Earth Day 2015

 My name is Melissa and I am just starting to grow my family. I am getting married in August and we are moving really soon to a house that will hopefully be home for the next half century or so. Currently my fiance and I are normal consuming Americans. We try to recycle, we take the bus when it's convenient, but really, we don't do anything out of the ordinary to reduce our consumption.

Enter my friend Andrea. She is my super-awesome-Zero-Waste-guru friend and every time I talk to her I get super excited about adopting her lifestyle, and every time I talk to her it feels more and more doable.

Well today, being Earth Day (her favorite holiday), we met in the heart of our beautiful little city and ate lunch and talked for hours about reducing waste for our wonderful planet. Somewhere in the middle of our chat I made the decision to work towards her lifestyle, and what better time than the present?!

So this blog is going to be dedicated to me and my fiance's journey as we go from ordinary consuming Americans to maybe not ZERO waste, but certainly LESS waste. 

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First things first is THIS IS A PROCESS. Andrea has been working towards this lifestyle of 10 years now. I can't expect us to be clutter-free and waste-less over night.

Secondly, I know that I am just ONE voice, but if more people catch on then our voices get louder and maybe companies and big corporations will start to listen. Just like I "voted with my dollar" for organic foods, I can continue to "vote with my dollar" for better/less packaging and a more sustainable product.

Lastly, as Andrea was so kind to reiterate to me today: we don't have to be perfect. She is living the extreme just to show possibilities, but even if enough people are making small changes it can help in a big way. 

My to-do list for this week:
- start to de-clutter. This is the perfect time since we are moving anyway.
- make t-shirt tissues/rags/produce bags
- continue to think/talk/research the idea of decreasing waste. (ie Bea Johnson and Be Zero)
- Be more mindful of my consumer choices and practice saying no to products that don't serve me.

Wish us luck! It's never easy changing your lifestyle, but we have to try otherwise this Earth that we all love so dearly will drown in our own trash:

• We produce a lot of waste. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the average American produces about 4.4 pounds (2kg) of garbage a day, or a total of 29 pounds (13kg) per week and 1,600 pounds (726 kg) a year! 
• Americans throw away enough garbage everyday to fill 63,000 garbage trucks, which if lined up end to end for an entire year would stretch half way to the moon. 
• Americans represent 5% of the world’s population, but generate 30% of the world’s garbage. On average, Americans throw away 2.5 million #1 PET and #HDPE plastic containers per hour! And only 9% of our plastics get recycled!
• Most recyclables never make it to facilities and most plastics are ending up in the ocean.
• The average American throws away approximately 185 pounds of plastic per year
• 50 percent of the plastic we use, we use just once and throw away.
• Americans use 500 million drinking straws every day. To understand just how many straws 500 million really is, this would fill over 125 buses with straws every day. That's 46,400 school buses every year! Americans use these disposables at an average rate of 1.6 straws per person per day! 
  
  
  (courtesy of BeZero.co)