Apparently my entire year’s waste fits into a mason jar… if we ignore the dryer lint, the vacuum canister, tire dust, produce stickers, tea bag glue, receipt BPA confetti, and the existential dread from compostable packaging that mysteriously “needs industrial facilities.” So, can we talk about tracing zero waste-the invisible stuff that doesn’t make the Instagram grid?
I’m looking for ways to audit the “trace waste” we all generate but don’t count. Not the pizza box; the microfibers, adhesives, shrink bands, desiccant packets, and the sludge of “responsibly recycled” items that might be on a slow boat to Not-Here-Island.
Questions for the brain trust:
- What do you consider “trace waste” worth tracking, and how do you measure it without a lab coat and a grant?
- Has anyone tried a Waste FitBit approach: weigh vacuum dust weekly, track dryer lint, estimate microfibers per laundry load, log tire wear by mileage and driving style, etc.? Any methods that didn’t make you hate your life?
- Open-source tools or low-tech hacks to trace where stuff actually goes post-bin? QR code scanning, receipt parsers, nerdy spreadsheets, anything that doesn’t require a blockchain sermon?
- Compost passport, anyone? A way to tag food scraps and verify they became actual compost and not a raccoon’s memoir?
- For packaging with “recyclable/compostable” claims, has anyone pressure-tested brand promises? Thinking crowd-sourced EPR map: what got accepted, rejected, or mysteriously “downcycled to vibes.”
- Ethical spiciness: is GPS-tagging a piece of trash to see where it ends up brilliant citizen science or a one-way ticket to a letter from the waste authority? Alternatives that stay on the right side of the law?
- If you had to design a Trace Zero Waste Challenge for a month, what metrics would you track that give real insight without turning your home into a CSI lab?
Bonus points for tools that:
- Don’t involve buying new gadgets wrapped in three layers of plastic irony
- Work for renters and people without curbside compost
- Produce shareable, comparable results so we can crowd-benchmark beyond “look at my photogenic jar”
I’ll start: I tested a microfiber-catching laundry bag vs. no bag and weighed dryer lint for two weeks. The bag cut lint by 20%, but line drying nuked it by 80%. My jar of trash is still cute, but my clothes are apparently the real confetti machine.
Who’s got methods, data, or delicious failures? If we can’t hit zero, can we at least get to “trace, then tackle” without losing our minds-or our socks?