Households in Carver County are creating and throwing away more waste than ever. From junk mail to excess paint to food scraps, this garbage takes time and money to deal with. Fortunately, there’s a lot you can do to reduce your waste at home. Besides, nobody likes taking out the trash!

Reduce Excess Paper

A good portion of what you throw in the garbage each day is paper. Much of the paper generated in our homes comes in the mail. The average American household receives more than 500 pieces of advertising mail each year.

Check with your local utilities and service providers – phone, gas, electric, water & sewer, garbage, cable, internet, banking, credit cards – request paperless statements. Typically, there is no cost to enroll, view, or pay your bills online.

The benefits include:

• It’s easy and secure!
• Viewing your bill online any time, any where, from any Internet connection.
• Reducing the risk of paper bills with your name and address getting lost or stolen.
• Money savings by reducing the need for checks, stamps and trips to the post office.
• Scheduling your payments online save time and avoid incurring late fees.

You can also take action and reduce the amount of unwanted mail you receive by following the easy steps listed on the Junk Mail page.

Reduce Packaging Waste

Packaging makes up 30 percent of municipal solid waste. You can reduce the amount of packaging you throw in the garbage by purchasing items that have less packaging. In addition, over-packaged products often cost more than less-packaged products. This means that you can save money when buying products with less packaging.

For example:

• Reduce the amount of packaging by purchasing concentrates and diluting them with water in reusable containers.
• Avoid single-serving products in favor of larger servings or buying in bulk.
• Take your own reusable cloth bag so you don’t need “paper or plastic”.

Eliminate Mercury 

Mercury evaporates easily and travels great distances through the atmosphere. It is a nerve toxin which ends up in our lakes and rivers, where it accumulates in fish and other creatures. Humans may be at risk if they regularly eat mercury-contaminated fish. Mercury is especially dangerous when ingested by children, pregnant women, and women planning to have children in the future.

The best way to keep mercury out of the home and the environment is to avoid mercury-containing products in the first place. If you do have any of the items listed below, be responsible, and make sure they are taken to the Environmental Center for proper management at the end of their life cycle.

• Fever and cooking thermometers
• Tilt switches in many thermostats
• Steam irons with 15-minute automatic shut-off
• Neon lamps, older batteries
• Fluorescent lamps
• Switches that stop washing machines when the top is open
• “Silent” wall switches
• Mercury vapor, high pressure sodium and metal halide lamps

When buying these types of products, look for non-mercury alternatives, like digital fever thermometers and alcohol-based cooking thermometers. Replacing your home thermostat? Consider a digital or electronic one that contains no mercury.

Did you Know? It is against the law to throw mercury-containing products away in the garbage. Proper management of mercury-containing products means keeping the mercury intact and bringing it to the Environmental Center. Efforts like these to remove mercury from our garbage has meant lower mercury emission levels from waste disposal.

Prevent Food Waste 

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), 27 percent of the nation’s total food supply — 97 billion pounds — went to waste in 1995. Food is wasted in many ways, such as preparing too much, letting fresh food go bad and buying too much.

Planning meals and creating a list of what you need before you go to the grocery store will help you buy exactly what you need. Composting leftover fruit and vegetable food waste with your yard waste helps create high-nutrient compost. Donate excess canned goods to a food shelf.

Making better use of the food you buy will save you money and reduce how much food you throw away. Composting the remaining food waste will provide you with a great additive for your garden.

Use The Least Hazardous Cleaning Products 

In a state the size of Minnesota — about 4.4 million people — approximately 572 tons of liquid cleaners and 132 tons of toilet bowl cleaners are washed down the drain each month.

Read the labels of cleaners and look for the signal words — caution, warning, danger, poison — which indicate the level of hazard. Use the least hazardous product to do the job. (“Caution” is least hazardous and “danger” is most hazardous. Extremely toxic products must also include the word “poison.”)

