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Comment by asdff | Hacker News Reader

I go through a 64 gallon trash bin a week. By my back of the envelope calculation thats about 1.3 chevy tahoes worth of trash a year, and that's just me one American out of 400 million so all told we are dealing with maybe half a billion chevy tahoes of trash a year we need to do something with or put someplace if most Americans consume like I do.

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> I go through a 64 gallon trash bin a week.

That seems absurdly large to me.

64 gallons is 250 litres. We're four and we use about one 30 litres (8 gallons) bag for "rest" trash per week (everything not recyclable, including diapers which take a lot of space, so hopefully soon we can at least halve that trash volume) one 30 litres bag for recyclable plastic/metal every two weeks and maybe one 30 litres bag for compostable stuff (mostly just vegetable and fruit peels from cooking) every two weeks or so.

That's about 60 litres or 15 gallons per week for a normal-sized family. I can see some of my neighbours having somewhat larger bags, some with smaller bags, but I feel like we are mostly average for our area (in Belgium).

In fact, a quick search tells me that Belgians have produced on average 683 kg of trash per year in 2022, which comes to 13 kg per week per person and seems rather consistent with my numbers.

(Fellow country man here!) That still sounds like a lot to be honest. According to the yearly stats we receive from our trash collector: in 2021 our family of 4 produced 27,50kg of non-recyclables. That's not per month or per person but for all of us for the whole year. Granted, no diapers anymore here; that takes quite some space (and weight, which is more important since we pay per kg).

We saw a significant drop after they started collecting plastics separately. We have a 120 litre bin that we put to the curb every two months or so. I don't quite understand what people are throwing out all the time that you can fill a large bin every week...

Its a 64 gallon bin but I'm not packing it in either, trash is bagged. I guess I should have figured that based on the reaction in the comments. I'm probably tossing in 2-4 13 gallon tall kitchen bags of trash into there a week and even that much is enough to have it fill up to the top of the lid. I can squeeze in two weeks of trash in there if I forget to put it out for pickup one week but no further.

Also family of four: we fill a 120l garbage bin per week, to the brim, and a 120l compost bin every two weeks (this one maybe is not full, but it stinks by that time) and a ton of "recyclables" (cardboard, paper, metals, plastics).

> Also family of four: we fill a 120l garbage bin per week

What goes into this since you already recycle bio, cardboard, plastics and metal? My "generic trash" is a 25 liter bag that I empty about once a month or so. Since most things go to the specific recycling containers, the generic waste is dominantly just napkins and tissues that shouldn't go to bio.

I don't have kids so no diapers or anything like that, but 120l weekly sounds still a lot after recycling.

Do you put garden waste (bushes, grass) in the compost bin? Otherwise it feels an order of magnitude off.

We have a very small compost bin in the kitchen that is frequently (about once a day) emptied into a garbage can with lid in the garage, which is then infrequently dumped into a compost pile. The particular combination of materials going into the garage compost can (like coffee grounds, citrus peels) gives it a spicy rather than putrid odor when the lid is opened.

I tired to do a compost last year but I live near a stream and tons of small flying insects infested the compost bin. It would never get hot enough to compost, ants moved in after the flies left in the spring. My climate is hot during the summer but even compost started wouldn’t help.

I have lots of kitchen waste, grass waste, and plenty of brown organic matter I can add that’s around my yard. The bugs love it.

> t would never get hot enough to compost

Sounds like too much water content and/or not enough air for aerobic bacteria to get to work. Tossing the pile with a pitchfork somewhat frequently should help it.

Unfortunately, compositing when you live with wildlife is a challenge. I don't bother because if the raccoons didn't get into it, the bears would, and both are annoyingly messy when they do. I even had a bear do structure damage to my garage when she broke in to get at the garbage one year.

I have a special compost barrel that was given to me. It has rollers and small holes. Raccoons and other animals are not able to get into it. Bears are not much of a concern.

I’ll try again with more dry leaves. Spring is close to starting in my area.

Cardboard strips, egg cartons, and (untreated) sawdust or animal bedding style wood shavings can make for some good dry material as well if your compost is in fact too wet. Good rule is to layer it while you are building the pile, then turn twice a week once it is going / ready to go.

