Besides strategizing to reduce our household’s carbon footprint, we also try to be efficient about our use of plastics, water, and “stuff” generally. We’re not zero-waste ideologues: disposable things are often disposable for a good time-saving or safety reason, and landfills are much more environmentally friendly than generally believed. But there are scarce environmental resources besides carbon budget— in the Western US, water is foremost among these— and real negative externalities from plastic production and disposal in particular. So it’s worth a bit of thought and exploration to try and reduce waste.
Topline findings so far:
As with energy, other resources typically have a few dominant users and then a long tail of many small users. In our household, for water, yard irrigation dominates; for plastics, food packaging dominates. The big uses are obviously the ones to go after first if you can easily do so, but often there’s not much to be done without real effortful lifestyle change, which is not what this substack is about.
Be skeptical of “green” substitutes for common household consumables. Many substitution strategies suffer from either low quality of the substitute or high effort to use it.
Before you substitute for something, see how much mileage you can get out of reusing it a time or two (for disposables) or using half as much (for consumables).
Away with lawn watering
Irrigation systems use a ton of water: so much so that, if you have one, using it less or not at all is probably the biggest thing you can do to shrink your overall water footprint. Our house came with an old leaky one which we turned off when it started using significant water around the clock. We let our front lawn go brown in the dry season (functionally fine but unattractive) and attempted to sustain our backyard plants by hand-watering (stunting or killing most of them).
A few years ago we put in a laundry-to-landscape system for part of the backyard. This is a pipe that runs from the water exhaust of our washing machine out and around to a series of diffusers, so when we run the washer, the wastewater from it runs through the pipe and then slowly into the surrounding soils. It made a huge difference to the health of a couple of our favorite plants, and it was only about $1k installed, a single-day nondisruptive job with no permit needed. Good deal. I got referred to the installer by the Urban Farmer store in western SF.
Then last year we remodeled all the landscaping and repaired the irrigation system. The new system uses drip emitters rather than sprinklers, so should in theory be less wasteful. It still uses a relatively large amount of water— on the order of 150 gallons each time we run it, which is quite a bit more than our typical total daily indoor water usage. But between selecting low-water plants in the remodel (no more lawn!) and keeping the laundry-to-landscape operating, we don’t have to irrigate very often.
If we were building new, I would probably push harder on using a combination of graywater and captured rainwater for all irrigation. It might well be possible to do some indoor graywater recycling too, e.g. using shower/sink drain water to flush toilets. But the retrofit plumbing required for all that is much more complex than a laundry-to-landscape system and probably pretty expensive. There might be a business opportunity for clever retrofit designs here.
Second lives, fractional doses
Before trying to replace some disposable or consumable with a “green” version, consider: whatever resource reduction goal that replacement could achieve, you could get halfway to that goal by reusing the disposable twice the ordinary number of times, or using half as much as usual of the consumable each time. Often this is way easier to do than finding and learning to use a full substitute, so gives you better ROI on whatever time you have to spend on household efficiency.
Examples:
For almost any detergent (for clothes, dishes, whatever) you can use half the recommended amount per load and things will still get clean.
Ziploc bags can easily be rinsed and reused a few times unless you put something really saucy/gunky in them.
Disposable razors and blade cartridges can be made to last several times as long by simply patting them dry after each use so they don’t rust. (I found this tip after nicking myself one too many times with an old-style non-plastic “safety” razor).
Actually good green products
Here’s a somewhat miscellaneous list of things we use that we’ve found make our lives richer as well as less wasteful:
High Sierra Classic low-flow showerhead (1.5 gpm). We got a water audit from SF Water a few years back and they gave us free 1.5 gpm showerheads to replace our old 2.5+ gpm models. The one in our master bathroom felt weak and ineffective, so a couple of months ago I replaced it with the High Sierra model that Wirecutter recommended. It really does what it claims: produces a very strong-feeling, satisfying spray of water while only using 1.5 gpm. The quality of the spray probably amplifies the water savings because you need less shower time to feel “showered enough”. I verified with a bucket and stopwatch that they weren’t cheating on the flow rate— that’s how surprised I was that a low-flow showerhead could be that good.
Stasher silicone bags. We have a bunch of these in different sizes and try to use them in preference to Ziploc disposable plastic bags. They feel very sturdy, have an excellent seal, and are reasonably easy to wash, so we’ll likely get enough uses out of them to pay back the higher manufacturing cost.
Tru Earth laundry strips. These come in a slim, light paper packet of 32 tearable strips; they tell you to use one strip per load, but as usual for detergents, a half strip per load works fine. Besides saving the plastic detergent bottle and the emissions from shipping a heavy liquid, I find them more pleasant to use because there’s no risk of a sticky detergent spill.
By Humankind mouthwash and dental floss. They come in paper refill packs, and the mouthwash is shipped as dry dissolving tablets, thus creating similar savings as the laundry strips. And they work well. By Humankind also makes toothpaste tablets, shampoo bars, and other bath consumables we haven’t tried.
Food: the unsolved problem
The consumable/disposable waste we’ve managed to reduce, unfortunately, seems to be a minority of our total plastic waste and a fortiori of our landfilled waste in general. As far as I can tell, most of that waste is packaging, and most of that packaging is food packaging. And we have no great solution to that, because a lot of the food we like to eat only comes in nonrecyclable-plastic-packaged form.
We used to get groceries delivered by a local startup called Zero Grocery which rigorously stuck to reusable/recyclable glass/metal/paper packaging only. Sadly, they had operational problems and went out of business, and their selection was never good enough to replace more than about half our normal grocery buying. We now get deliveries from Imperfect Foods, which has better selection and a great focus on reducing food waste across the supply chain, but which does often use landfilled plastic packaging, though less often than a conventional grocery. I’ve given feedback to Imperfect that we’d like to see even less packaging waste; we’ll see how that evolves.