The typical American family creates an average of 18 pounds of trash per day, while single individuals produce approximately 5 pounds per day[1]. Whether you're at the high end of this average or the low end, it's very likely that you're producing more waste than you need to, and if you're reading this it's probably because you're somewhat aware of that fact and seeking to change some habits.

I don't think I need to sit here and explain why waste is bad, particularly the kind that does not decompose, but also the kind that does decompose but not return its nutrients to the land and therefore interrupts ecological cycles and produces large amounts of methane gas. Nor do I feel like you really need to know about the practices of the Global First World shipping trash to the "Third World" or trash islands in the ocean, etc etc, because you probably already know.

While we have yet to achieve a truly zero-waste life, we oscillate between being extremely close to zero-waste and being not so close. If I'm being completely honest, I don't know that the average person is going to be able to go completely without producing waste without making some fairly significant life changes, and so I think a good place to start is not necessarily moving the goalpost completely, but setting up some staging posts for us to stop and evaluate our progress along the way. This way, we know we aren't failing, and we're moving in a good direction, but we can be lucid and honest about the barriers we may be facing and what it may take to overcome them.

What goal posts work for us might be different, though, and so I've decided to choose a place to start that hopefully allows you to set your own goalposts within that space, and worry about the rest as you begin to find rhythm with the general practice of striving for a zero-waste life. So let's get into our kitchen a bit and talk about what waste we're likely producing there and then find a few solutions and figure out what may be stopping us from implementing those solutions immediately – so that hopefully we can start implementing them soon instead.

What makes waste in the kitchen?

I chose to start in the kitchen because I think it's the area of the home where we're likely doing the most damage in terms of filling our bins. Some of the key offenders of non-biodegradable waste are going to be:

• Cleaning supplies and their containers
• Single-wrap snacks especially, but store-bought snacks in general
• Paper towels (the towels might be compostable but the plastic thing they come in is not)
• Sponges
• Plasticware and disposable dishes (even if they're only used for parties or hosting)
• Liquid jugs and containers including your milks, sauces, juices, sodas
• Single-serve drink containers including sodas, juices, coffees, etc
• Your single-serve drip coffee machine "pods", if you have one, or coffee filters and wrappers if you use a normal drip machine (some coffee filters are compostable but the plastic thing they come in is not)
• Canned food
• Staple foods that come in plastic bags, like rice, or boxes with a plastic window, like pastas
• Stickers from produce
• Grocery bags, including the small produce bags or bulk-bin bags

Our biodegradable waste offenders are usually things like:

• Leftovers from our meals
• Vegetable or meat trimmings: ends, leaves, fat, skin, undesirable parts, bones
• Coffee grounds
• Fruit peels, skins, cores
• Tea leaves or bags

Truth be told, it's possible this is not a comprehensive list and either over or under-represents your purchasing of these or similar offending items, but the point here is just to have a conceptual starting point. So, now that we know what some of our offending items are, how do we stop making so much waste?

Step 1: Stop buying sh*t (with love)

Here's the truth: you don't need so much stuff. I mean, if you're finding that you really have almost none of these items in your kitchen, good for you! You may not have that much work to do. But probably for most of you (and us), it's useful to hear this: you don't need so much stuff.

The first and foremost way to stop producing so much waste is just to buy less stuff. I understand that this is a shift: and while homemade alternatives might feel overwhelming to consider at first, they're definitely a better option. However, even if you literally don't have the time, if you get down to evaluating all of your consumption choices, you might just find you don't need all of the things you're currently buying and eating, and that if you don't have time to replace it, you really just don't miss it after a while, or something else pops up as a replacement that's easier anyway, and probably better for you, and life just keeps going on. So this is our first step. Let's look through our grocery list as we make it and think: "what could I just try going without this week as a test, to see how it feels to not have it? What are the non-essentials here?"

