33 Ways to Reduce Carbon Footprint of Trash

Aug 30

14 min read

Energy from trash, including single-use containers, paper and cardboard, is nearly 6% of the total U.S. carbon footprint that is warming our planet. Here are 33 ways to reduce the carbon footprint of trash with practical actions.

Julie Smith, 8/26/26

This is a summary of Chapter 22, What a Waste!, in the book, “2050: What’s it Gonna Be?”. You can download the full chapter, as well as other chapters. References are here.

In the U.S., we send 266 million metric tonnes (mmt) of waste to landfill annually,¹ pretty much all of which is either recyclable or compostable. That works out to 1,765 LBS per person, nearly a ton every single year, almost 5 LBS per day. I mean, for crying in the night, how absolutely absurd is that? Our landfills take up 44,500 acres of land, and emit 109 mmt per year in CO₂e, in the form of lost CO₂ uptake of the land itself and anaerobic decomposition of biodegradable materials that would be better composted. Collection and transportation of the waste from our trash cans to landfills emits yet more CO₂e from the fuel. All this waste, in addition to the litter tossed out the car window by the truly clueless is playing big in decimating our wildlife in addition to the many other ways we kill.

Americans, despite being only 4.4% of global population, produce 20% of the world’s garbage.^2,3,4 As you can see in Figure 1,⁵ a huge portion of our waste is single-use packaging, which is no wonder, since packaging is yet another gargantuan powerful big corp industry. Globally, it’s valued at about $1 trillion. Not trivial, and a major reason why recycling and circular economy legislation at the Federal level is unlikely any time soon since, as always, big corp prefers to keep selling us packaged products so they continue to profit from it.⁶ Basically all that we toss could be kept within our circular economy, saving energy through recycling and re-use, rather than extracting yet more raw materials to constantly make more new, fresh packages and other products. However it’s not. Evidently we can’t be bothered.

The first four categories, paper, glass metals and plastics, are all easily recyclable in single-stream recycling programs, which are available either curbside or at a recycling center, depending on where the city or town happens to be with respect to progressively joining the 21^st century and demonstrating some level of responsibility for our planet. For plastics, that’s not actually 100% true, because of the unnecessary plastic bags and films and Styrofoam that swath so much of the food and stuff we buy, none of which can be recycled with single stream recyclables. We also have the endless array of plastic items and packaging that slips through the cracks, as it were, like the 900 million toothpaste tubes we pitch every year,⁷ or all the tooth brushes, disposable razors, Brita filters, most personal care products, creams and makeup containers, all our pens and markers, just to name a few of the products we use regularly. You get the picture. Think about that. Look around your house.

If we assume that about half of the plastic that goes to landfill is recyclable in a single stream program, then it’s safe to say that about 42% of landfill waste could be recycled in curb side programs. The rest of the plastic, along with the rubber, can be recycled with TerraCycle boxes,⁸ and the leather can be composted. Textiles can be recycled with either TerraCycle or RidWell.⁹

Food scraps and yard trimmings combined make up the second biggest mass of landfill waste, at 34%. These are the main contributors to landfill CO₂e emissions, and should always be composted, where they can be used beneficially to nourish our food crops in a full circular economy instead of contributing to the warming of our planet. The wood and leather also biodegrade anaerobically in landfill, though much more slowly than the food. The paper and paperboard also contribute to CO₂e through anaerobic decomposition, at a rate somewhere between the rotting food and the rotting wood. Adding it all up, about 66% of our landfill waste contributes to greenhouse gas emissions, when it should be composted, with huge reductions in CO₂e, since the methane gas from anaerobic decomposition is more than 20 times more potent than the CO₂ from composting, which is an aerobic process. The final “other” category is bits of dirt, pebbles and rocks that find their way to the land fill, no real harm done, other than a waste of transportation. But still.

It turns out that the manufacturing of single-use packaging, including all the raw material extraction, industrial manufacturing and final disposition to landfill, comprise nearly 6% of our carbon footprint in the U.S. That’s right. 6%. Getting rid of this would be a decent next step in our journey towards 80% reduction in gross carbon footprint. Ya think? And, the truth is, it’s not hard. Unless you think you shouldn’t have to bother since nobody else is. Or you have an aversion to doing the dishes. Which I would call out as pure unabashed entitlement. And laziness. And I’ll remind you that you’re not royalty, so you might want to get over yourself and do a little work around the house. Which includes being responsible for stuff you just had to have and buy and use in your home. It may not be easy, but it can be done. We’ve been a zero-waste household for about 10 years so far, and it took us about 20 years before that to get there, one small change at a time. If we can do it, so can you.

