'I Stopped Throwing Things Away for a Year, We Made a Surprising Discovery'

Something about trash has always bothered me. The idea that somewhere out there was a pile of all the stuff I had discarded, sitting there, forever. What would happen, I wondered, if we simply stopped throwing things away?

So one day I decided to try it: a year of no garbage.

I'm an author and I've attempted weird projects like this before, so my husband and two daughters were wary but not entirely surprised. They'd been through a Year of No Sugar when the kids were small and a Year of No Clutter as young teenagers, so what was one more bonkers life-changing experiment?

Mind you, before this project began, I'd always thought of myself as environmentally self-aware. Not a zealot, but a person who would, when I could, go the extra mile to do the right thing. I recycled, brought my own bags, and shopped at the farmers' market. I started a backyard compost pile and planted a garden at our home in Vermont.

As January approached, I tried to imagine what living without garbage would really look like. Would we be living like Oscar the Grouch? Would it turn into an episode from Hoarders?

Well, how hard could it be? I thought. All we have to do is buy only materials that can be put into recycling.

Ah, how innocent we were.

How we gave up garbage for a year

Like so many garbage services, ours used a "single stream" system, which allowed us to throw in our recycling with all the usual suspects unsorted—glass, metal, paper, and cardboard, as well as all plastics marked 1-7.

In a corner of our kitchen, I set up a bench with small bins and containers for whatever didn't fall within those parameters, so that after being cleaned and dried, I'd have a place for them to wait until I figured out what to do with them.

It didn't take very long for the small bins and containers to be replaced with larger and then still larger bins and containers, and then to start overflowing alarmingly onto our floor. Old mascara tubes and ripped pantyhose mingled with snack bags and netting from a bag of lemons, a broken coat hanger, and some used-up ballpoint pens.

It was a mess. And I noticed that virtually every single item in my "Problem Pile" was made of plastic.

Challenges we faced

Avoiding plastic packaging turned out to be way harder than any of us had ever expected and avoiding plastic food packaging was almost impossible. Was I prepared to give up meat? Bread? Cheese? Even fresh fruits and vegetables came festooned with little plastic tags and stickers. It quickly became clear I'd better come up with some solutions.

Sometimes there was desperation. I may or may not have flushed used staples down the toilet. My younger daughter Ilsa made her friends take their candy wrappers home with them. Those little absorbent pads hiding underneath your chicken or steak? My older daughter Greta called them the "most revolting thing you could get stuck with, ever."

The dreaded meat sponge ended up in a small wastebasket we marked "Health and Safety." This was the only place we were permitted to throw things "away" in the interest of being well and not getting sick, and contained things like used band-aids and the plastic shrink seal from medication bottles.

"Health and Safety" was also used for sanitary products. Although I ended up switching to a combination of "period panties" and washable cotton sanitary pads, I was never able to convince my daughters to give them a try.

I started making my own cleaning products. I mended pantyhose, rather than ditch them and buy new ones. I tried out an array of zero-waste products, from toothpaste tablets to bidet attachments. I posted on online message boards: did anyone want my collection of plastic bottle caps? Sooner or later, someone always did.

All this progress was good, but it still wasn't enough. My Problem Pile continued to loom alarmingly in the corner of our kitchen, and I knew it couldn't just live there forever.

After some research, I identified several "extreme recycling" programs that allowed you to mail in and/or pay to recycle difficult-to-recycle items, and this was our last resort for the remaining plastics. Unfortunately, many of those mail-in programs have since come under scrutiny, and even been the subject of lawsuits, due to suspicion that they aren't actually recycling the material they receive.

Learning the truth about plastic

I dove into research, reading books and searching online about plastic waste, as well as making calls to manufacturers and recycling facilities. I even took a college class all about plastic.

Unfortunately, the more I learned, the bleaker it got. That's because I started to understand that when it came to plastic and recycling, there exists a startling abundance of lies, half-truths, and misinformation. My family was astonished, after all our heroic washing and drying efforts, to learn that plastics—even numbers 1-7 collected every week in your single stream—aren't really "recyclable" at all. In fact, 94 percent of plastics end up in the landfill, the incinerator or our oceans, according to a recent study.

There was more. We learned that products marked "compostable" usually aren't, and that a lot of "flushable" wipes aren't flushable.

Perhaps worst of all was the moment we realized that plastic lasts forever and never really goes away. Microorganisms don't recognize plastic as something that can be broken down, so instead, plastics break up, into microplastics. Eventually they become small enough to be eaten in our food and inhaled through the air. That's why scientists have found microplastics in our blood, lungs, poop, liver, breast milk, and even the placenta of unborn babies.

How we treat our garbage now

After living without garbage for a year, we learned that personal responsibility—in the form of being less wasteful, reducing, reusing and recycling—has its limits.

We have brought the garbage can back into our house. After spending a year scrutinizing what goes into it, we have managed to reduce our waste from an entire rolling trash container per week to half a kitchen-size garbage bag. It is entirely composed of single use plastic food packaging.

We have achieved this reduction in waste by making a host of changes: eliminating paper towels, collecting wine corks and plastic caps to donate for school craft projects, composting all food scraps, and, as much as possible, avoiding buying things that are made with the express purpose of being thrown away. I don't even line the garbage can with a disposable plastic garbage bag anymore; I use cat food bags to carry my garbage to the dump.

I've gotten really good at repurposing, mending and fixing, as well as finding alternatives. When I need a white board, I use card stock. When I need hand weights for a new workout, I use cans of chickpeas and artichokes. I find I buy very little these days, and when I do, I try to purchase clothing, housewares and books that are second-hand.

I believe our culture's addiction to plastic is worrisome not just because it's bad for the environment. It's worrisome because no one yet fully knows the health ramifications of all this plastic coursing through our bodies.

It can feel overwhelming to look around and realize how entrenched our everyday lives are in plastic, but I maintain that there is a lot we can do. I don't necessarily recommend trying to live for an absolute Year of No Garbage. Instead, my advice is to do the very best you can, given everything you know.

Eve O. Schaub newest book Year of No Garbage will be published on Earth Day, April 22, 2023.

All views expressed in this article are the author's own.