Garbage is garbage

Jody Copely refuses to make refuse.

BY ISABELLE SOUTHCOTT | isabelle@prliving.ca

How many garbage bags do you fill in a week? A month? A year?

Our house generates about half a bag a week. On average, residents of the qathet Regional District produced approximately half a seven-kilogram bag of garbage each week in 2019.

I’m not proud of that fact, but it’s less than we used to produce (and we have two fewer people living there now that the boys have gone.) But quite honestly, I haven’t spent a whole lot of time thinking about it. Until I met Jody Copely. Jody is what you might call a ‘super recycler’. During a recent 12-month period, this woman filled a small bag (smaller than a grocery store shopping bag) with trash only once! Once. Yes, once. “I compost a lot, I reuse a lot and I recycle a lot,” she told me. If she’s out with friends and has a cup of tea she’ll bring the tea bag she uses home (if the coffee shop doesn’t compost) so she can put it in her compost. And, she never uses plastic cups.

Jody washes out bottles and bags and gets them refilled. Mostly at Ecossentials, the Farmer’s Market and the Winter Market. She’s a vegetarian and she finds it easy to compost all her food waste and she composts all the dust and lint she picks up while cleaning.

Powell River’s Debbi Dupuis left a pandemic heart on her garbage in late March. “This morning I watched the garbage man pick up my garbage, rip the heart off and put it on his truck,” she recalls. Garbage stinks, but sanitation workers? We love them.

Jody has been interested in reducing her consumables for years but it wasn’t until she saw the awardwinning documentary, The Clean Bin Project, where partners and filmmakers Grant Baldwin and Jan Rustemeyer compete to see who can swear off consumerism and produce the least garbage, that Jody challenged herself to a zero-waste challenge. She realized that in order to reduce the garbage she created she had to reduce the garbage she brought into her home.

She wouldn’t buy anything that had a handiwrap covering on it or fruit that had sticky plastic tape.

She also had to think about what she wanted to buy. “Could this package be recycled and reused?” she asked herself before committing to an item.

COMPOST EVERYTHING. DON’T BUY OVER-PACKAGED ITEMS: Those are Jody Copely’s tips for getting your household garbage down, way down, to less than a bag a year.

So instead of buying new clothes when something got a hole in it or a rip, she focused on repairing the item and repurposing things. “I started doing Boro stitching,” she explained. If Jody didn’t want something she’d ask others if they wanted it and pass it along. She says Wendy Drummond has been a huge help in teaching her how to mend clothes and do needle felting. “Now I repair almost everything.” She also participates in Wendy’s clothes swap group. “These swap groups are a fantastic way to reduce garbage and recycle your things,” she says.

Other tricks include using the library regularly, having a sticker on her door that refuses junk mail, and refilling soap containers from a local vendor. She also lives by the three R’s: Refuse, Reuse – wash – and Reuse again!