know that cloth diapers are being used as well and that so many of us seem to not only generate small amounts of trash but also seem really responsible about sorting and recycling.

Family of 6 + 2 dogs + 5 cats.

One can of garbage a week. 2 Recycle cans a week.

Cardboard boxes I collect and either reuse them or give them away on Craigslist for people whom are moving. They’d buy new boxes otherwise.

I use shredded paper as kindle for the fireplace, simply because it can not be recycled and despite requests, junk mail still finds it’s way into my mailbox on occassion. Also with my paper statements for my credit cards, there are always more pages than I need for my files… so I shred the rest of ‘em.