Use Less Stuff Day

What the day is

Use Less Stuff Day is observed on November 19, and in many listings on the Thursday before Thanksgiving. Either placement makes the same point: it sits at the opening of the six weeks in which American households generate their heaviest waste of the year.

Origin and background

The day was started in the mid-1990s by the publishers of the Use Less Stuff Report, a newsletter arguing that source reduction, meaning not acquiring the thing at all, matters more than recycling it afterward.

The argument had unusual evidence behind it. William Rathje, an archaeologist at the University of Arizona, spent two decades running the Garbage Project, which applied excavation methods to landfills and sorted household trash by hand. The findings contradicted most of what people assumed.

Fast-food packaging and disposable diapers, the villains of 1980s waste coverage, together accounted for a small fraction of landfill volume. Paper dominated, and telephone directories and newsprint occupied more space than the products being campaigned against. More striking, the organic material was not breaking down. Deprived of oxygen and moisture, landfills mummify their contents, and the project recovered legible newspapers and identifiable food waste decades after burial.

The trash also caught people out. Comparing household garbage against what those same households reported in surveys showed consistent under-reporting of alcohol and systematic over-reporting of vegetables, a result that made garbology useful well outside waste management.

The seasonal figure usually cited is that household waste rises by roughly a quarter between Thanksgiving and New Year, driven by packaging, wrapping and uneaten food.

How to take part

• Buy nothing for one day and notice how much of the impulse was habit.
• Plan holiday food quantities honestly. Uneaten food is the largest single category most households throw away.
• Reuse wrapping, bags and boxes rather than sourcing recyclable versions of them.
• Repair one thing you had already decided to replace.
• Refuse packaging at the counter, which is the last easy moment to do it.
• Remember the order: reduce, then reuse, then recycle. It is a ranking, not a list.