Contrary to what one might expect, the lion’s share by a long shot among our single-use packaging is pulp and paper, at 4.2% of gross carbon footprint. Whoda thunk? While we hear a lot about plastic in particular, as well as metals and glass, our paper and cardboard is the biggest contributor, by a long shot. So, how can that be? Hmmmm. Well, for one thing, it’s the sheer mass that we produce, 80 million metric tonnes, but worse than that is the 460 million metric tonnes of trees that are logged in the U.S., over 60% of which goes to paper and paperboard, the rest being used for wood for construction and other products. 80% of pulp and paper is used for single-use products. The carbon footprint of all that logging in terms of CO₂ absorption sink loss is the biggest contributor, bigger than all the energy used in the actual logging machinery and processes, and the industrial processes to make the final paper and cardboard.

Another reason that pulp and paper is so huge is that, in addition to single-use packaging, I included all single-use paper, which includes all the printed single-use paper, as well as idiotic and unnecessary paper like plates, cups, napkins, paper towels, tissue paper and toilet paper. Yes, you read right. Toilet paper. Almost as big a marketing brainwash scam as bottled water. Seriously. And, the worst thing is, in addition to literally never hearing about that in general media, as pointed out in Chapter 12, we get a huge amount of our paper in the U.S. from other countries, particularly from Canada, where Kimberly-Clark scrapes 100,000 acres annually of old-growth boreal forests²² for Scott Tissue, destroying precious wildlife habitat so that we can blow our noses and wipe our butts and flush it away.

Here are 33 ways to reduce carbon emissions of trash:

