Reduce, Reuse...

RECYCLE.

Good lord, there are so many bags of recyclables on our back porch, it's crazy.  Don't tell our landlord.

Jumbled as it may look, there IS a rhyme and reason to this mess - each recyclable is sorted by type - each number of plastic even has its own bag.

Our trash experiment went really well.  By simply sorting our waste into three basic categories: recyclable, biodegradable, and none of the above (a.k.a. trash), we were actually able to not take the trash out for three weeks.  Imagine that.

We stored our compost in a bucket between our back and screen door - out of the house so not to stink, and away from animals (as if any would even want to come up the three flights of stairs to eat anything in the first place).  It didn't even really smell, and the only nasty bit was emptying the bucket afterwards.

So many things are biodegradable!!

The largest pile by far was the recyclable one.  The compost was the heaviest (most of it was inedible things, like peels - don't be thrown off by the left-out squash sautee on top...) and the trash trash the least in volume and mass.

I challenge you to try this for a week and see what you come up with.  You may get a little more hands-on with your waste, but you dealt it, so smelt it.