Part 1: Waste
There is a myth that reducing your carbon footprint implies sacrifice. I don't believe that is necessarily true. While some sacrifice may be necessary, there is a lot that can be done that is simply different - different lifestyle, different priorities, and in many cases I think represent an improvement over the "standard American lifestyle".
In this essay I will go over some of the steps I have taken, both large and small.
Let me start by saying that I am a big fan of so-called 80% solutions. I firmly believe that oftentimes getting 80% of something done can be pretty easy, and then getting that last 20% can be terribly difficult, so unless that 20% is truly necessary, why go there? This is encapsulated in one of my favorite aphorisms: The perfect is the enemy of the good.
So I will not try to be perfect, but simply look for improvement.
Waste not, want not
The three canonical strategies for dealing with waste are Reduce, Recycle, and Reuse.
The basic goal should be to send less stuff to the landfill.
The Kitchen
For the kitchen, I buy fresh vegetables each Saturday at the Farmer's market, and then put together the menu for the week. Note that I reuse plastic grocery boxes for things like peppers, blueberries, and cherry tomatoes, and the bag of Basil will get rinsed and reused all summer long. 80% solutions, good not perfect. I also have a set of mesh bags that I carry to the market so that I don't have to use the single-use plastic bags they offer.
From that menu I then put together a shopping list for whatever else I might need, which we usually pick up on Monday. I try to develop a set of
menus so that everything with a short shelf-life gets used each week, plus I occasionally inventory the cabinet and freezer to see what might be getting old and need to be used.
So I have reduced waste by buying the right amount, and using it all.
When prepping vegetables, some things go into a freezer bag to be turned into vegetable broth, others go into a compost bin. For vegetable broth, I accumulate things like onion and garlic peels, carrot ends and peels, potato peels, herb stems, asparagus ends, pea trimmings - basically anything that will not turn the broth bitter - so no cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage, etc. When the freezer bag is full, I pop the contents into my Instant Pot for 15 minutes with 3 cups of water, let it cool and strain out the broth which goes into a silicon bag in the freezer. Then the cooked remnants go into the compost bin. These are examples of recycle and reuse.
Also in the kitchen I have purchased silicon bags for storing food, so that I can minimize the use of plastic freezer bags. They are a bit pricey, but they last really well, and I have been really happy with them. I recommend putting a price watch on them using camelcamelcamel.com and wait until they go on sale. With the silicon bags, a special drying rack is also very helpful.
Leftovers go into plastic containers and into the fridge for lunch. I bought a large bag of one pint plastic containers like you get from a restaurant for almost nothing, and they seem to last for at least a year or two.
Of course for grocery (and other) shopping we have reusable bags. I really like the ones from BagPodz which are a convenient size and pack into a small carrier that you can clip to a belt loop. I find most shopping bags are too large and get overfilled. These are just about the perfect size.
Electricity (and gas)
There is a real benefit to not wasting energy, in that it saves money. And who doesn't want to save money? Smart thermostats that can detect when no one is at home and set the temperature accordingly, LED light-bulbs, high efficiency appliances, all of these are good ways to cut energy usage. I recommend looking at the reviews on The Wirecutter for light-bulbs, as the quality of the bulbs and the quality of the light can vary quite a lot. Ceiling fans are great in a hot climate for allowing the thermostat to be bumped up a few degrees.
Some steps we have not yet taken, but are considering, are replacing our water heater with a heat-pump and replacing our gas stove with an induction range.
Miscellaneous things
Using less paper is a fairly easy thing to do. Change magazine and newspaper subscriptions to be electronic and read them on a tablet or other computer. I know that I used to go through an enormous amount of newspaper back in the day. And now my fingers don't turn black from newsprint. Certainly paper that you do receive should be recycled. But better to find ways to not receive it at all.
I will admit to being a fairly regular user of Amazon. One thing that I do is I have set up one day a week (for me, Thursday) to receive whatever I order from Amazon. So if I have multiple orders, they will try to consolidate them into one shipment - which means fewer boxes or envelopes, and since they arrive on the same day, less gasoline usage by the delivery truck. I call Thursdays "Jeffmas", because it's when I get my packages.
Instead of throwing out stuff that is still usable but no longer needed or wanted, I used to use a service called "Freecycle", but now I use the NextDoor neighborhood list. I post what I want to give away and invariably someone will say they want it. I also have found that giving stuff away is easier than throwing it away - it just feels easier.
Note that many companies, like Amazon, will accept old electronics.
Perspective
I have read quite a few blogs and articles about cutting out waste, and one thing that I see far too often is what I would call a lack of perspective. Some people go down the rabbit hole of expending great effort to make a tiny improvement. I don't see that as helpful. Especially when they start preaching that this is what must be done. Keep perspective, don't strive for perfection, and do little cost-benefit analyses. If it is taking too much effort to reduce some small aspect of waste, stop. There are probably much more useful ways to apply that effort.