I spend a good bit of time analyzing, some might say over-analyzing, everything we do. This includes the amount of waste we produce. As I've mentioned before, I have stockpiling rules that govern what comes into my house, what I'm willing to spend my money on. One of the goals is to get as close to zero waste as is humanly possible. I'm a realist, zero waste is never actually going to happen, but I can try.
The most obvious way to save money by reducing waste is trash bags. If I'm not filling trash bags, I don't have to buy as many. Seems simple enough.
My town provides roll away recycling bins, and I use mine. My town will actually give you two if you request a second, and I did. I recycle everything I can. My husband doesn't quite get why I pull things out of the trash behind him and the kids. He gets the logic of recycling, but he doesn't quite get why I pick things others have discarded out of the trash and put them in the recycle bin. He honestly doesn't remember that is how I got him to recycle in the first place.
I also compost our food and yard wastes. Again, if it's not going into a trash bag, we use and buy fewer trash bags. An added benefit to not tossing food in the trash is that our trash doesn't smell at all.
There are secondary savings to recycling and composting past the cost of trash bags.
Every year I drop some money to freshen up the soil in my container garden, I buy fertilizer and I should buy some mulch. I've never actually bought mulch. Our leaf blower is also a vacuum, and it comes with a chopper. I vacuum up the fall leaves and dump them unceremoniously on my rose bed. Free mulch. Having priced mulch, I save about $50 a year not buying it. I compost what's left of the leaves, and I save about $20 in manure and fertilizer (I still end up buying some, just not as much) using compost made from yard and kitchen scraps. I used to compost my egg shells religiously, but after being told I should lime my lawn every so often (it's the soil here), I stopped dumping them all in the compost and started saving them up to "lime" the yard. Over the winter, the 30-ish ounce coffee container on my counter fills with egg shells, which I crush with a tall glass, and when the spring rains come I sprinkle it all over the lawn. This saves me about $5 a year in liming the lawn. Summer egg shells get similarly crushed and periodically sprinkled on the compost pile. Some of them get worked straight into the tomato containers.
The savings from recycling are less directly quantifiable after trash bag cost. According to the Aluminum Association "Today, it is cheaper, faster, and more energy efficient to recycle aluminum than ever before. For instance, only about 5 percent of the energy required to produce primary aluminum ingot is needed to produce recycled aluminum ingot. In addition, to achieve a given output of ingot, recycled aluminum requires only about 10 percent of the capital equipment compared with primary aluminum." So recycling aluminum means that buying aluminum is cheaper for producers. Businesses live and die by their profit margins. If they want profit to be X%, or if they want to make $Y profit, the lower their costs, the less they have to charge for their product to be profitable, the less I have to pay for their product. How much this saves me is an enigma, even if I could accurately quantify how much aluminum we use per annum. It could be pennies or tens of dollars a year. The same logic applies to other recyclables.
I mentioned that we have 2 roll away recycle bins. They're not enough, and they won't let me have a third. We have a single neighbor, and every now and again he lets us hijack his bin and fill it up on trash night. We do that when all the inside bins are full, and the outside bins are overflowing already. About a year ago we started segregating our aluminum drink cans from the rest of the recycling, crushing them, and collecting them in a bag in our shed. We did this for 2 reasons. 1) We were visiting the neighbor every 2 weeks (which is how often they pick up the recycling), filling his bin and still having some to take back in our house. 2) There is no bottle and can deposit in my state, but there are scrap metal places. Let's collect it and sell it as scrap. Why not? That's what the trash collector is doing with it. We've been collecting aluminum cans for over a year now, we've got 2 full bags. One of these days I'll take them down to the scrap place and see how much they actually pay me for them. Probably won't be much, but as long as it's more than the cost of the bags and the gas, that'll be fine with me. If it's more, that'd be great. We discussed doing the same with steel cans, like what you buy soup in, but decided that we didn't want to get too complicated running more than 1 experiment at a time, and the cost of steel was lower than the cost of aluminum, so we'd stick with the more profitable metal. Steel cans are harder to crush anyway.
So, instead of going through a 20 count box of trash bags, sometimes 2, a month (we have a large family), we go through a 45 count box of trash bags a year. That's a savings of $25 a year.
All tolled, I've listed $100 in annual savings just by thinking hard about how much trash we're producing and taking action to fix it. Can you pull $100 or more a year out of your trash? Try it, let me know how well you do.
