Back to School for The Three Rs

By Jeff Lindenthal

Executive Director, Solana Center for Environmental Innovation

We’ve all seen the three “chasing arrows” that make up the universal recycling logo. Common too, are the words reduce, reuse, and recycle. The next time you see the recycling logo, imagine that each arrow represents one of the three words.

For today, let’s take the first word, reduce. Waste reduction is our first line of defense against more trash. It means, literally, let’s reduce waste by not generating it in the first place. Some common methods of waste reduction are using both sides of a sheet of paper and packing school lunches in a reusable lunch box.

Another way to reduce waste is to buy products with packaging you can recycle in your curbside program. For example, most recycling programs accept brown paper shopping bags but not plastic bags. Go for paper and add it to your recycling program. Or better yet, skip the paper or plastic and reduce waste by bringing your own bag!

Home composting is also a great way to reduce waste in your own backyard. You will be amazed at the quantity of grass clippings, leaves, plant matter and food scraps that will decompose in your compost pile. It’s often less work to commute to the backyard compost pile than it is to haul waste out to the curb on trash day. Besides reducing waste, the finished compost you make will feed your plants and soil as you distribute it back on your landscape.

In our household, the only time we use the garbage disposal is when rinsing off the dinner plates. All our coffee grounds, apple cores, melon rinds, tea bags, and vegetable peels go straight into a counter top food bin (a fancy name for a plastic container). Here’s an opportunity to embrace the second “R” word, reuse. Find a plastic tub with a lid that you can reuse to catch your food scraps and keep it next to the sink.

Once or twice a week I trudge out to the backyard compost bin with my bucket of food waste. I keep a pitch fork next to the bin and the trick is to dig down, dump in the food waste, and cover it all back up. I’m a relatively passive composter and harvest the compost once a year. In the meantime, I pour buckets of food waste and plant trimmings in my bin throughout the year and turn the pile every once in awhile. Amazingly, it all decomposes and in the process of making rich, crumbly compost the volume in the compost pile drops while making room for more incoming material. The biological decomposition of organic matter, composting, is nature’s proven method of recycling, our third “R” in the recycling loop.

For more information, attend one of our upcoming workshops and learn more about the availability of low cost compost bins by visiting our website at www.solanacenter.org.

The County of San Diego Integrated Waste Management Plan identifies residential yard waste as representing 8% of the total waste disposed in the county. The Plan further states that by increasing the diversion of materials such as yard waste from disposal, the County can dramatically reduce the need for new landfills in the future.