About Reduce Your Waste Project

boy-on-beach-with-puppyReduce Your Waste Project is a place to exchange information, stories and successes about, you guessed it, the reduction of waste, and about sustainability in general. Too much goes to the landfill every day, but each of us can make a difference in our own lives by learning how to consume and throw away less. Reduce Your Waste Project informs you about the issues and offers solutions. The “Project” part of the name is intentional. Working toward reducing waste is like any other project one takes on. Changes take time, and as with a project, there are always new and creative ways to address and solve problems.

It all started with Betty and Jon Shelley, who, over the course of several years, gradually lowered the amount of trash they generated, arriving in 2006 to just one 32-gallon garbage can per year. This led to Betty’s successful Less is More class, held mostly in and around Portland, Oregon. Reduce Your Waste Project seeks to take this necessary conversation to the world to help people realize how easy it is to make a significant impact on the environment and climate change.

Waste Facts:

  • Edward Humes, Garbology

    “Our Annual Waste: 19 billion pounds of polystyrene peanuts, 40 billion plastic knives, forks and spoons, 28 billions pounds of food, enough steel to level and restore Manhattan and enough plastic film to shrink-wrap Texas.”

  • The Story of Stuff

    “The US has 5% of the world’s population and uses 30% of the world’s resources.”

  • Wall Street Journal

    "American communities on average spend more money on waste management than on fire protection, parks and recreation, libraries or school books..."

  • The Story of Stuff

    “For every can of garbage put out at the curb, the equivalent of 70 cans of waste is produced to create the trash you put at the curb.”

  • David Wann, Simple Prosperity

    “Since 1900, US population has tripled, but use of materials has increased 17-fold.”