Read the instructions on how to use cleaning products and be sure to use the correct amount. Remember, you won’t get twice the results by using twice as much.

Reading labels gives you information on how to use a cleaning product correctly and how dangerous a product might be. You could also consider using a substitute for cleaning projects around the house. For example, vinegar and water work well to wash windows and floors. Another idea is to share any excess products with someone else who can use them, such as your neighbor or friend. Instead of buying many different types of cleaners, use one general-purpose cleaner.

With so many choices of products to clean your house, it can be difficult to choose the best one for your household. Buying cleaning products with the least dangerous signal word and using substitutes will reduce the amount of hazardous chemicals in your home.

Buy The Right Amount Of Paint For The Job 

A large amount of paint collected at Minnesota’s household hazardous waste sites is still usable. If stored correctly, paint stays in good condition for a long time. If it mixes smoothly, it can still be used.

Before you begin a painting project, measure the area first. Calculate the area to be painted (height x width = total square feet). One gallon covers about 400 square feet.

To prevent paint from drying out, cover the paint can (use its original container) with plastic wrap, replace the lid securely and store upside down. Protect your paint from freezing. Use leftover paint for touch-up jobs, smaller projects or as a primer.

Using low-VOC or water-based paints, stains, finishes and paint strippers will help keep hazardous chemicals out of your home. Prevent waste through wise purchasing; calculate the right amount of paint for the job. Use leftover paint up instead of throwing it away.

When it comes to conserving resources, preventing pollution and saving money, reducing waste trumps recycling. In this game, businesses and organizations of all sizes can truly do well by doing the right thing.

Office Paper

Copy paper, like the kind used in photocopiers, computer printers and plain-paper fax machines, is the most common type of office waste paper.

• The average office worker uses 10,000 sheets of copy paper each year.
• The U.S. EPA estimates that paper and paperboard account for almost 40 percent of our garbage.
• Office paper is highly recyclable, but a lot gets wasted. Waste reduction is more cost-effective than recycling.
• Nearly 3.7 million tons of copy paper are used annually in the United States alone. That’s over 700 billion sheets.

Tips for Reducing Paper Use

• Try to use both sides of a sheet of paper for printing, copying, writing and drawing.
• Reuse paper that’s already printed on one side by manually feeding it into copiers and printers. Use it for internal documents like drafts and short-lived items such as meeting agendas or temporary signs.
•  Once-used paper can also be reused in plain paper fax machines — they only need one clean side.
• E-mail can be used to share documents and ideas. Be sure to only print the e-mails you need to have a hard copy of. Consider saving your emails as a PDF document. This advice goes for Internet documents as well. Instead of printing a Web page, bookmark it or save the page on your hard drive and pull it up when needed.
• Desktop fax, electronic references (CD-ROM/USB flash drive databases), electronic data storage, electronic purchasing and direct deposit are all ways to use electronic media that reduce office paper waste.
• Help minimize misprints by posting a diagram on how to load special paper like letterhead so it will be printed correctly.
• Practice efficient copying — use the size reduction feature offered on many copiers. Two pages of a book or periodical can often be copied onto one standard sheet.
• Use two-way or send-and-return envelopes. Your outgoing envelope gets reused for its return trip.
• Use reusable inter- and intra-office envelopes.
• Reuse old paper for notepads. It can be cut to custom sizes and simply bound with a staple.
• Draft documents can be reviewed, edited and shared on-screen.

Printing

Printers, designers, and print buyers can incorporate good environmental practices into their work to reduce the overall impact that printed materials have on the environment.