Buy bulk without a container as much as you can. Don't put all your produce in separate plastic bags, just toss them in a single bag at the store and put them in containers at home.
Always recycle. Recycling saves 97% of the carbon emissions for aluminum, 52% for glass, 53% for tin and metal, 51% for plastic and 79% for pulp and paper. Curbside single-stream recycling programs take all of these.
For oddball stuff like plastic film, mixed plastic, textiles and plastic lids, and corks, to name a few, RidWell picks these up curbside.
For pens and markers, footwear and other oddball stuff, check TerraCycle for options.
Avoid Styrofoam food containers completely. They are absolutely not recyclable and they leach toxic monomers into your food, especially if it's hot. Ask the proprietors to use something else for to-go, or bring your own to-go containers (what we do) or get your take-out somewhere more responsible.
If you get stuck with Styrofoam blocks in packaging, do two things. First, find a place near you to recycle it, there are many centers that will take the blocks. Second, ask the vendor to use something beside Styrofoam in their packaging.
Be aggressive about mail order shipments that contain excess filler, like Styrofoam and bubble wrap. They can just as well use paper and compostable corn foam packaging. Tell them you don't want that, and if they don't comply, buy your stuff somewhere else.
Disposable diapers should be avoided completely. In the U.S., they are in the top 40 of plastic garbage found on land, and the top 25 of plastic found on the floor of the ocean.¹⁰ Use a diaper service with cloth diapers, or simply wash them yourself like my mother did for her four children. There are compostable diapers out there, and they should be used and composted if you must have the convenience of single-use diapers.
Precycle. This means don't buy anything that can't be recycled. For parties, get paper glitter, not plastic, tea in bulk or compostable bags, not in plastic bags. By the way, most tea in grocery stores is in plastic, which leaches into your hot tea. Gross. Get salt in bulk, or a simple box, rather than a complicated multi-component grinder/shaker thing. You get the idea. It's not hard. Just think about what you're doing and what's going to happen to the container when you're finished with it.
Skip the single-use cutlery, plates, and cups. Get back into the habit of washing the dishes. If you have a big event that requires more dishes than you have, find a service that can provide dishes, or get your friends to help by bringing theirs. If you have a catered event, choose a caterer that will bring real food service and not disposable. After all, you’re the customer, so you can call the shots.
Skip the single-use paper towels, napkins. There are such things as cloths, cloth towels and cloth napkins. Use those.
Are you sure you need that new, upgraded electronic gadget? Are you sure you’re ready to update your cell phone or your computer? Can you not squeeze a little more life out of it? Naturally, big corp wants to sell you another, and can be quick to remind you that you have enough points for an new one, but can you maybe hold off on it, instead of just getting one because Samsung told you to? Americans throw out 350,000 cell phones per day, and only 15 to 20 percent of electronic waste is recycled.⁴⁶ That’s just ridiculous, especially when so much electronic waste could be reused or refurbished, and at a time when we absolutely need to keep the components of our electronic gadgets within a circular economy. If it’s really time to upgrade, at least be responsible and recycle it.
I’m forever astounded by the incredible array of complicated gadgets for hand washing dishes. I mean, really? The sponges, combinations of sponge and scrubby, dispensers for dish soap, etc. Seriously. All of these things fail or wear out in no time, then you need another. And, it turns out sponges get really nasty with bacteria, and are in fact the worst source of germs in the kitchen. Yuck. You can clean them by soaking in extremely hot water or running them in the dishwasher on hot cycle, which in my view is a waste of energy and wouldn’t work for us since we do all of our dishes with cold water. We prefer a simple life, so we use a cloth that we can wash when it gets grungy. We also have green scrubbies (no gross sponge attached) and an iron scrubber for more challenging tasks. We soak those in Clorox as needed.
Re-use plastic bags and aluminum foil, and get re-usable containers with snap tops for storing food. We haven’t purchased plastic bags or aluminum foil for more than 10 years, and we still have a box of each in the pantry. We’ve basically stopped using it, so it just sits there. Our strategy for avoiding plastic film, bags and foil is to find another way to cover food. My favorite is to simply put a plate over a bowl, which is great because it allows us to stack something else on top of the bowl if the fridge is really full. We use re-usable beeswax food wraps for containers that we can’t fit a plate on. We use re-usable stasher bags and cloth bags instead of plastic bags. Plastic bags still show up in our house if we buy bread, and we re-use those until they leak, then recycle them. Most of our bread these days is purchased from Nude Foods in a returnable cloth bag.
Big time, don’t get token useless gifts that people don’t need or want just to give them something. Think through your giving, and give something truly useful, educational, and easily passed along when the time comes. Like a book, a movie, a bottle of wine, home-canned goods like pickles, a coupon for responsible groceries, an experience, like a coupon to go to a responsible restaurant, or a play, or the museum. I’ve been known to give boxes of LED lights, TerraCycle boxes, gallons of my Aspire refillable castile soap, gallon jugs of organic olive oil, even snap tops and beeswax wrappers for sustainable food storage, just to help my loved ones reduce their carbon footprint just a little bit more. And I love to give books on sustainability and healthy eating and responsible purchasing. I can only hope that some of it sticks.
You can literally cut your carbon footprint by 4% just by using less paper and recycling what you do use, to avoid yet more trees being cut down. Use responsible forestry certified paper such as Programme for Endorsement of Forest Certification (www.pefc.org) or post-consumer waste for paper products, including toilet paper and printer paper. Or at least bamboo, or something that grows faster than a tree. By the way, are you aware that bamboo is a grass? A very large grass, but it’s definitely grass.
Better yet, avoid the toilet paper completely by going to pee cloths if you’re a girl, and getting a bidet for brown, where you just use a dedicated cloth to dab off the water. Your bunghole will never be cleaner. Trust me. Remember the COVID toilet paper shortage? We’re just freaking idiots at the end of the day. We so don’t need toilet paper at all. We should grow up.
