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" Partway through cleaning her Austin, Texas, home last spring, Ashley Menger encountered an eco-riddle: How do you throw away an old garbage can? &amp;quot;I left it by the curb for days, but the garbagemen wouldn&amp;#039;t take it,&amp;quot; recalls the 31-year-old design analyst. &amp;quot;They thought it was just another can.&amp;quot; She eventually got rid of the relic by taking it to Goodwill, but the episode made her think about her dependence on the convenient round bin. &amp;quot;I wondered: Is the garbage can the problem or am I?&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;If you took away that crutch, what would I do?&amp;quot; For most Americans, the answer would be &amp;quot;panic.&amp;quot; Each one of us generates about 4.5 pounds of trash per day, and it doesn&amp;#039;t take a garbage strike to imagine how quickly that would start to pile up. Despite recycling an increasing portion of waste over the past two decades, the flow into the country&amp;#039;s 1654 landfills still adds up to 133 million tons a year, accumulating the weight of the Empire State Building every day. But the &amp;quot;waste footprint&amp;quot; for typical homeowners includes much more than the landfill space they use. Hazardous waste ranging from motor oil to mobile phones can poison vast tracts of land and water, and the weekly pickup carries away limited resources like plastics (made from oil), wood and paper that we can ill afford to throw away. Even when you recycle a glass bottle, you&amp;#039;re still losing 70 percent of the energy that went into manufacturing it. Menger decided to try life without a garbage can. For a two-week period, she vowed to collect every scrap of trash she generated--and keep it within 5 ft. of her at all times. It was a challenge with special significance for Menger, who previously designed consumer packaging for corporate clients such as Igloo. As she hauled a bag of jetsam around Austin, she had a crucial realization: By the time you pause over the garbage can with a disposable item, the critical moment for reducing its impact has already passed. &amp;quot;You made that decision when you bought it,&amp;quot; she says. The Whole Life Cycle Garbage is not just an empty container, but everything that first went into it: water, energy, raw materials and all of the waste produced during an item&amp;#039;s manufacture and delivery. A &amp;quot;life-cycle assessment&amp;quot; takes into account all of these things, plus the cost of landfilling or recycling what&amp;#039;s left over, and so it&amp;#039;s the truest measure of how products stack up. Though consumer packaging accounts for a staggering 50 percent of municipal waste by volume, a detailed life-cycle assessment conducted by the Tellus Institute in the 1990s concluded that more than 95 percent of its environmental cost occurs in the manufacturing process. Consumers need to consider where garbage comes from, not just where it&amp;#039;s going. When yogurt-maker Stonyfield Farm wanted to evaluate the environmental impact of its plastic containers, it commissioned the University of Michigan&amp;#039;s Center for Sustainable Systems to perform a life-cycle assessment. The study found that 4-ounce containers generate 74 percent more solid waste than 32-ounce ones. It also found that increased recycling of empty containers could decrease the amount of solid waste by about 3 percent; shortening the delivery distances to stores would save a similar amount of waste while reducing energy consumption by 4.7 percent and greenhouse gas emissions by 10 percent. In other words, reducing waste requires a multipronged strategy: Buy larger containers, recycle when possible and choose locally produced goods. What You Can Do Unfortunately, when it comes to consumer decisions, it&amp;#039;s easy sometimes to get bogged down in the details. Paper versus plastic is the perfect example: Americans throw out 100 billion plastic bags each year, and with them 12 million barrels of oil that went into their manufacture. Paper bags, on the other hand, consume 14 million trees and are less efficient to transport. The answer? As in most things, use common sense: Avoid them both and bring your own. Newer technology involves more complex choices: Electronics are the fastest growing component of the waste stream--5 to 7 million tons of computers, cellphones, TVs and other devices are tossed each year. A typical desktop PC contains 30 pounds of metal, 90 percent of which ends up in a landfill. But most dangerous are CRT monitors, which can contain more than 5 pounds of lead. When it&amp;#039;s no longer possible to extend the life of electronics with simple upgrades, consult epa.gov/ecycling to find a nearby location for safe disposal. Even the greenest homeowner occasionally has to dispose of durable goods. The practice of taking old clothes to Goodwill instead of dumping them is well-established, but making the same effort with old kitchen cabinets and other renovation debris is an idea that&amp;#039;s just beginning to catch on. &amp;quot;People nowadays are much more handy,&amp;quot; says Kevin Brooks, whose Philadelphia salvage firm disassembles buildings from the top down so that materials can be reused. &amp;quot;You can just put up a message on Craigslist and someone who wants cabinets will come and take them out themselves.&amp;quot; The little decisions do add up: After two weeks of avoiding paper products and packaging, plus recycling everything she could and even bringing her own cutlery to fast-food restaurants, Ashley Menger had accumulated only 1.2 pounds of trash--a far cry from the 63 pounds most people generate during the same time span. Her colleagues have taken up the challenge, and are now trying to pare down their own waste footprints. Like any attempt to shed pounds, it&amp;#039;s easier when other people share the experience; Menger says: &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s like Weight Watchers.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a2320/4234061/>