Chicken Dinner

I obviously need to change the way I do some things.  In an attempt to truly document the amount of trash in my life, I have to start fresh, right? So today, being Sunday and the end of daylight saving time, I got up waaaaay too early on my day off and did a few things.

First, I cleaned up the kitchen from last night's dinner extravaganza.  Nearly every night that my spouse (whom I shall call Sam in a thinly veiled attempt at anonymity) cooks dinner is a major production. Sam is a chef and really loves to cook, at home and at work.  The cleaning part of cooking? Not so much. 
So, I began loading the dishwasher, rinsing out the empty bottles and cans and opened our under-the-counter trash bin to toss in the random bottle caps, paper towels and plastic safety wrappers.
This is what I found in the trash;

That's recyclable, dammit!

That's a rotisserie chicken container right there in the garbage. With the carcass inside. And some carrot peelings.  So I take it back, Sam does clean up. Sam cleans up in the same way that a million billion other people* clean up.  Toss it in the trash!  You would think that after living with someone <ahem, me> for 18 years, a person would know better.  This is why I am not trying to change my spouse's ways with my personal project.  It would be pointless.  All I can do is focus on me and hope to lead by example (ha! fat chance!). 

After tossing the kitchen trash into the outdoor giant wheeled garbage can (what is that, 64 gallons? I'll have to find out...) and reloading the kitchen bin with a fresh plastic grocery sack , I created my own separate garbage can. This way, I can see my own refuse and Sam is my control group.  Thanks for being my lab monkey, honey!

Continuing to clean up a bit, I vacuumed the dining room.  When I went to empty the crap out of it, I didn't want to dirty my fresh, clean wastebasket.  Trash already? No way! My first act of actual behavioral change was to dump the vacuum canister into the compost bin instead of the trashcan. Whew. That was easy.  

*Not a confirmed statistic, I made that number up. It's called hyperbole, people.