If you must floss, use compostable floss. I actually do floss, but I don’t do it every day like a brainwashed robot. In fact, there’s absolutely no statistical evidence that daily flossing reduces plaque in any way. That’s just yet more big corp brainwashing. I actually floss if I can feel something stuck in my teeth which, ironically, only happens if I eat meat. I’m serious. And, what I’ll do is, I’ll actually try to pick it out with my metal dental pic, and if that doesn’t do the trick, I’ll floss it out. Mainly, my goal isn’t to get rid of plaque, but to get rid of the food that’s stuck there, that will most definitely lead to rotting of my teeth, because bacteria will feed off that morsel until it’s consumed, and grow a colony at the interface between gum and tooth. Just plain old brushing with toothpowder takes care of the rest. By the way, at 66 years old, I still have all my teeth. And, don’t just use it once. You can rinse it off and use it next time. It’s been at least 10 years since we’ve bought floss. Think of the cost savings of just saying no.
Avoid fast fashion and buy textiles that will last, and that are recyclable, recycled or made from hemp, organic cotton or organic wool.
Another thing that adds up fast in the landfills is feminine products. Use compostable products like Rif Care and Natracare, made from hemp and cotton. There are also plenty of choices out there for reusable cups and tampons.
Say no to plastic straws, and if you can’t be happy without a straw, get your own reusable one. Stainless steel ones are easy to find, and actually quite nice. They look classy too!
When we go to a restaurant, we always ask if they recycle, and if they don’t we take things that we consume like beer bottles and cans with us. We always reject straws and extra napkins, and we have to be quick; sometimes these just appear before you even know what’s happening, and once it’s on the table, it’s yours. If you ask the staff to remove it, they’ll simply toss it in the trash. I’ve had this happen right in front of me, and I had to remove it from the trash and take it home to recycle it. This can definitely be frustrating. If we’re travelling and unfamiliar with a restaurant and their practices, we’ll look inside to figure out how they do things, and if we don’t like what we see, we’ll move on and find another place. Avoiding and dealing with trash that isn’t intended for recycling is not easy. It’s hard. But it’s worth it. Our planet does not need this waste.
Six pack rings are really dangerous because fish and birds get tangled up in them. They can’t be simply tossed into a single-stream collection bin, because they tangle up the separation equipment, similar to plastic bags and film. However, since they are made from polyethylene, they can be stuffed into an HDPE (high density polyethylene) bottle, which is also made from polyethylene. That way, they’ll go through the recycling facility without getting tangled up.
Mend clothing instead of tossing it if it gets torn. Obviously, all clothes will completely wear out sooner or later, and when they do, recycle them rather than just dump them in a landfill.
Don’t wash clothes unless they are actually dirty, because that wears them out faster. I have pants that have only been washed a couple times a year, because they don’t get dirty that often. Eventually I’ll spill something on them, and then it’s time to wash them. I can typically wear a shirt several times before washing it. I have sweaters that have never been washed.
Over 10 Billion plastic pens are sent to landfills every year, and they can’t be recycled in a single stream collection system, because they’re made of random combinations of steel, plastics and petrochemicals. Get a TerraCycle box for pens and markers, and offer it to neighbors as a drop-off point.
Don't just dump toxic products like leftover paints, stains and pharmaceuticals in the trash. This is illegal in most landfills anyway. Find a local drop-off point for those. The landfill can tell you where it is.
Kitchen TerraCycle boxes take any kind of random plastic food trash that can’t go in a single-stream collection system, like plastic inserts, chip bags, black plastic, plastic lids and anything that’s used to package food. An 11” x 11” x 20” tall box costs $130 (2024) and will last a year or more for a family of four, especially if you are really careful about packaging and precycling.
Try to avoid single-use containers from green-wash businesses like Starbuck’s and even the Post Office, who like to make you think their containers are recyclable, but they’re not. As an example, the Starbuck’s website has no recycling solution for plastic inserts for the coffee totes or lids, and they don’t take anything back. They will, however, fill your own personal cup, so the best solution is to completely avoid single-use containers at Starbucks and any coffee shop in general. Same for the USPS bubble wrap envelopes. They’re stamped recyclable, but the USPS doesn’t take them back and they can’t be recycled in single stream. In a word, we’re on our own. All of this can be recycled in a TerraCycle kitchen box if you find yourself stuck holding the bag and ending up with this stuff.
Instead of bagging leaves and sending them to the landfill or the composting facility, try leaving them on the ground. There, they’ll enrich the soil and avoid the need for fertilizer. Sending leaves away is one of the silliest things we do. Yeeeesh. That’s right, put leaves in a bag and send them away in a gas guzzling truck, then use your gas guzzling vehicle to go to Home Depot and buy fertilizer in a plastic bag. Wouldn’t it be just so much easier and cheaper to do nothing? Hello? No raking, no bagging, no driving, no cost. How hard can that be? Think about that.
As the leading consumer of coffee on the planet, in the U.S. we consume 400 million cups of coffee every single day, and go through 136 million paper cups daily.⁴⁷ Is that ridiculous or what? And the hot coffee leaches plastic monomers from the plastic liner, poisoning you. Please don’t be that obtuse loser that uses a single-use cup every time. We can make a big difference in our paper by bringing our own cup. This should be a no-brainer.

32. Do you ever get sick and tired of junk mail? I do. Of course. It turns out that, on average, in the U.S. we consume more paper per capita than any other country on earth, which is why our carbon emissions from single-use paper is 4% of our gross carbon footprint. And our junk mail makes up about 41 LBS per capita,⁴⁸ which works out to a whopping 7.23 million metric tonnes per year. Worse, among U.S. manufacturing industries, papermaking is the first-ranked consumer of water per ton of product, the third-ranked energy consumer and fourth-ranked emitter of toxic pollutants into water.

33. Use these tips and tricks to get rid of junk mail:

Use Websites to block junk mail
Avoid placing your address on surveys, raffles and warranty cards
Buy with cash, don’t provide contact information
When buying on-line, make sure box requesting solicitations is unchecked.
Ask individual senders to remove you from their lists.
www.wikihow.com/Get-Rid-of-Junk-Mail

33 Ways to Reduce Carbon Footprint of Trash

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