Now, when it comes to cleaning supplies and switching from disposables to reusables or just purchasing less items, let's have a small segue:

It's pretty likely that a good portion of your waste comes from trying to keep things clean, that you have this idea that reusable stuff is impossible to truly sterilize, the only way to not spread horrifying diseases around your kitchen and home is to ensure that you can throw things away when they get too filthy and start anew. But that's... not true. This thinking is the result of 60 years of aggressive marketing campaigns trying to teach you that disposable is superior because things that last decades don't sell as many units. Folks used reusable diapers and baby wipes and napkins and dish towels (or literally none of these things, probably in most cases prior to industrialization) and survived for much longer than they haven't. And don't come for me with the "but people really were sick more" thing, because that's silly. There are a lot of reasons folks were sick more before automated dishwashers, and it's not because they didn't have dishwashers. It's also kind of a myth that people were sick more "back then"[2], anyways, but let's move on.

The point is that there's a cost to disposables much greater than any perceived benefit, and that the benefits are, in fact, perceived. A wet paper towel can spread germs just as easily as a wet dish towel, and if we're laundering things well in hot enough water and then letting them get some UV through air drying them (or drying them on a high enough temperature if air drying isn't possible all the time), we're pretty unlikely to be getting ourselves sick with them. How do you think hospitals are able to get sheets and blankets laundered and not murder everyone that goes in[3]?

We can hopefully use these trains of thought to consider which things we don't need as much of, or which things we can kick off of our grocery list altogether.

Replacing what we stop buying: some ideas to get you started

I don't just want you to stop buying paper towels this week, I want you to be able to continue not buying paper towels. And this means that we need to consider what this thing is being used for, and what an alternative is that doesn't require repetitive purchasing and therefore repetitive waste. Ditto for cleaning supplies. It's likely that you don't need as many different types of cleaners as you're currently buying, and if you look up "homemade window cleaner" or "homemade all-purpose spray" online you'll find that lots of home formulations can be crafted using various amounts of a few staple ingredients that you can buy in bulk, rather than buying lots of small containers full of proprietary chemical blends that aren't necessarily more effective.

When we consider reduction in terms of evaluating:

• What need an item fills (or if it's just a desire and not filling a need at all)
• What alternatives exist that require less waste – such as buying one thing in bulk rather than repeatedly buying lots of spray bottles that you throw away rather than refill
• Where you can simply omit an item from your life and fill the need with something else you already have on hand or already purchase for another purpose

Then reduction becomes a little easier than emphasizing the moral failing of needing something, or the frustration that you feel like you're losing something that's making your life easier. Snack foods are a good thing to use this framework with: if you find yourself getting something specific every time work gets stressful, there is potentially a good internal dialogue you can have about whether or not this is really the way you'd like to be reducing stress, what alternatives are available (like making the item at home, making something else at home, doing something that uplifts your mood and doesn't require buying something like hiking instead, and so on).

Step 2: replace necessary items with reusable items

Once we've begun reducing our consumption and cut a few items out of our lives, we can take the next step and evaluate what other things we can replace with reusables instead of cutting out completely.

In some cases it's better to stop buying something than get a reusable alternative. Some things claim to be reusable, but really only last a few weeks or months before requiring replacement – and then you're just throwing out more durable, slower-to-degrade materials in many cases and buying more expensive replacements. Sometimes things are reusable, not super long lasting, but ultimately compostable, and if the ecological cost of their production isn't extreme then that's... probably fine and better than the less ecologically friendly option. However, for some things we just need to consider what is the longest lasting thing that fills our need and figure out how to spring for that.

For instance: we own three frying pans and two pots. That's it. Well, technically there is a third pot now and a teapot because we found them in the camper trailers we obtained for people to sleep in. However, our three frying pans are cast iron and if taken care of our children and their children should be able to use those same pans when we die. Our two stainless steel pots should likewise last forever. There's not a larger cost ecologically to produce a cast iron pan than the teflon pans you get for $10 a piece at big-box stores, but if you get a good cast iron pan it will last forever, where the $10 pan begins to flake and change shape in a year or two and then demands replacement (and poisons you all the while, but we can get into that another time). An even better alternative would be cooking with earthware, but I think most of us lack the infrastructure to really cook completely naturally and therefore our concentrated-heat stoves usually demand ironware, extractive as it may be to produce. This is a situation where we understand we're working towards an ideal and that we aren't there yet.

