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NO TRASH TUESDAY

“By letting it go it all gets done. The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try. The world is beyond winning.” –Lao Tzu

After placing my mouth over the corner of the sandwich bag, closing my lips gently, inhaling deeply and removing the air from my daughter’s lunch, therefore creating a perfect freshness vacuum in her various snack bags, she politely informed me that it was No Trash Tuesday! In her universe, that means lunches must be brought in plastic trays, re-usable water bottles, and a really cute assortment of teeny Tupperware with the goal of making less trash at school and in the landfills. Besides the fact that we were already 2 minutes late when she told me this, we simply didn’t own all of the above, so I promised we’d have our act together by next Tuesday.

While shopping for the above, my mind wandered beyond the stinky, sticky school lunch yard contemplating just how far we could go with reusing, reducing, and recycling on No Trash Tuesdays! After spending the morning telling my son to carefully choose his words directed towards his sister, I thought repackaging this mantra, “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all!” to reduce trash talk and taunting might help them choose their words more consciously and would benefit our morning commute.

Posted to my employee board at work, was the following article: 15 Things You Should Give Up To Be Happy by purposefairy.com. It focuses on all of the things that we accumulate and carry with us – aka: Baggage. They quoted one of my favorites, Wayne Dyer, “Would I rather be right or would I rather be kind?” I’m told we don’t actually get an Olympic podium at the end of our lives where we receive awards for being right all of the time, earning the gold medal, some of the time, earning the silver, and so on. I like the idea of incorporating letting go of these 15 things go into No Trash Tuesday.

As with any of the above efforts, focusing on it for a day makes us conscious of our habits and behavior and then the goal to increase the habit to make it an ingrained behavior is the long-term goal. What can you do to reduce the trash in your personal dancing space? 

If you need a good Tupperware lady, I know one – not me!

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4 Comments

  1. No problem on the baggie–simply reuse it. We rewash and reuse our baggies all the time…just not those folding plastic sandwich ones my husband insists on buying. I hate washing those out. Everything else can be reused.

    Oh by the way, since we’re talking no waste: glass containers in the fridge are awesome. We got ours at Costco, but Rubbermaid makes them too. They have secure lids and no plastic leaches into your food when you microwave! http://www.rubbermaid.com/Category/Pages/ProductDetail.aspx?Prod_ID=RP091945 And you don’t throw them out like you do the plastic ones. 🙂 And for some reason, I never lose these lids–not like I do the plastic ones!!

      1. they are awesome, I wouldn’t ever go back to plastic. And they are heavy enough that even though we’ve dropped them, they don’t break. At least not on linoleum or hardwood floors!

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