Waste = Food: Breaking the Trash Habit
Our houses have habits. And we learn them.
Next thing you know you’re adapting your behavior to the way your home doesn’t work. There’s no place to organize the mail, so it lands on the kitchen counter; kid’s backpacks lie on the floor; clothes are piling up on chairs; every one at your party is stuffed in the kitchen, elbow to elbow. Sound familiar?
We help homes break these habits by recognizing how spaces inhibit activities we want to encourage. We reveal fractured patterns and reassemble solutions that help our homes help us live the way we’d like. Every design project begins by trying to recognize and respond to a home’s “bad habits”.
Sometimes those habits are so ingrained they are next to invisible. Take the kitchen trash. Thinking about our kitchens as the last link in the journey from farm to fork has provoked me to rethink everything about how our kitchens are designed to manage that flow. I quickly realized that I had accepted a host of ingrained patterns about how kitchens are designed and work.
One of these involves the kitchen trash. In nature, trash equals food. There is no waste, everything cycles. It’s a “whole” system. Hmmm. Not at my house. How come? I needed to see what wasn’t working. So here’s what I did.
After researching the rules and resources available to recycle, I moved my kitchen trash to a different room. Now every time I attempted to throw something in the trash I found an empty space – my own personal “gotcha!” Now I had to decide if what I needed to dispose of was even trash, or more likely compost or some form of recycling.
Here’s what I learned. There is an odd assortment of a few items that cannot be recycled or composted. These include foil and foil faced packaging: chip packaging, foil faced cardboard, wine covers, chocolate wrappers, yogurt seals. Things that are soiled or contained meat are out. So are meat leftovers. Then there are the queer little things like wire twist ties, sponges, light bulbs, even shoe laces. But not really that much.
By disrupting the usual trash flow and discovering that nearly everything can cycle forward for another use a surprising thing happened. It now takes a full month to fill a single kitchen trash bag! Now we have a very small kitchen waste basket, a new container for #5 plastic and another for the assortment of plastic bags. We continue to use our curbside recycling bin and our old kitchen trash container helps organize paper for recycling. Organic waste collects in a countertop container and travels across our yard, sometimes by moonlight, to our compost bin. Our kitchen is helping us practice new habits that are much closer to whole.
Ten years ago, at the grocery store I’ve gone to since I was a teen, they constructed a median that prevented the left turn I’d take to head home. It took me a full year to break that habit and learn to exit on the opposite side of the store. Unlearning ingrained habits can be hard. Revealing those habits and redesigning space that enables new habits can make a world of difference.
And the world needs that difference!
Love this. When we renewed our composting efforts we quickly realized that our weekly run to the dump wasn’t required. One bag, about every two weeks (I have 2 children living in the house) was about all we produced. The trash is still under the sink, but cardboard, recyclables…all go down in the garage. The problem is that before they head to the garage they accumulate at the top of the stairs on my floor in the back hall waiting for someone to take them down. There’s got to be a better system.
Here’s what else I notice my house lacks for this way of living:
1) A place to hang a jacket, leave dirty shoes, store a towel for a wet dog, have handy a garden clipper or basket for picking right at the back door to facilitate these trips to the compost or to the garden.
2) Counter space – not only for the unruly mail that you already mentioned (as if you could see my counter when you were writing), but for the compost bucket which feels rather large in relation to my limited counter space.
Here’s to continuing the conversation to develop a life that works – mind, body, soul and environment.
Terry
Reality check.
You know why I have given up on composting? Because I am the only person who will touch icky food bits. If I had a weapon I could not compel cooperation on this point from other household members.
Ecological living is a job, and it’s a job that falls on the person who cares about the issue and cares for the house. And that person is a ….. WOMAN the vast majority of the time. And I don’t WANT more work in the kitchen. You are crazy if you think you can thin out the trash stream that much without making work for someone who doesn’t want it or need it.
Breaking the trash habit will also take some serious gender re-education, a battle that I do ok on most days, but which I don’t really want to make harder.
Any thoughts, enviro purists?
I feel you. Its one reason I physically moved my trash out of the kitchen – to better understand my own complacency.
This whole exercise in awareness is part of a larger effort that I am undertaking to “rethink” the kitchen in order to make it serve a “whole systems” approach to our relationship with food (which of course must include “waste”). I realized that as a kitchen designer I design from a vocabulary of patterns and forms that are so familiar that we design kitchens in many ways without thinking about why. My goal is to seek ways in which doing the “right” things (like composting) are also the easiest and most convenient.
I like the challenge you’ve issued Lori. In my design thinking I may tend to design for “the person who cares” – and provide stools(out of the way) for those who don’t participate. Now I’m going to have to work on drawing them in to the “workflow”. I think what we’re after is not cooperation but collaboration.
…and on the gender issue (I’m male and the cook in my home) I just want to say one thing that always drives me crazy when I’m shopping is to see a man shopping with his partner and just standing there staring stupidly while she makes all the selections (and even pushes the cart). I just think to myself “you are so lame!”
Thanks, appreciate the acknowledgment.
See, I am desperate to make doing the right thing (composting, sorting) dead stupid moron-proof easy.
I have a weird house (who doesn’t?), wherein the kitchen is on the SECOND FLOOR in the FRONT! (don’t ask, I don’t understand it either. We chose it because it’s roomy and in many other respects quite flexible living space). If I could, I would put in a CHUTE to a compost bin outside the house, on the ground floor because I find the trip to the backyard to empty the compost bin to be such an insuperable inconvenience.
If it’s harder to do things the right way than the wrong way, the right way is permanently screwed. We need to make it so that doing things the right way is easy and obvious. That is the mission of design. We don’t need future-friendly living to be an all-day hair shirt exercise.
Also, I don’t find it to be impressive when men tell me they cook. Cooking is cool, guys love it, and they often leave a trail of kitchen destruction in their wake, and a fuming women with a rag clearing the debris field.
What impresses me is if men tell me they clean baseboards and scrub out the kitchen trash can and wipe out that disgusting place behind the faucets where the mold grows. That is impressive.