Your local hardware store may also have some compost kickstarter liquids as well, which might be helpful if you want to get it going before too many flies or ants come out to infest the pile.

I also live near a stream. I don't notice lots of insects in the pile, but I'd only really worry about flies on meat, and I don't put meat scraps in the pile.

How large is your property? I can put the actual pile some distance away on a > 1 acre lot.

In the past, I composted cat litter (paper variety, not clay) in a compost pile, and that did cause serious odor problems. Don't do that.

We put our compost bag in the bottom compartment of the fridge. It doesn't smell or leak there and for especially smelly things, we first wrap them in a smaller compostable bag before putting that in the city-provided bag.

We nominally go through a garbage bin a week... but if you compact it down it isn't anywhere near full. It's just effectively impossible to compact as an end user without special appliances.

I think a lot of people make the mistake of looking at a quantity of trash and measuring it by apparent visual volume, but that's not a very useful measure. Mass is a lot closer to a useful number. Many things that visually appear enormous are in fact not that big a deal, many things that visually seem small actually represent a lot of resources.

Yeah I am using the visual volume measure here. Its probably 2-4 13 gallon kitchen bags of trash in there usually but that is enough to fill up the 64 gallon bin up to near the lid, sometimes push it up a little. Of course all the data in the literature out there is using weight as their metric, and I have no idea how much weight I am tossing, just a loosely packed volume of trash.

Check your municipal waste centre. Mine, in Limburg (NL), recycles diapers.

Interesting, I wonder how they process them and what they become after recycling. Here in Antwerp diapers are explicitly supposed to be put in the rest[0] though.

[0]https://www.antwerpen.be/info/restafval

If you search for "luier recycling" you can find out how it's done.

https://nos.nl/artikel/2250937-fabriek-voor-recyclen-poeplui... very interesting, I hope it comes here in the future even though it will be too late for me :)

Chiming in to also state how absurd this sounds to me.

I live in a household with 3 adults generating trash, we don't even fill up a 190L bin every 2 weeks in between pickups, usually when I roll the bin to the street it will be about 1/3 to 2/3 filled. We have a compost bin about the same size which also gets about 1/3 to 2/3 filled every 2 weeks.

Apart from that our recycling bins (about 60L for the paper/plastic ones, 20L for glass and metal) gets filled in about 4-6 weeks which I then take to the recycling station.

In summary as 3 adults we generate in the absolute top end about 117 gallons of non-compostable trash a month (those are very rare instances), so about 30 gallons a week for 3 adults even when adding up all the recycling we do.

And my household of two produces 20l of regular non-recyclable trash every month, 40l of plastic trash every month, maybe a couple of kilos of organic waste per week. But we buy a lot of organic and glass where possible.

I'm not compressing my trash or anything. I don't even push down the kitchen trash because the sooner I take it out to the main bin the less likely it starts to reek for whatever reason. Then of course I don't compress the 64 gallon roller bin because it gets collected weekly, but by visual measure I am filling it up to the lid with 2-4 of these 13 gallon bags a week. They are kind of a terrible shape to slot in efficiently into this sort of bin the city has provided. One bag falls down vertically where it narrows substantially then two more fall on top of that, and the bin is pretty much filled to the lid at that point without some force and tetris.

That's an insane amount of generated trash. My husband and I combined might fill our 13 gallon kitchen trash can once every four days. Is your lifestyle primarily eating out/prepackaged foods?

I'm not filling the thing up to the brim or tamping anything down, probably 3 13 gallon kitchen bags fit in it before the lid is pushed open.

That’s obscene. My family does maybe 1.5 small bags of non compostable/recyclable each week - Brabantia X size

That would be 1.2 cubic miles a year uncompressed. Quite a lot but also not that much.

Cubic miles? Strange measurement unit...

I wanted to go with cubic acres ...

https://sundaycomicsdebt.blogspot.com/2015/02/scrooge-math.h...

Hogsheads are more intuitive.

We're in a thread that opened with chevy tahoes... I'd say it's an improvement, even if there's some way to go still :)

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