Ever since I read Zero Waste Home about 5 years ago, my life has transformed. It helped spur me to start my personal organization business, (BalaganBeGone) and quit my job in graphic design. It also helped me reduce what I have and be more minimalist. (I plan to write more about this is a future post.)
Being Zero waste is more than just recycling, it is about selecting new products with little or no packaging, it is about considering my purchases and deciding if I really need something or if it just marketing making me want to buy it.
2015 was the first year I had Passover in my home for all 7 days. Prior to 2015, I had packed up my family and gone to my parents. There were a few years where my husband came home to work on the intermediate days and so I didn’t have much stuff for Passover, I didn’t need it.
When I found my self hosting 15 people for the Seder last year, I faced a conundrum, do I go out and but single use plates, forks, spoons, knives, napkins, and cups, or should I buy a set of reusable. I opted for reusable, (only needing to buy plates and glasses because my silverware was able to be made kosher for Passover, and linens can be washed to bekosher for Passover) but, here is the rub, having all this extra stuff I use only for Passover doesn’t align with my minimalist life.
This year when I unpacked our Passover stuff it made me kind of sad we had so much stuff. I only have 7 boxes of stuff for Passover, considerably less than my parents, the only thing I can gauge by, but it still feels like a lot, and even with these I hardly have anything to store or warm food in for Passover so I do end up using aluminum pans. I looked at our garbage output for this past week, and it was at least triple what we normally put out. *Sigh*
What’s a personal organizer to do? I think we can do better next year, for this year I take solace in the fact that I was still able to compost, which is a big part of our waste, that at least I didn’t use disposables for our meals at home, and that we made our silverware, knives, and a few pots kosher for Passover, instead of buying new stuff.
For next year, I hope find a better solution to for warming and storing food, which may mean purchasing a few containers just for Passover, and managing our waste during our family picnics, which happened 5 times this year. (More on that soon.)
Tell me how you plan to reduce your waste either for passover or in general.