I’ve noticed a little pattern recently, and I thought it would fit right in with the things we learn about here in Money Mustache School, so I’d like to share the story with you.
Tuesday is garbage day in my neighborhood, and that means everyone will be rolling the enormous 96-gallon bins provided by the city, down to the curb. Most of these will be quite full, with about a quarter of them so full that the hinged lid pokes up at an angle, as if in a big dumb salute to Ultimate Wastefulness.
If you’ve never seen a 96-gallon plastic container, it is quite a sight to behold. You could easily hide the entire MMM family in one of these things, or several hundred pounds of various kinds of waste. If you filled it with water, it would weigh 800 pounds. When I’m in the middle of a construction project, I find that I can fit an entire bathroom’s worth of renovation debris into the thing easily.
Although the sheer size and weight of this container would take two strong people to lift when it is full, my city is able to empty thousands of them per day, thanks to a fleet of very sturdy tractor-trailer trucks with hydraulic robot arms on their curb-facing side. The truck roars up to your house and brakes aggressively to a stop, and the robot arm effortlessly picks up the 200-pound container as if it were made of styrofoam, hoists it 16 feet in the air and dumps it into the top of the truck, then slams it back to the curb. Then the truck’s 400-horsepower turbo diesel engine goes straight to full throttle and accelerates the 30,000 pound load of truck and trash for a few seconds before burning the energy back into the brakes and stopping at your next-door neighbor’s house to repeat the process*. This cycle repeats all day, every day, since it takes seven days to make the rounds of the city, by which time it is time to begin anew.
Other than my occasional guilty habit of generating construction debris by renovating other people’s houses, I find that the 96-gallon container would hold between three and six months worth of our normal household trash. In fact, as a way of saving the 30,000 pound truck some gas, I only put our container out to the curb when it gets full, which is once per season or once per construction project, whichever comes first.
Expressed as weight rather than volume, I’ve measured our total trash at 2-10 pounds per week. The average individual person in the US generates 22 pounds per week, meaning you’d expect our family of three to be rolling 66 lbs to the curb every Tuesday. So when comparing both weight and volume to our neighbors and the EPA website above, we seem to be throwing out about 90% less stuff than normal. What gives?
First of all, Mr. Money Mustache is not a holy zero-trash saint like the No Impact Man. I often get ribbed from my own readers in the comments about leading a relatively decadent life.
On the other hand, it does annoy me every time I have to heave something I bought into that big black bin, and this definitely affects my spending patterns – I try not to buy things if I can foresee any part of them ending up in the trash. Since I feel unhappy when throwing things out, I become happier when I avoid this activity. And thus, it is yet another way buying less stuff ends up building happiness – which luckily happens to be perfectly aligned with becoming financially independent as well!
With that justification, I now present
Mr. Money Mustache’s Top Four Ways to build Stash while Reducing Trash:
On the surface, these may just sound like Trash saving techniques, but I find it’s more powerful than that and there is a positive ‘Stash component as well.
A Mustachian’s wealth comes in equal parts from being an optimistic producer who earns a great income, and from being a stubbornly efficient user of this income who refuses to see it go to waste in such an obvious way as the Big Black Bin.
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* I’m actually working on a letter to the head of the sanitation department of my city, since my calculations show if they asked the driver to slow down the peak speed by 4MPH, the fuel savings would be much greater than the extra salary and benefits to pay the worker for more hours. So we’d be saving the city money AND creating more local jobs. The trucks would probably last longer as well, needing fewer brake jobs.
** I think this box of cloth napkins was Mrs. Money Mustache’s birthday present to me for something like my 35th birthday. Best gift ever!