Garbage Flow Chart

I finally found a program that will make flowcharts that have automatic tracking of arrows. It's called LucidChart and it is available at the Google App Store. It integrates with Chrome and Google Drive, and allows for collaboration. You have to buy the program if you want to increase the size of the document beyond a normal letter page, or want more than 60 boxes on your flowchart. Boxes snap to a grid pretty intelligently, and arrows can be straight or 3rd order Bézier curves. I loved working with it.

With this program i was finally able to make a flowchart of the Garbage streams in my house. We have 7 or 8 depending on how you count. Printer paper, Shreddables, Kitchen Waste, Bird Waste, Yard Waste, Recycling, Trash, and possibly Old Food. Old food can get fed to the dog, go in the food waste bin or go in the trash. Bird waste gets separated into stuff that can be fed to outside birds or compostables. With All the different trash streams our trash is kept down to less than a bag per week.

Earlier this spring I measured how much paper we were producing. It came out to about 7 pounds/week. This includes junk mail, boxes from Costco  boxes containing soda (diet soda being our primary beverage), and printer paper produced by my at-home office. Corrugated boxes I cut into 2-4 inch strips with a box cutter, and then put it into my 12-page cross-cut shredder. Putting it through this workload dulled out the teeth my last one in about 2 years.

Garbage Streams at our house. Most garbage ends up staying on my property. Recycling stream not  shown.