Kim Paymaster was a tad stressed over the Fourth of July weekend. She had family with small children staying over, her water heater was broken, and the local city pool was closed, so her daughter and the other kids couldn’t take a dip to get a break from the heat.
But one thing she didn’t spend much time worrying about was trash — unlike many of her neighbors in Fairmount.
While they struggled to manage mounting piles of increasingly noxious rubbish during the eight-day strike by sanitation crews and other city workers, and debated whether to use the city’s waste dropoff sites, she could focus on entertaining her guests and getting that heater fixed.
“We’ve got a group chat for our block here, and everyone was chatting about, like, ‘Where can we take our trash? It’s overfilled,’ all of these things,” Paymaster recalled. “It’s nice not to have to deal with that.”
Trash “didn’t even enter my mind,” she said, because her family generates so little of it.
“We usually take our trash out about every three to four weeks. I get upset when it’s three,” she said with a laugh.
Instead, they’ve adjusted their daily lives to keep their household waste from ending up bagged at the curb, or from even being created in the first place, she said.
Paymaster is one of a number of zero-waste enthusiasts and sustainability-minded city residents who have figured out how to maximize their composting, recycling and reuse of products to avoid accumulating much trash.
Many also take added steps like bringing their own mugs to coffee shops, buying pasta and shampoo in reuseable containers, and getting clothes at stores, rather than having them delivered in packaging that then needs to be thrown out.
It takes a little extra effort and some relatively modest added costs, they say. But the result is ultimately gratifying for the environmental benefits and the lack of mess in the house — and for the unexpected perk of not minding too much when a once-in-a-generation trash strike comes along.
“It’s very easy to look at your trash situation, and just get very discouraged by it, and just be like, ‘Oh my goodness, this is so overwhelming,’ ” said Kristin Skyrm, a sustainability specialist for a nonprofit organization who lives with her husband in Fishtown. “I’ve implemented little things over a long period of time, and now it’s paying off for the eight days that we had this trash strike — which is great.”
“It’s about the waste you don’t create”
The Philly residents who minimize their waste often describe having a transformative experience that galvanized them to start making changes in their lives.
For Paymaster, who works as a grant program manager at the Conservation Alliance, the turning point was “a kind of meltdown” she had during the pandemic, she said. People stuck at home generated large amounts of residential waste, and the city’s trash collection and recycling programs broke down.
“I saw some story about how horrible the recycling system was, and how nothing was getting recycled, and a lot of it was getting shipped to Asia and elsewhere,” she said. “I went down this rabbit hole of trying to figure things out, and got connected to a plastic reduction group at the Weavers Way Co-op and eventually to Circular Philadelphia.”
Scott Kelly, an architect who lives in Chestnut Hill and is also a Circular Philadelphia member, said he adopted a low-waste life after a long trip across the country in a Volkswagen van and backpacking in the U.S. and Europe.
“You become very conscious of all the resources you use, not just the materials. If you’re out in the woods, hiking for two weeks, carrying everything you have on your back, you may take the paper off the tea bag,” he said. “That gets ingrained in you, and you don’t fall back to the waste that you see around you.”
Circular Philadelphia is a membership organization that promotes measures like recycling, product reuse and reduction of packaging. Many members work in sustainability-related jobs, and they’re passionate about taking advantage of businesses and programs in the city that help them avoid accumulating and throwing out all kinds of stuff, said Nic Esposito, the group’s co-founder and a board member.
“I like to go down to Ray’s Reusables and fill up glass jars full of my soap and things of that nature. Ray’s has a lot of very low-packaging products like toilet paper and paper towels. So it’s about the waste you don’t create,” said Esposito, who was previously the city’s Zero Waste and Litter Director.
Esposito started a company called Unless Kids that reuses toys, essentially renting them to member families until their kids are done with them and ready to get a new batch. He and the others also heaped praise on Rabbit Recycling, an East Kensington company that takes a huge variety of different items — far more than the city accepts in curbside blue bins — and ensures that they’re actually reused in some way.
The company’s pickup service starts at $29 per month for one bin, up to a few hundred dollars for households who need multiple pickups per week.
“I love using Rabbit Recycling. They do the hard-to-recycle items,” Esposito said. “The tube of toothpaste, you can recycle it through them. Light bulbs, batteries. I don’t have to run all over town trying to figure out, oh, where do my batteries go? Where do my light bulbs go?”
“They’ll take everything from electronics that don’t work anymore, to clothes that you don’t know where to take if they’re stained or whatever. A lot of plastic goes in there, and then other random things that they figure out,” Paymaster said. “So it’s lovely.”
Composting for the win
The strategy that was perhaps most impactful during the trash strike was composting, whether in a patio bin or through a pickup service like Bennett Compost or Circle Compost, zero-waste practitioners said. Bennett’s basic plan is $21 per month, or slightly less on an annual plan.
“That definitely reduces our waste a lot. Just based on what I put in my five-gallon bucket every single week, it’s a sizable amount,” said Skyrm, who uses Bennett. “We’ve been getting corn on the cob, especially with the Fourth of July, and that takes up a lot of space in the trash bin. I’ve just really noticed that that’s been a really big way to avoid putting things in the trash that’s going to go to the landfill.”
Not having biodegradables like banana peels, coffee grounds and moldy leftovers hanging around made it a snap to get through the strike, she said. People can also grind up small food scraps in their garbage disposal and let them wash down the drain, Esposito said.
“It’s not just about feeling good about yourself and saying, ‘I’m a zero-waster,’ ” he said. “It also is really nice not to have smelly, gross trash sitting in my trash can all week.”
Kelly’s office uses Bennett, and at home he has a simple backyard composter — basically an upside-down trash can on the ground — where he combines food waste and yard clippings with wood chips and lets the mix gradually break down over several months, he said.
“It’s a small thing, but I just compost so much stuff there that stays out of the landfill. That’s good material, that’s good nutrients that I want back in my soil so I can grow food in my backyard, versus letting it go into a landfill where it will no longer be accessible to nature,” he said.
Zero-wasters acknowledge that changing habits may be harder for some people, like cat owners who have litter boxes, or parents who throw out lots of diapers (although potential solutions are available, they note, such as using washable cloth diapers and having your cat poop outdoors). The costs of composting and recycling services may also be a barrier.
But these practices could have major advantages for many people and for the city as a whole if they are more widely adopted, advocates say.
Esposito, a longtime critic of the city’s waste management strategy, said the strike showed residents that simply depending on conventional curbside pickup and street sweeping — key priorities in Mayor Cherelle Parker’s Clean and Green initiative — doesn’t work, and those must be augmented with innovative efforts to reduce the creation of waste in the first place.
“When they really see all that trash piled up, it’s not ‘out of sight, out of mind’ anymore, the whole ‘it goes away in this magic blue bin or your trash can,’ ” he said. “All the litter that you see, most of it results from our trash days. It’s not just people throwing stuff on the ground. It’s how we pick up our trash, because it’s still stuck in the 20th century.”
Kelly, the architect, called for better education about how to recycle properly, and for people to seize the opportunity to change the way they live.
“This trash strike could be a really good thing, because we’re going to become more aware of our trash,” he said. “This was an opportunity for Philadelphians to understand how to reduce what they consume, reuse what they can, recycle what is recyclable, and learn from this. I want us all to get smarter.”
Editor’s note: Nic Esposito’s title at Circular Philadelphia has been corrected.
