Yeah, I really said that. Take a good hard look at everything you throw out for a week. Why are you throwing it away? It didn’t come into your house for free—have you used it to the full extent of its life? Can you re-use something one more time?

Every day our daughter brings in the paper, salvages the bag it’s delivered in and uses that to clean out the cat litter. We hang on to the rubber band from the newspaper for craft projects. It seems that practically everything we throw out could have been used for another purpose.

I always thought it was a tacky cheapskate thing to do, to keep yogurt cups and cottage cheese containers and re-use them for leftovers, but now that I have kids loosing expensive store-bought containers at school or under the seat of the car, etc., I’m just as happy to loose a yogurt cup. Call me tacky, at least I’m not angry about the missing plastic-ware.

I compost almost everything I can. Junk mail, bank statements (yeah, steal that ID thieves!) coffee grounds, vacuum dust and lint from the dryer. There’s something satisfying about watching the MasterCard statement being eaten by worms and then growing mint for my mojitos.

We throw out one kitchen-sized bag of garbage per week, and mostly that’s cat litter and leftovers past their prime. A substantial decrease from where we were about three years ago.

This post is part of a series I’ve entitled “Frugal August” and is inspired by (though not copied from) the book The Complete Tightwad Gazetteby Amy Dacyczyn. My tips are meant to build on hers, but generally are not duplications.