Strategies for Printing Greener

► Print on both sides of the paper, and reduce the width of margins and font sizes. These options reduce waste and save both resources and money.
► Keep your mailing list updated. Evaluate your data, delete duplicates, remove those who have requested to be off, and target your mailings to specific audiences. This can help save money on printing and mailing costs, provide you with a more effective mailing, and reduce waste throughout the printing process.
► Request paper with pulp that is brightened without the use of chlorine. Chlorine bleaching creates a toxic, bio-accumulative waste by-product called dioxin. By demanding alternatives to chlorine-bleached papers, you help create new markets and encourage paper mills to move away from polluting production practices.
► Use paper labeled totally chlorine-free (TCF) or processed chlorine-free (PCF). Both terms mean that the mill did not use chlorine compounds to brighten the paper. Talk to your paper vendor or printer about the price and availability of TCF and PCF papers. Both significantly reduce the persistent, bio-accumulative compounds in the mill wastewater that are associated with the traditional chlorine bleaching process.
► Request inks with non-petroleum bases, such as soybeans or linseed.
► Request inks that emit low amounts of volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Non-petroleum-based inks are usually lower in VOCs.
► Use pre-press technologies that eliminate or reduce hazardous materials, such as direct-to-plate printing.
► Buy paper that is produced by a company with a stated commitment to environmental stewardship, and to minimizing ecological impacts and ensuring long-term sustainable production.
► Purchase and specify post-consumer recycled content papers. This helps expand the recycling market and assure recycling programs stay viable and effective. It also closes the loop by diverting waste from landfills and incinerators. As an added benefit, purchasing papers made from recycled stock means using fewer trees to make the paper.

Buying Green For The Office 

The National Recycling Coalition recently published Purchasing Strategies to Prevent Waste and Save Money. This publication contains many useful ideas on how to purchase products that create less waste.

Here are some purchasing ideas for offices to make the workplace more environmentally friendly.

• Refurbish and buy refurbished office equipment.
• Reuse and refill toner cartridges and ribbons.
• Purchase non-toxic, biodegradable cleaners that contain low- or no-volatile organic compounds.
• Buy concentrates.
• Buy in bulk.
• Buy products that are reusable, returnable or refillable.
• Buy recycled office products that contain post-consumer recycled material.
• Use flexible interior features, such as movable walls, to reduce waste associated with renovation.
• Choose durable materials and furnishings to reduce the costs and waste associated with replacement.

Building Management Tips 

How a building is managed can affect environmental quality and employee health. There are several steps that building managers can take to reduce waste and protect the health of tenants and employees within a building.

• Use reusable dishware in your company’s cafeteria and kitchen.
• Use cloth towel roll dispensers in your bathrooms and cloth napkins and towels in your kitchens.
• Separate your building’s organic wastes from non-compostable trash and send it to a composting facility.
• Use paint and install carpeting that contains low levels of volatile organic compounds (VOCs).
• Work with janitorial service or staff to find ways to use less toxic, non-toxic and/or non-VOC cleaning products.

Put Food Waste To Good Use 

“Unwanted food” may conjure up images or brussels sprouts or fruitcake, but we’re talking about the organized collection of perishable and non-perishable food for feeding the hungry in our communities. Reusing or recycling unsaleable food materials significantly reduces the environmental impact of waste disposal for restaurants, food service vendors, supermarkets, and food suppliers. There are a lot better destinations than the landfill!

Food to People

Food shelves accept food donations in the form of canned or dry goods, and redistribute it to those who are not able to provide basic food requirements for themselves and/or their families.
Food rescue programs collect perishable foods mainly from businesses and redistribute them to food shelf programs or food kitchens. This is often an option for businesses that generate large quantities of unserved food.

Food to Livestock

Food that’s not fit for human consumption can be fed to animals, either directly or after it’s been processed into animal feed. This option is frequently used by grocery stores and other large generators of food waste.

Composting and Recycling

If food wastes are no longer edible, commercial composting can combine them with other organic materials to make a soil amendment. And specialized recycling services are available for materials like grease, cooking oil, and butcher scraps.

Events of all sizes can do a lot to reduce their impact on the environment. From baby showers to National Night Out, to a corporate event, any event can demonstrate the economic and community benefits of going green!

Not sure where to begin when thinking about ways your event can be more environmentally friendly this year? Look no further! Check out these resources for ideas on how to get started with going green at your event!

