Here's an idea for reducing your garbage output: Don't take out the trash until the collection day. Store all of your trash inside your living space. Is it taking up too much room? That motivates you to throw away less stuff. Does it stink? That motivates you to think about better ways to dispose of things. I haven't lived in a place with outdoor garbage cans since 1996. The first effect of this was to motivate us to start a compost heap so that the vegetable scraps (which were attracting fruitflies) were out of the kitchen and also, incidentally, out of the landfill. The next effect was to change our thinking about pizza: Sure, it's fun to order some yummy pizzas, but then you have those boxes cluttering the house until trash day...so our pizza purchases actually decreased as our income increased, and when we do eat pizza we usually walk over to the pizza place and eat there, eliminating the box (we bring a container for leftovers) and the fuel for delivery. Over time, we've reduced our garbage in various little ways and also become more adept at nesting and crushing things to take up less space. Now, in a typical week our family of three puts out half as much garbage as the single person nextdoor. Some weeks we decide not to bother taking out the trash because there isn't enough to fill a kitchen-size bag. Storing our garbage in the house has been one of our motivations to use cloth diapers: You can wash diapers whenever you're ready, and dirty cloth diapers do not smell ANYWHERE NEAR as bad as dirty disposable diapers! We have had several experiences with guests leaving a used disposable in our trash or Nicholas accidentally running out of diapers at childcare and being sent home in a disposable, and they REEK!!! The mass-marketed "solution" to this problem is to wrap the plastic diapers in yet still more layers of plastic, thus ensuring that one's little darling's products will be preserved for centuries. I think cloth diapers are a much better idea. I just love being able to put dirty diapers into the washing machine and come back 40 minutes later to take out clean diapers; it's like magic! :-) ---'Becca