May was a wonderful and busy month with many highs (traveling to see my wonderful Grandma, buying our first house!!!, and wonderful times with family & friends) and just a few small lows.  Overall we’re still happy with the decision to do this “extreme” challenge and try to have a zero waste/low waste home in 2016.

It’s hard to put yourself out there, and I just want to say again that I’m so grateful for your support and help as I open my life to share our ups and downs on this journey. I’ve been dealing with more anxiety and stress recently than I’d like – probably brought on by a variety of things coming together at once like buying a house (!!), work deadlines and balancing family/motherhood/etc. I’m grateful to have this space and Instagram, etc. to chat with you and share our successes and things we find beautiful/interesting/funny/amazing/powerful. Thank you!

Here’s our landfill waste for May 2016:

During May we began to pack up for our move and therefore there’s more trash in there than I’d like. It’s funny, however much I feel I’m “dramatically” reducing my possessions and streamlining my family’s life and giving myself gold stars left and right for progress, we are still going through drawers, cabinets, bags and bins and coming up with random little bits of trash.

I’m not sure I’ll necessarily ever want to catalog every item in our trash because I’m sure there will typically be some candy wrappers, misc. food packaging, labels/stickers, etc. and I’m not sure justifying every piece is up my alley at the moment. I do go through it on my own and think about where I can improve. This is as much detail as you guys probably need, anyway 🙂

We’re using an old non-recyclable dog food bag (we’re now using a different food) as our trash bag for the year. I wanted to be able to say that this bag holds all of our landfill trash for 2016 so far, but my husband thinks that we did throw out our January trash already. Anyway, here’s a look at the bag we will be putting in our trash bin (our landlords bin, actually) before we move. In our new home we will only have a recycling bin.

I love hearing from you and answering your questions big and small – please shout them out in the comments or chat with me on Instagram. Or if you prefer a less public chat, feel free to send an email: meredithtested@gmail.com.