Reusable alternatives to typically ultra-cheap or intentionally disposable items are often more expensive up-front, but they'll save you money in the long run. For instance, we don't use food storage bags, but because we make our own dog food we did need something to portion the food out in that wasn't extremely high-cost and that wasn't completely disposable. We thought about butcher paper, but it leaks without plastic lining in the fridge and would require tape, anyway (or twine, I guess is something I'm thinking of as I'm writing this but didn't think of at the time) which would have to be thrown out each time. So we found these silicon food storage bags that are a somewhat greenwashed product and they're not super cheap, but if we were someone who routinely purchased plastic bags we'd be saving a lot of money each week not doing the repeat purchase. Ditto for things like dish towels: a set of dish towels costs more than a package of paper towels, but in the long run you save a lot of money over the life of the towel not buying paper towels every week. If you have local stores that let you use reusable containers for refilling in the bulk section, definitely frequent them – and if you're not sure, just try bringing in some mason jars or cloth bags to fill and bring an extra for the cashier to tare on their scale when you go to pay. You might get a raised eyebrow, but I've yet to find a store with a bulk section that will, after I've filled things, tell me to go put them back and get a plastic bag instead. Don't ask permission beforehand, just do it and make sure you're not inconveniencing them too much by not bringing something to tare so they don't get in trouble for under or overcharging you at checkout.

Step 3: Tackling food waste

Steps 1 and 2 primarily work on reducing the packaging that we're bringing into our home and throwing away. To some degree, while we're working on step 1 we should be evaluating the packaged foods were buying and not just the non-food stuff that we used in most of our examples. But up until this point we've mostly discussed packaging waste and not organic waste. So let's get to the latter now, because this is still a really big deal.

Food doesn't organically decompose in a landfill. Most landfills are dumping waste in plastic-lined swaths of land to try to "protect" the underlying soil from chemical leaching. This means that while food does break down, it isn't returning into any natural cycle. As a result, it's not getting worked into soil and feeding other beings, but sitting there releasing methane gas – and at the scale that most Americans are throwing food away, it's not producing an insignificant amount of methane gas.

There are a few critical ways that we can do better disposing of food waste, and which methods you choose are going to have to depend on your specific living situation. I'll try to briefly touch on all of them, but each can probably be its own article so I won't pretend like this will be a wholly comprehensive discussion.

Composting

Most of the gardeners who read this publication are already familiar with composting. Composting is the controlled decomposition of organic waste in the interest of transforming it into humus, which is the decomposed organic matter that makes up a portion of good soil structure. There are various ways to compost food:

• Bokashi buckets[4]
• Vermiculture composting
• A traditional aerobic heap setup, either that's turned manually or one that is constructed with airflow as a primary aspect of construction
• Trench or in-ground composting

There may be more, but these are the ones I'm most familiar with. Bokashi buckets are, briefly, a method of composting where the compost is fermented within a closed container and then applied to crop or injected into the soil as a slurry. Vermiculture composting uses earthworms to decompose organic matter, and when it's done well it results in an incredibly rich soil product. Aerobic heaps that are turned manually are probably the most common and easy kind of composting where moisture is abundant, and then heaps that are constructed with airflow in mind are probably the second most common and use a big carbon material like straw to allow for the compost to decompose aerobically without manual intervention. Trenching or in-ground composting is something we recently did a deep dive on and has some caveats, but works well in a dry climate or with materials that aren't conducive to a good living compost heap.

In order to compost your food waste you need to determine which method is going to work best for your based on your proximity to other houses and people, your local rodent and insect populations and their propensity for spreading diseases (which is higher in urban environments and highest in regions with warm climates and significant populations of unhoused folks or regions of the world where sanitation practices aren't up to par with population density), what materials you have to compost, local regulations if there are any (and how much you should care about them), and what you're going to ultimately use that compost for once it's produced.

