In Mill Valley, CA, Bea and Scott Johnson’s family generates about a handful of trash a year.
They have two sons and a small dog. There are no waste baskets in their house. They have a garden and a compost pile. Though they do occasionally recycle, their idea is to refuse packaging in the first place. By all accounts they don’t sneak things into their neighbors’ trash either.
A Stanford University study estimates that packaging makes up one third of the volume of trash Americans toss every year. It adds up: the ubiquitous plastic shopping bags, the boxes within boxes, the molded plastic and Styrofoam that our products come in. Every month we discard our own weight in packaging.
The Johnson’s kitchen is spare, with foods stored in glass containers that Bea takes to the store to refill. Bea makes a lot of their food from scratch like cookies and pizza, and can get the ingredients in bulk, which she also stores in jars. Johnson goes to the store once a week and buys ten baguettes, which she stores in a pillowcase in the freezer for the week. Juices are freshly squeezed. The family goes through about ten pounds of oranges a week. Paper towels have been replaced by microfiber cloths. Each family member carries a handkerchief.
Bea even shops for fresh produce at Farmers’ Markets so she won’t have to deal with the little stickers stores put on fruit and vegetables. For books, the family hits the library. They use Netflix - although Bea has written to the company to do something about the strips on their self-adhesive envelopes. The walls are mostly bare, except for a stunning five foot square vertical garden made of succulents that gets misted a couple times a week, and a painting Bea did on another wall using recycled paint.
Gifts for their young sons are more often experiences than things. There are four toy bins. Anything new has to fit in them. They acquire their clothes second hand, then take care of and recycle them. They even have compostable toothbrushes made in Australia. They’re near some wonderful vineyards, so the Johnsons use refillable bottles for red wine. If it’s odd to see their online photos of jars containing sausage or fish, that’s only because I’m so used to the practice of shrink wrapping in plastic and Styrofoam. But habits, after all, can be changed.
Today, Vermonters recycle 36 percent of the waste stream. Another half of the remainder is recyclable, but it ends up in our landfills, which are filling up fast. According to David Brooks at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, 70% of trash in landfills is biodegradable. But because the material isn’t exposed to enough water and oxygen to decompose, it remains relatively unchanged, even after 50 years.
Bea points out on her website that the habit of refusal creates a demand for alternatives. And after all, we cannot just make trash disappear.
