Traveling with a zero trash goal sure is challenging, but we’re doing all we can to stick to it.

April came and went in a flash. This month we managed to get a real count of our trash, which we’re updating monthly on Facebook.
You can see it below.

As you can see, it’s been very difficult for us to source food which doesn’t come in plastic bags. Between the tortillas, bread, bagged veggies, etc… we had a plastic bag of some sort for almost every day of the month.

We started getting better by the end of the month at bringing our own containers to establishments. For example, you can get fresh tortillas right off the press in so many parts of Mexico, but they bag them. I started bringing a plate and asking them to put a dozen tortillas on them. I stored them in a re-used cranberry ziplock bag when I get back to the van. Some street vendors have pre-packaged food, like sun-dried fruit. [Tweet “I’ve been emptying the contents into glass jars and returning the bag to the merchant”]

Still the plastic bags remain an issue.

We finished our Costco box of granola bars. We now stick to nuts and dates. It’s hard to bake cookies in the van! by which I mean impossible. We’ll have to try harder to find non-grocery store cookies, or another alternative.

We had extra milk cartons this month from the puppy’s formula, but milk cartons remain difficult to deal with. We mostly drink almond milk, which can be homemade if you have a blender, but that’s not an option in the van. Still looking for a solution.

We kept some recyclables for almost a whole month looking for a place to dump them. Aluminum cans turned out to be really easy, we drop them off at metal scraps places, they take them willingly. Plastic and glass bottles proved to be impossible to recycle in Baja. Fortunately, we didn’t have any plastic bottles, and glass doesn’t have too hard of an impact on the environment, but from now on we’re going to have to stick to cans. Carrying recyclables is a space hog and it suffocates us.

If you would like to join us and pick up the challenge, please leave a comment below. It doesn’t matter if you’re traveling or not!
If you’re already on a zero waste journey, what have you found to be challenging?