In tight urban areas the best way to create a good, living compost heap is probably going to be working hand-in-hand with a local community garden that can use the compost and which probably already manages a compost heap that can be added to by members of the garden. Single folks in apartments are unlikely to produce the volume of scraps or carbon needed to maintain a heap, so finding some friends to pool with is probably pretty important. The governance structure of such things is variable, so if you know of a local garden, just check in with anyone you see tending the space and I'm sure you can get pointed in the right direction. Other alternatives in tight urban areas that may be good are Bokashi buckets, where you can store a few buckets of scraps, ferment them, and then either offer the slurry to a local garden or semi-local farm or inject it into your small backyard (or a road meridian or vacant lot you're guerilla gardening, I suppose) so that you're working on the soil in a way less likely to create booms in rodent populations or create smells or "unsightly" heaps your neighbors might complain about.

In suburban areas your primary constraint is going to be how many scraps you produce, your local HOA bylaws if you have one, your nosy neighbors, and ensuring you don't bomb everyone around you with rodents. Some of the tips for composting in heaps are kind of silly: no meat, no eggshells – this isn't a hard and fast rule. While meat might attract different scavengers to your heap, not including it is by no means an effective form of rodent control. In suburban areas, you can do the Bokashi method or purchase an aesthetically appealing compost box with a turner and try to ensure it's well sealed, though it will not be able to be sealed entirely on top or it wouldn't be able to decompose aerobically.

If you live more rural, chances are the sky is the limit (depending on how rural, I guess, still try to be respectful of your neighbors and ecosystem) and you can probably do all kinds of combinations of the composting methods listed above and others, just depending on how rural you are, what kind of wildlife you're concerned about attracting, what you're trying to grow, and what your local conditions are.

Finally, a quick note on municipal composting schemes: while I think that there is merit to cohesive public infrastructure for composting in dense urban centers, unless you're in an extremely dense city with little to no community infrastructure for urban gardening because restrictions are so heavy (Manhattan and a few other parts of NYC probably qualify here), I wouldn't bet that your local municipal composting scheme is going to be the best, most ecologically friendly option for getting rid of food waste. In most cases, working with a community garden or starting one, using a friend's backyard, trying to get your apartment building to let you garden up the courtyard or front space, etc – these are going to be better options. Municipal schemes have to throw a lot of waste away due to contamination from non-compostable items, face high operating costs, still produce methane in poorly managed areas that go non-aerobic, and are often going to be pulling more energy for operation than is needed.

Convert food waste into more food

Quite honestly, as avid as I am about composting (particularly things that normally enter into a wildly inefficient and polluting sewage system), when it comes to food waste in particular I'm much more fond of another option: using your waste to feed beings that in turn can continue to feed other beings and continuing the cycle through one or more rotations. Even better is doing a combination of composting some things and feeding out others.

There are folks in need of good food, and nothing composts food scraps more efficiently than the gut of a gastric animal. What the microbes in a heap take approximately a year to do a pig can do in 24 hours – and the result is more food for more people, and it's not like the soil is neglected: the manure is perhaps an even more valuable and immediately usable by-product of our food scraps. While some manures need to be aged and in regions with dense populations we need to take care with stocking density and manure management to ensure we're not increasing our community's risk of contracting certain illnesses, the benefits of a source of protein that doesn't require acres and acres of land (depending on species) like producing plant proteins in the quantities needed to really sustain populations does, and still having a valuable soil amendment, are numerous.

For small spaces consider quail, guinea pigs, rabbits, or chickens (bantams if the space is really limited) where regulations permit (or can be gone around) as food recyclers. Omnivorous chickens are top of the list here, because while quail are omnivorous as well they're unlikely to eat the diversity of foods that chickens can and because they're much smaller and require more specific management and a more expensive commercial ration if the amount and type of food scraps cannot be produced to feed them adequately, chickens are a better beginner choice for most folks looking to do this. Stocking rates must be considered: no one is proposing that from your food scraps alone you'll be rearing enough chickens to eat chicken once a week indefinitely. Chickens grow relatively slowly, the "broiler" chickens most folks raise for meat specifically cannot be fed on scraps alone because their rapid growth must be supported with commercial rations, and if you have more than a handful of chickens you'll find yourself supplementing them heavily with a purchased ration. However, if you have some folks pitching in food scraps and your chickens can get at some bugs (in a well-set up community garden where the chickens can range around the beds but not in them, for instance), you could feasibly raise a few chickens on that alone quite happily. The benefit of chickens is that you can get eggs to either sell to support the garden or other endeavors in your community or to eat in the meantime, and you can make a celebration of hatching an extra rooster or two once a year and offering a potluck for the community.

