Renton recycling contestants go on "trash diet"

With an infant son and 3-year-old daughter, Baiba Rubino's household produces a lot of trash: 63 pounds last week, to be exact.

On Thursday, a county "garbologist" dumped the family's trash onto a tarp and picked through disposable diapers, cans of formula and a rotting crab leg before offering tips on how they could recycle more.

Rubino is starting a trash diet for a King County competition among six households to see who can produce the least garbage. She didn't recycle at all until February, when she left her job as an assistant buyer for Costco to take care of her children. Now she wants to figure out how to recycle more.

"There's a bit of a stigma attached to recycling that makes it daunting at times — this fear of doing it wrong or fear of failure of doing it," she said.

The fight against climate change has come down to scrutinizing the most mundane of tasks: taking out the trash.

Rubino wants to do right by the environment, but she also dreads the daily debate of where to put which piece of garbage.

Can the plastic blueberry container go in the recycling bin? No, she learned Thursday. Should she switch to diapers with flushable inserts? No, officials said, the county doesn't want them in the sewer system.

Each of the Renton families in the contest brought a week's worth of garbage to a "Biggest Loser" style weigh-in Thursday. The county will hold weekly weigh-ins over the next month and the winning family will receive a home recycling consultation from King County and $100 gift certificate to Ikea — with the hope that they will buy more recycling bins.

The contest comes as local governments are encouraging — and in some cases mandating — people to toss less.

Seattle, which ships its garbage to Oregon, already requires all residents to recycle — or risk a fine or have their garbage left at the curb. Next year, the city will require single-family homes to compost or sign up for food-scrap recycling. Next month, the City Council will consider charging a 20-cent fee on all paper and plastic grocery bags.

King County will spend $120,000 this year to promote recycling, in an effort to extend the life of the Cedar Hills landfill. Single-family homes in the county already are recycling 54 percent of their garbage. Still, of all the garbage collected in the county last year, half could have been recycled, county officials said.

The Summer Wind neighborhood of single-family homes in Renton is close to suburban utopia. Parents hold sidewalk happy hours while kids play in the cul-de-sac. They hold a barbecue for the Fourth of July. When residents are away, neighbors collect their mail.

On Thursday, King County garbologist Tom Watson (who occasionally writes for The Seattle Times) sifted through the Renton households' trash to see what could be recycled. He said the contestants already are doing a good job recycling cans, glass bottles and newspapers, but said they could probably reduce their trash by another 20 percent. One contestant, Karen Kawamoto, was out of town most of last week and had only a half-bag of garbage, 7 pounds, at the weigh-in.

Watson encouraged them to start recycling food scraps by keeping a container by the sink lined with a compostable bag and dumping it into their yard-waste bins.

Rubino said she and her reluctant husband "absolutely" could reduce their garbage by 20 percent.

Carrie Gesell, a neighbor whose trash weighed 17 pounds, says she and her husband will try.

"I'm not really an environmentalist and I don't have a fear about global warming," said Gesell, who has three young children. "I come from the Christian perspective where I'm just interested in respecting God's creation in the best way I can and passing that on to my children and the next generation."

Rob Nichols, whose trash weighed in at 31 pounds, calls himself a recycling skeptic, even though he recycles bottles, cans and newspapers, and composts food scraps in his backyard with yard waste.

"I'm the one being dragged in" by two teenage sons and his wife, he said. "I see the environmental value, but I question the economic value." He called the compost he generates in the yard a "novelty."

At the weigh-in, Watson pulled a pair of flip-flops out of Nichols' trash and suggested he donate them to a thrift shop instead. An empty tissue box could also be recycled, and some food scraps and food-soiled paper could go into the yard-waste bin.

Nichols asked about the cat litter. That should go in the garbage, officials said. Double-bagged.

Sharon Pian Chan: 206-464-2958 or schan@seattletimes.com

Six Renton families compete to reduce trash by recycling more