Trash: Not quite out of sight, out of mind for cruisers
Do you remember the People Are Good video that I shared back in August? If not, you may want to go revisit this post. I found the video quite inspiring. Well, Rob Greenfield has been at it again, and his most recent project was designed to help illustrate how much waste our modern lifestyle creates. And he did it in a pretty creative way!
Waste management is an important subject for cruisers, because unlike most North American dirt dwellers, we don’t have the ability to simply stick our garbage out by the side of the road at night, and wake up in the morning to see that it has magically disappeared. No, each bit of trash that we create on our boat needs to be stored, at least temporarily, and then transported to shore for disposal, either by us or by someone we pay to take care of the dirty work for us.
Not quite out of sight, out of mind!
Our current procedure is to store our trash in our aft-most locker until it’s time to get rid of it. When we were in Grenada, we would often hang on to those bags until Sunday morning when an enterprising young man named Raymond would go boat-to-boat to collect it (we paid him $5.00 XCD for that service). Here in Martinique we are fortunate that there is free garbage disposal on shore, and even recycling bins in certain areas! That is not the case in many places.
The trick, of course, and what Rob was attempting to get across, is to minimize the waste that we create in the first place. That is not only beneficial for cruisers, reducing the work that we need to do to get rid of the trash, and the money that we have to pay for its disposal, it’s beneficial, vitally in fact, for the environment! I am in no way going to profess that we are great at reducing waste, or that we’re even good at it. We are aware of it though, and do try.
Do you have some tips on how you minimize waste? If so, please share them in the comments here.
In addition to what you said, cruisers continue to be reminded of the trash we generate for these islands in a few other ways – the smell of burning trash that is a constant in the Caribbean, and waste in the water when garbage is mishandled trash and gets washed out to sea.
Very true!
We live in 720 sq foot apt so we don’t have that much more room than a decent size cruiser. Apartments and condos are notoriously bad for separation of what can be recycled.
1. Buy in bulk as much as storage room permits.
Bulk meat = one styrofoam plate instead of 3-4 smaller portions each with their own styrofoam.
2. we re-cycle at the store…Costco sells a box of quaker oats. Inside are 2 paper bags. At our car we remove the 2 bags, put them into a reusable grocery bag and then place the box into Costcos recycling
We just returned from the grocery store here in Martinique. They do somethings well here, and some things not so well.
On the plus side, you must use re-usable grocery bags. In some stores that is the only option: bring your own or buy them. In other stores, if you forget yours and don’t want to purchase any more, you’ll be charged for the plastic ones.
On the not so good side, we were pretty much forced to put all loose produce into individual plastic bags because we have to print off labels, and attach them to the bags for the clerk to scan them.
We use the 5 gallon jugs of drinking water on for our sailing school trips eliminating 70 liter size plastic bottles a week.
We use recycle glass bottles as much as possible. The is a local bottling company that recycles some flavors of pop and of course beer.
We bring tubs and our own bags when we go shopping – and we do a lot of shopping.
We pick up trash we see on the beach.
We buy eggs in bulk and use our own egg cartons.
Reducing the trash you consume is huge once you start to realize what your doing.
Thanks Mike & Rebecca for being part of the solution!!!!
I KNOW you guys are conscious of this. I have seen the lengths you go to recycle, on an island where it is only jus’ now becoming possible to do so.
It’s unfortunate that the water tanks in all boats weren’t maintained well enough to allow for them to be used for drinking water.
Installing a good water filter system (all of ~ $35 if you know how to buy generic parts) was the best trash reduction step yet. It really is simple to keep the water system safe and good-tasting!
http://sail-delmarva.blogspot.com/2014/06/drinking-water-filtration-short-version.html
Otherwise, I do my best to cook based on fresh veggies, fish I catch, or shell fish I collect. Minimal packaging. Other than that, no good tricks.
Thanks, Drew. Although we do not yet have a water filter, we cleaned our water tanks, and thus are happy to drink the water straight from the tap. No problem with taste.
I made my own grocery bags out of Dacron (http://jdfinley.com/diy-tote-bags/) – somewhat for practice but mostly to reduce my use of plastic sacks. Super strong and hold a bunch of stuff! I sure wish the grocery “manufacturers” would minimize packaging – that’s probably counter to “marketing” though… 🙁
Yes, that is the real problem.