For slightly larger spaces, pigs eat just about anything and turn it into not just valuable animal protein but cooking oil for the kitchen, too, which eliminates yet another product you otherwise have to buy. Folks who raise geese swear by goose fat as a cooking fat, also, and geese are pretty self-sufficient with a good amount of yard, but they'll eat less food scraps than the pigs, and that's really the problem we're trying to solve right now.

I've also heard of folks raising darkling beetles on scraps to feed the mealworms to their chickens, but I've not done this myself and cannot attest to the volume they can convert, and it's kind of an extra step because the chickens are just as happy eating the food scraps, assuming their protein is adequately supplied through foraging insects and the scraps they're getting.

I will say, and hopefully this goes without saying because of our own taboos against cannibalism in our species: do not feed animals scraps of the same species. Your chickens don't want your fried chicken bones – turn those into biochar or compost them separately. The reasoning here is actually less about morality than the potential for spreading disease, but still, I feel morally weird about it all the same.

Final thoughts

This is just a starting point. Going truly zero-waste would involve only having things made of fully natural materials and which are also made on a small enough scale that we can have insight into their production process. Otherwise, we can obfuscate the waste created when something is produced but we cannot actually eliminate it. Most of the bloggers who tout their "zero-waste" lifestyle are not, actually, living life without creating waste, they're just pretending because they've stopped throwing things in the trash. Eventually things wear out, and the only way for them to not become "waste" is for them to be able to return to the cycle of our community and land.

However, in the scope of changes to make right now, taking steps to reduce the waste we create – be it waste we can see or waste in the supply chain – is a notable action that we would all do well to take on. With that, I hope that this gives you some concrete places to start regardless of your budget, where you live, your housing situation, or your dietary needs.

We welcome your questions! If you feel stuck on any of this, or don't feel like something really handled your particularly context and needs, let us know. We want to ensure that everything we write is useful to all of our readers, so we're available via email if you'd like to discuss anything further.

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Notes

1. According to the EPA.
2. There are a few sources for my thinking here, including books like Steven Johnson's Extra Life which indirectly supports it by discussing the infrastructure and scientific changes which improved public health as opposed to the kind of folk-claim-through-advertising which asserts that consumer goods are what's supportive of good health, as well as Sex at Dawn which specifically discusses (again, tangential to our specific topic) how prehistoric people really didn't get ill all that often because of enormous differences in population density, opportunities to come into contact with novel pathogens, proximity to animals, etc. The point is, we imagine that until the, I don't know, 1980's or some other arbitrary point in the 21st century people were just living short miserable lives, and that the line towards a "good, healthy" life is a diagonal arrow up and to the right, but that's just not true. People are plenty sicker with plenty more things now that never plagued anyone historically, and less sick with other things, and at different points in history and in different regions with vastly different geography and infrastructure people have struggled more or less with very different types of illnesses. There are no magic bullets to good health, but enormous costs to the type of thinking that leads us to purchase endless quantities of disposables.
3. Hospitals, while designed to give the impression of sterility, are also just not super clean places. Do they clean a lot? Yes. Are they clean? No! Loads of folks walk through there with shoes from off the street, sick people and people with open wounds are housed in the same building, and just in general any public space with lots of people from lots of different places walking around and touching things and toileting and eating is not super clean. But the point is: you trust that the linens on the beds are clean enough to not make worse your ailments, that they're clean enough to not get you ill (or more ill), and ditto for your doctor's office. Is this because the things are cleaner? Or because of the psychological container of cleanliness? The point here is that the reality of "clean" and "safe" is not necessarily a purely material one.
4. By some definitions Bokashi buckets might not be considered composting in the pure sense, since they rely on fermentation in a closed container and not aerobic decomposition, but I'm including it here because there are excellent use cases for them and I'm not interested in composting purity anyway.