I don't know how many of you have been to Whole Foods lately, but if you get anything from the salad bar or the hot bar, you'll notice that all the containers and cutlery are either recyclable or biodegradable. It's part of a burgeoning trend to produce "zero waste."

Zero waste used to be an ultra-liberal concept - I remember a few years ago when my aunt spoke admiringly of a couple she knew that sent only one bag of trash to the landfill per year. I couldn't even imagine it. 

Nowadays, however, the idea of zero waste is becoming more and more common as landfill permits become more difficult to procure, as places to dump become scarcer, and as we realize the detrimental methane-producing effects of throwing all our trash into the landfill.

Why are landfills going the way of the dinosaur? Simple. Do you want to live next to a landfill? Neither does anyone else. We are simply running out of space to dump our trash. Did you know that every American, on average, discards 4.6 pounds of waste per day? It's much better if we can recycle it, rather than leave it to take up space for thousands of years.

Read the NYTimes article here:

Nudging Recycling From Less Waste to None

There are two challenges to recycling:

1. Sorting is a hassle. People will sometimes inadvertently throw biodegradable items into the recycling bin, which then gets heated up at the recycling center, only to melt and gum up the machines. We either need to be better educated in how to properly dispose of our waste, or we need smart machines that can do the sorting for us.

2. Composting is a tough sell. People are worried that it's stinky, that it will attract pests, and that it's simply just more work than tossing that apple core into the trash and never thinking about it again. But it's a worthwhile effort, because that nutrition gets returned to the soil, rather than being smothered in the landfill, only to produce methane, a gas that contributes to global warming. The key to happy composting is, again, education.

So how about you? Are you close to achieving zero waste, or do you still have a long way to go? Hit me up in the comments section below!