Author of Gardening Eden and Flourish conference speaker Michael Abbaté is trying to spend November generating zero solid garbage. Anyone want to join him? Here’s what Michael writes on his blog announcement about No Waste November:

“You and I are trash machines.  We each generate nearly one ton of garbage each year.  The nearly 250 million tons of garbage we produce in the United States would fill Giants Stadium at the Meadowlands in New Jersey 737 times each year.  That’s twice a day, every day.  That’s a bunch of rubbish!

So, for the month of November, Vicki and I are trying a little experiment.  We are going to strive to produce no garbage for a month.  Our compost pile and recycling bins will be our friends.  Admittedly, we will have to make some serious choices about the purchases that face us the next month.  Instead of just shopping for price, quality and convenience, we are going to be thinking about packaging, utility and reusability.  We are going to refuse to make refuse.

So, for the next month, I will be talkin’ trash!  Daily, I will write about our successes and failures, the things we learn, and the things we regret.  The goal: keep the trash can empty!  Keep up with our progress here, and join us in this effort.  Let’s do what we can to keep from throwing things “away”.

After all, away is not just some imaginary neverland – it is an actual place on our planet. Garbage just gets moved from my house to another place in God’s creation that we collectively decided it would be OK to trash.  It can be nearby, or it can be thousands of miles away, messing creation by spoiling the land it is placed in, fouling the air through incineration, and by polluting by transporting it.  Can we make these places smaller, more local, less frequent and less degrading to Creation’s natural systems?

So, go ahead and jump into the waste stream with me.  If you want to read more about the impacts trash has on our planet, read Gardening Eden, pages 207-217.”

Michael writes about his family’s effort in terms of its effect on the creation. I’ll bet the bigger result will be the effect on him and his wife, ask they’ll be demonstrating with their actions what kind of people they want to be–responsible and careful rather then reckless and careless.

Gardening Eden is available at the Flourish online bookstore .

Gardening Eden: How Creation Care Will Change Your Faith, Your Life and Our World, by Michael Abbate, published by WaterBrook Press, a division of Random House, 2009.  ISBN  978-0-30744-499-8.   For more info: www.michaelabbate.com