I blame my parents. Both of them. Growing up, I watched my mother scrape containers clean, and then wash them to use elsewhere. I saw my father save bolts and screws and nuts in little jars. I suffered through endless trips to bulk buy stores, farmers markets and yard sales so that they could find the best deals. Frugal use was, and is, her game.

Apparently, the frugality gene is not recessive. “Waste not, want not”, is my motto now that I am a mother of four and trying to keep us all comfortable on a single income. All this, while trying to reduce our family’s impact on dear Mother Earth.

What began nearly six years ago with a single cloth diaper, has grown to a system of frugality and conscious use that has reduced our household waste down to a mere 4%. That is a pretty incredible feat for a family of six, three of whom have been in diapers, at one time or another, over the last six years.

As I look back to write this, I am reminded that it was a gradual process of trial and error. I remember talking to my Mom about finding a way to reduce the amount of space taken up by the cans we had been collecting to recycle and her digging around until she found a can crusher she just “happened to have”. Mom is handy like that. She “happens to have” a lot of useful “stuff”. Yard sales, remember?

And so it began. We are now fine tuning a system that allows us to recycle nearly every piece of packaging that comes into the home. We have a counter top compost container as well as an outdoor container (that also makes awesomely potent compost tea!) Our children know to reuse paper until there is practically nothing left (and then how to make NEW paper from what remains!). We don’t subscribe to newspapers or magazines, since I can read almost anything I want online. We use BioBags for dog clean up. Finally, we make every effort to buy with as little packaging as possible, and to make sure that the packaging we DO buy can be either recycled or reused in some capacity.

Simply put, making the decision and preparing a plan is really the hard part of drastically reducing waste in any sized household. I have run into many people who cite time, space and cooperation as their reasons for still using highly packaged goods, for not making their own cleaners, and for not getting a compost or recycling system in place. It does take some time to remember to not throw away your dinner scraps, and to empty the counter top (or under the sink) container every few days, but the time is literally seconds or mere minutes. The hard part is retraining yourself to NOT buy items with excessive packaging and then training yourself to put those items in a container other than your trash can.

Try it for one week. Even if you just put recyclable items in one bag, compostable items in another, and trash in a third. Try it. See how little you would actually be throwing in to the local landfill if you kept it up on a regular basis. I don’t have to tell you that I think you will be amazed…

I KNOW you will be. And I am fairly certain you will find it a fairly simple thing to get the rest of the family on board. Besides, think if the family time you can spend outside at your local Farmer’s Market, instead of rushing through your local supermarket.

And after it is all said and done, we still haven’t even touched on utilizing local thrift stores, CragisList or Freecycle to find items you need and to clear out those you don’t…all with zero additives to your local landfill!

Author, Michelle Ray, is a Cheap, Frugal Mom of Four. You can visit Michelle at Dagny’s Promise, a website committed to offering eco-friendly and socially responsible products produced in the USA. You can follow Michelle on Twitter: www.twitter.com/dagnyspromise