Reduce your waste to help the climate crisis

Studies show that Californians are doing a trashy job of reducing their waste, with an estimated 6 pounds disposed per person every day.

That’s about 2,200 pounds of garbage per year. While our waste management systems like Recology are working hard to divert that waste from landfills by recycling and composting, the best way to reduce your impact is by not using items that will produce a lot of trash in the first place.

Consider the packaging of products: Reuse what you can, and make it easier to improve your city’s waste management.

Sintana Vergara, an associate professor of environmental resources engineering at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt says, "Waste is most challenging to process when it’s mixed all together, if we’re able to separate our waste into parts. So, for example, if your organic waste is separated from your paper and from your landfill waste, it’s a lot easier to reuse and to beneficially reuse the parts of our waste if they’re separated. Once they’re all mixed together, it really becomes trash and it becomes very difficult to recycle, to compost, to make beneficial use out of these products if they’re all mixed."

Reducing our waste in turn reduces bad greenhouse gas emissions which is causing global temperatures to warm, making our weather more extreme.