One LA Guy’s Almost-Zero-Waste Year

Dave Chameides of Los Angeles set out to create as little trash as possible in 2008, but he wasn’t about to stop drinking beer or eating potato chips. Since the waste from those items would undoubtedly add up, he found ways around the problem so he could still enjoy those items without having a lot of trash piling up. Chameides saved his trash for all of 2008 and his final total was less than the average American family throws away in a week.sav

From Green LA Girl, via ENN:

“I didn’t want to change the way that I was living my life,” Dave says. “If I wanted to drink beer, I wasn’t going to say, well, I can’t find a way to drink beer without creating packaging, so therefore I’m not going to. Instead, what I’m going to do is look at the packaging in beer and pick the most ‘eco-friendly’ way to do it.”

The idea behind Dave’s project was to focus on things people could do without drastically changing their entire lifestyle. “There are definitely people out there who have done similar things where they’ve cut everything out of their life,” Dave says. “A lot of people who are really really hardcore have emailed me and said, “You know, you can just not eat potato chips.’ Well, yeah, but I wanna eat potato chips!”

So Dave opted for bigger bags of chips versus the more wasteful one-serving bags — and cut out packaging wherever he could. Buying used items on Craigslist, composting food and paper scraps in his worm bin, and shopping at the farmers’ market — where he could even take back his egg cartons to a farmer for reuse — helped downsize Dave’s trash pile.

Dave’s total non-recyclable trash accumulation was just 30.5 pounds – and he kept his recyclables for a year, too, to prove that “recycling isn’t the answer”. Dave points out that the recycling process uses energy and resources, so it’s not a great way out of our trash dilemma.

You can read all about Dave’s journey at his website, Sustainable Dave.

Link [ENN] + [Green LA Girl] + [Sustainable Dave]

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