- Hi, I'm Cindy Villasenor,
I'm a garden consultant, garden educator, environmentalist,
and low-waste advocate.
Today, I will be sharing five tips.
These tips I'm sharing with you all,
are there for you to get a start in low-waste living.
I ended up taking a urban farm internship.
I learned about urban farming,
zero waste farming.
That's where I really started,
including a lot more low-waste living in my life.
It became a very big part of what I share online.
And one of my friends actually started calling me,
cero-waste Cindy, and it stuck.
I often times call it low-waste living,
or low-waste lifestyle because we all make trash,
we also don't see the trash that is made behind the scenes,
for example, a big pallet of food,
is actually wrapped in lot of plastic at grocery stores.
And that's the background trash,
so we do not have to notice.
It's not perfectly zero waste, but I am trying my best.
It all depends on accessibility,
as well as privilege of time.
A waste audit is something that will give you
a head start on your low-waste journey.
To see and reassess what other steps,
extra steps, you can take,
towards a low-waste living lifestyle.
There's a couple ways that you can do it.
Do a tally as you throw away things,
the end of the day, or the end of the week,
look through your trash,
take note of all the trash that's in your trash.
What's something that I can do,
so that is reduced, significantly, or maybe even,
make it something that's not in your trash anymore.
So another tip would be,
replacing your throwaway paper towels or napkins
with reusable ones.
I have one right here that is a linen napkin.
I also have a cotton towel right here
that I use for cleaning.
I wanna say this is a linen blend,
that we use to dry dishes.
This is actually secondhand, that someone gave it to me.
All of these napkins here, it's towels,
replacing throwaway paper towels and napkins.
If you are worried about sanitation
of your reusable paper towels,
there are two things that you can do.
You can either boil it in hot water, in your kitchen,
or you can throw in with their load of clothes.
When am making an extra load of just paper towels,
and we seen extra water.
I've been doing this, three years now,
and we haven't bought any paper towels
or napkins ever since.
Reuse and repair, whenever possible.
In my household, we reuse what we can.
Even plastic containers.
If you grew up in a Latinx household like I did,
I always watched my mom reuse butter containers
for the Salsa.
We're always reusing things.
I have this jar right here,
that actually have dried herbs that I dry myself.
Then we have this plastic container that I ended up with
and I'm holding some raisin.
It's so easy for us to say,
"Okay, well this is it, let me throw it away."
We got to get out of that mindset
and always repair what we can.
If it has a little rip,
sew it up, patch it up and keep reusing that item,
until you can no longer use it.
If something is really damaged,
one of the things you do with them,
is actually turning them into your reusable,
paper towels or napkins.
Cooking more homemade meals if time permits.
As well as using whole foods.
And what I really mean by whole foods
is a whole food liKe, a butternut squash or a potato.
I go to the markets and I look for items,
that are package-free, example potatoes.
I look around to see what's available to me personally.
And then from there am able to make up,
and look for recipes that fit for my lifestyle.
It's pretty awesome to just grab a vegetable,
a protein like beans and rice and make a whole lot of it.
What's really cool about that process,
is that I tend to avoid a lot of processed foods,
because those usually are packaged.
Because of COVID, has been a little bit harder.
The ways that I worked around it was,
I started to get CSA boxes.
CSA box is a community supported agriculture farm box,
as well as different things,
that come into reusable containers like a glass jar.
There's definitely, a little ways around it,
and different things that you can always work on.
And my last tip for today is,
growing your own food if possible,
as well as composting.
Because those go, really well together.
It doesn't have to be anything fancy.
It could be in a container like this,
where you drill little holes,
and you grow your own little herbs like Cilantro, Dale.
When you end up growing your own food
you actually are starting to avoid
a lot of the packaged stuff at the store.
So another thing that goes well with
growing your own food is composting.
So there's different methods of doing that.
And it all really depends on your space.
And when you compost what happens is that,
like this food scraps right here,
instead of going to the trash are being recycled back
into the earth.
Instead of going to the landfill,
creating that thing that goes up into the atmosphere.
In my situation, I have a vermicomposting bin.
I also have a compost tumbler.
Now a compost tumbler,
is actually a bin, that is lifted up from the ground,
where you just keep churning and churning.
And also, I'm able to drop off my compost,
at a local community garden.
So I actually have those three options.
And I feel very fortunate for that.
Any organic matter that comes into my house,
whether it's food scraps, even brown paper bags
and things like that all end up in the compost.
We don't end up taking our trash, we probably take it out,
about once a month.
So that's been the very cool thing about composting
is that you do significantly reduce the amount of trash
that is coming out of your home.
Hopefully all of these tips today will help you strive
for a low-waste lifestyle.
Low-waste savings isn't just about the plastic packaging,
or how much trash you make.
It's also about, changing our mindset around material goods
and over consumption of materials,
that we actually don't need.
Our actions and the way we live,
can affect anything else that lives near us,
whether it's an animal,
whether it's the mountain range near us.
You just have to really remember to connect and remember
that we are a part of this whole ecosystem
that we share together.
(slow beat music)