Event Planning At Home

Event Planning At Work

Some Helpful Tips

► The greenest fit. Destination, accommodation and venue selection are important. Make your greening goals known to all involved in planning and execution of the meeting. Discuss criteria, outcomes and evaluation.
► Put it in writing. Include sustainable practices clauses in your contracts with the venue, caterers and hotels you are recommending to meeting attendees.

Venue and Hotel Selection

Ask the meeting venue and hotels about their environmental practices, including their waste and resource management. Try to find a venue or hotels that:
► Have recycling programs established for all house areas.
► Have clearly labeled recycling bins in place and recycle paper, plastics, glass and metals.
► Have food rescue, food-to-animals or food composting programs collect all food scraps and leftovers.
► Use reusable rather than disposable goods.
► Have an energy efficiency program and use energy-efficient lighting (i.e. fluorescent lighting).
► Minimize using harmful chemicals while cleaning.
► Have bulk dispensers for shampoos and soaps in guest rooms.
► Use post-consumer recycled content paper products.
► Have water-conserving fixtures in place (low-flow shower heads and faucets, toilet flushing).
► Offer guests the option to avoid unnecessary laundering of bed linens and towels.
► Provide guests with paperless check-in and checkout.

Catering

Ask the catering company about their environmental practices. Ask your caterer to:
► Use organic, seasonal, fresh and/or local foods and provide vegetarian options.
► Offer fair trade, shade grown, and organic coffee.
► Accurately count meeting attendees to avoid food waste.
► Avoid using disposable dinnerware and individual packaged items, and use reusable dishware, cutlery, linens and tablecloths.
► Use bulk dispensers for salt, sugar, pepper, creamer and other condiments.
► Use minimal packaging that is recyclable and recycle materials accordingly.
► Compost or recycle food waste, and arrange to donate un-served food to a local food rescue organization.
► Choose reusable centerpieces and decorations.
► During breaks, avoid the use of single-serving beverages, and encourage use of reusable mugs and water bottles.

Travel and transportation

► Connect to the airport by mass transit and/or offer group shuttle services.
► Select a venue location within walking distance to green hotels and/or public transportation.
► Use alternative fuel vehicles to get to and from the meeting and/or airport.
► Provide electronic links and/or maps of public transportation near the venue to attendees in advance.
► Provide bus or light rail tickets along with the registration packet.
► Establish a Carbon-Neutral initiative to counteract the CO2 emissions from your meeting.
► Minimize idling of vehicles in transit and during loading/unloading.

Communications and Marketing

► Use paperless technology (websites, online registration and advertising, etc).
► If written materials are necessary, have them printed with vegetable based inks on post-consumer recycled paper. Print on both sides of the paper.
► Avoid printing excess documents for the meeting.
► Use erasable boards, or electronic gadgets to document meeting discussions, and then e-mail the results to attendees.
► As speakers to minimize handouts; offer to post presentations on a web site.
► Use recycled paper nametags or reusable name tags that participants return at the end of the event.
► Consider broadcasting the meeting over the Internet to minimize air travel.
► Consider reusable or edible products as giveaways. Reusable mugs or water bottles are great, and can be used during the event.

At the Event

► Use signage to clearly mark all recycling and composting containers and sustainable menu selection options.
► Post signage for event attendees with energy and water conservation prompts.
► Ask participants to recycle or turn-in reusable nametags at the end of the event.
► Post information about transit and alternative transportation options in a central place.
► Announce the green goals of the event to participants and ask for their assistance to meet them.
► Develop and report metrics such as water and energy savings, composting, and other sustainable objectives during the event and lessons learned.
► Highlight any extra steps the event site has undertaken to become more sustainable.
► Ask participants to evaluate the sustainability aspects with a questionnaire at the event or an email survey sent directly following the event.
► Calculate and report results of sustainability initiatives at the event and post event outcomes on event website.