Reducing My Trash: An Update

For the month of June, our family has been working on reducing the amount of waste that we produce each week. I feel that we have made some progress, but our trash reduction has not been as dramatic as I had expected. I guess we still have a long way to go....
Here is what we have done so far:

• We have been diligent about only using a disposable diaper while Phoebe is sleeping at night, and not during any other times of the day. I thought about putting Finn back into cloth at night, instead of his pull-up, but the diaper we have don't fit him anymore and I don't think I want to invest in clothe diapers for a kiddo his size (he is 3 but wears 5T). We have also been diligent about using cloth wipes unless we are out and about.
• I made some cloth one-use hankies for us to blow our nose on (see above) instead of grabbing tissue paper. The system is still getting organized, and I realized that I need to make more hankies (I guess we blow our noses a lot), but I have seen a definite reduction in the amount of tissue paper in the bathroom trash can each week.
• We have been composting our dog poop. A little gross, yup, but so far so good. I carry it to the dog compost zone (we made a special compost pile just for this purpose only) each day and cover it with used straw from our duckhouse or yard waste. So far there has been zero smell and no grossness. I still need to do some research about flushable cat litter. Just haven't gotten around to that yet, but in my plans for the near future!
• I have also been mindful about composting as much food as possible. Now that I am eating very little dairy, this has actually been a lot easier because I can compost almost all of my food waste, even food that has been cooked. I have to head out to the compost pile with food waste just about every day, which has been a little annoying, but also makes me realize that we were throwing away a lot of food that could have been composted. Now we still really need to work on wasting less to begin with. It is hard with a three year old to not waste... sometimes he eats 2 servings and sometimes he won't touch a thing on his plate. Oh well. 
• My husband did a little research and found a local place that will take some recyclable plastics that our curbside pickup won't take (like the annoying plastic containers that strawberries and blueberries come in). So we have no set up a bin in the garage for these containers, and we will drop them off as-needed.

On the down side, we have had a few things break (like a full length mirror) that had to go in the trash, and cleaning out our garage produced some trash that had been hidden for awhile (oops). I feel like we are still producing more trash than we should be, but, we are taking steps to try and reduce that, and hopefully we will see it decrease more and more as time goes on.  

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