Every Wednesday you can drive through my neighborhood and see trash cans whose lids can’t even close because they are overflowing with garbage.

We are just a family of two, but we still only have about 3 bags of trash every two weeks. We compost our organic wastes, too (except meat and citrus).

Last week, we took three months of recycling to our local waste center. But before we did that, we weighed everything to see about how much we prevent from filling the Middle Point landfill next to our county’s drinking supply - the Stones River. I forgot how many pounds (I’ll tally it and post it later) each category was, but it came to about a bag of trash every week, or a whopping 52 bags of trash in 2007 that did not go to Middle Point.

Every family can make a huge difference in the way we manage our resources. We pay for our own trash pick up, too. We used to pay for recycling pick up, but they would only take certain things. Now we do that ourselves.

That’s a good question. I hadn’t really thought about it much one way or another.

We don’t produce too much trash, but there’s only the two of us and we aren’t home all that often. Even so, one of the things that immediately occurred to me was the awkward class dimension to this kind of thing.

Composting organic waste works pretty well when you have a yard to do it in. Although you can technically do it inside, it’s harder and messier, and can often be more trouble than it’s worth (what exactly are you going to do with it when it’s done, if you don’t own anything you can put it on?). While we technically have a yard (at least until the move), our landlords are adamant that we not hang anything back there (so no drying clothes on a line, which sucks because we don’t have a washer/dryer, either), not make a mess, disrupt the grass, etc. Higher class food generally (though certainly not always) tends to come in more easily recycled (or otherwise reused) containers, while cheap stuff often comes in cheap plastic the recycling people just toss outright.

This isn’t at all to say it’s impossible to cut down if you don’t have much money. Of course you can, and you should, and it’s likely to have other benefits too. What I was trying to point out is that the things that usually come out first in conversations like this - compost your organics, use cloth bags instead of the plastic ones they give you, recycle and reuse like mad - are pretty well bound up in circumstance.

(I include things like geography under circumstance… places that are less overly concrete-y than SoCal probably have more houses with yards, for instance.)