The Garbage Challenge - Month 1

Happy Earth Day! (Only a day late)

We have been weighing our garbage for about a month now and (as promised) we want to share the results with you! Overall, we had almost 73 lb of trash in 4 weeks. Here is the breakdown across the 5 categories we have been tracking:

What we've called "Misc." is basically just everything that doesn't fit into one of the other categories, and, as you can see, it is a huge portion of our trash. It's quite perplexing to me, really that we have that much random garbage. I don't even know what that consists of. I guess that's one of our goals through this process though is to become more conscious of what we are throwing out and figuring out how we can minimize it.

In my original post, I gave you some stats on how much garbage the average American produces in a day. Here's how we stack up:

There are some caveats to our data that make us look far less wasteful than we actually are. In particular, our data only includes trash from our home. The data we collected from the Clean Air site includes waste generated at work, restaurants, etc.

One of our goals in this project is definitely to reduce the amount of trash we have overall. The thought that we could potentially produce almost 1,000 lb of garbage in one year make me sick to my stomach. Eek.

A second goal of our is to increase the percentage of our trash that is reusable in some way (recyclable or compostable). This first month our garbage was pretty much 50-50 between reusable and "true waste".

And how are we going to reach those goals? Still trying to figure that out. Check back later!

Of Spending and Such

When it comes to money, I've always been more of a saver than a spender, but it's hard to know precisely what's happening with your money if you don't track it. As Galileo said:

"Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so"

So starting in the summer of 2008 I began tracking our spending on a great website, yodlee.com (similar to mint.com). We have linked all of our bank accounts, credit cards, investments, loans (back when we still had loans, abooyah!), and other assets all in one place. And whenever we would make a purchase or a deposit, it would be automatically picked up by the application and categorized based on where it came from. Then every month or couple weeks we do some maintenance - we just have to go in there and make sure everything is being put into the right categories. So after almost 3 years, we pretty much have this down to a system, and we've got some pretty sweet (and accurate) data to show for it.

Here's some interesting data on what we spent in 2010.

After seeing this chart for the first time, I took the opportunity to point out to my wife that she was our 6th largest expense in 2010...

The "Other" category is made up of things like: Cable Services (Internet), Cell Phones, Utilities, Health & Hygeine, etc that were much smaller slices on their own. So we know exactly what this slice represents, but it just didn't make sense to leave them broken out in the chart.

Necessities (Red) - 45%
Luxuries (Blue) - 31%
Travel (Green) - 24%

This chart provokes the question: would we rather have that big, green slice back in our savings accounts or have the experiences we've had this year on our vacations? Hmm...

Some other great finance resources:
Interesting Census data
Thrive
Money Strands