On Wednesday, we wake up with a focused intention to create no garbage. We bring our water bottle, our coffee mug- and don't buy or use anything where the packaging can't be composted or recycled- and we try not to generate any food waste.

Nearly everything can be recycled or reused, but certain materials pose greater challenges. Plastics is one. The simple truth about plastic We have massive numbers of types of plastic, and each has a resin identification code. They must be sorted before they can be recycled, so they cost more to recycle. Plastic is made from oil, natural gas and chemicals. That means it is a nonrenewable resource that will last as long as 100 years in a landfill.

This is a game that everybody in the house play. This has been done on college campuses, and even as a publicity exercise on a national morning show. It is a very effective and fun way to tune into the issue of the resources we waste, especially in the form of packaging! This has even been done by companies - in Japan for example, 2800 companies vowed to get to Zero Waste within a year, and they all succeeded.

"Waste is a resource in disguise. It represents a failure of our processes and products and a loss of money. We recommend that the entire concept of waste should be eliminated from our thinking and the word resource be substituted."- Zero Waste Alliance