this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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Zero Waste

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Being "zero waste" means that we adopt steps towards reducing personal waste and minimizing our environmental impact.

Our community places a major focus on the 5 R's: refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle, and rot. We practice this by reducing consumption, choosing reusable goods, recycling, composting, and helping each other improve.

We also recognize excess COโ‚‚, other GHG emissions, and general resource usage as waste.

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I'm not sure if anyone is here from the reddit community, or remembers my tiny post about trying to find a way to package my dog food without using ziplock bags.

But basically, I said I make my dog food in bulk, using vegetables that where dumpsterd, home grown, etc. At the time I had a 150 lb cane Corso, only. So portions where already pretty large, I would process and freeze vegetables as needed and make a batch of dog food all at once in a 30 ish gallon stock pot, then freeze them in flat packs of ziplocks. Since then I also have an incredibly high energy rescue pit mix puppy in my family.

I was given allot of advice, all of which I tried out. The one that I thought would be the most promising was freezing them in sheet pan trays, scoring them. And separating them with wax paper. No lie. This worked horrible. I tried many iterations of that. Nothing worked out. I did end up finding a solution. I found large plastic Tupperware containers. They're about the size of casserole dishes. Just twice as deep. I fill those and pull 2 out at a time one to defrost on the porch and the other one to throw in the fridge for a few days. By the time the first one thaws out, the one in the fridge is about kicked. These containers are pretty cheap. And I don't expect them to last forever. But I'm very careful with them and so far it works great! I should also say they seem to hold up longer than the reusable vinyl/silicone bags I tried. Tbh for most applications, I would recommend using Mason jars over them for pretty much everything. I was so hesitant to buy plastic Tupperware that I ended up creating more waste in the long term.

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[โ€“] bloopernova 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You're awesome for trying this, for caring about your dogs, and for documenting the process even if it didn't go as well as you thought.

Thank you for being great ๐Ÿ˜ƒ

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago