Wednesday Waste-o-Meter

In the 1920's, Seattle garbage was still collected by horse-drawn garbage wagon and started moving to garbage trucks.

Today, it's collected in state of the art garbage collection trucks, and in Leschi it's collected on Wednesday mornings.

According to King County, in 1999 residents threw away about four pounds of garbage per person per day. The City of Seattle recycles about 44% of its garbage today, and is putting together measures and plans to increase this to 72% by 2025 and somewhere around 55% by 2010.

There is also a movement in many parts of the world to simply reduce the amount of plastic used. When I was Ireland this summer, I was shocked (in a good way) to find out that all of Ireland, or at least the county that I was in, had banned plastic bags. We found this out the hard way when checking out of a grocery store to find (horror!) that the store wasn't giving us a free one-time-use bag to carry our items to the car. So we bought a grocery bag for the week, which my parents brought back with them to the States. I was surprised to find that Ireland is more progressive than my all-organic food co-op on Capitol Hill, but I have my head in the sand half the time. In San Francisco, plastic bag bans are starting up and the mayor is front & center of the debate.

So I started thinking... how much garbage do I haul off each Wednesday? And what kind of plastic do I go through on a weekly basis.

So I'm going to count. And post it here, at least for a few weeks.

Think of it as the Wednesday Waste-o-Meter

Specifically:

- how many bags of garbage (non-recycling) per week
- how many plastic water bottles per week
- how many styrofoam containers per week
- how many plastic bags per week
- how many paper cups per week
- maybe I'll figure out how much my garbage weighs, although no promises.