I read over on a British blog called My Zero Waste that September 7-13 is National Zero Waste Week. OK, well it’s really INTERnational Zero Waste Week if it started in the UK but I’m talking about it here on my U.S. blog.

Anyhoo, zero waste is one of the concepts where green meets frugal. If you can figure out ways to reuse what you have, you can get away with buying less and therefore spending less.

Here are three ways that our family creates zero waste (though that sounds oxymoronic) and saves money in the process:

• We compost our food scraps. The less trash I have to put out by the curb, the fewer garbage bags I need to buy. In addition, I can go with the cheaper, less frequent trash pickups with less garbage. I even get my daughters to bring home their food scraps with their lunch from school so we can compost them at home.
• Speaking of lunch we pack zero waste ones. My daughters have reusable lunch boxes, water bottles and sandwich boxes, and most snacks we pack in reusable containers. If they’re taking fresh fruit, it’s in one of those reusable containers or the core/peels/seeds come home at the end of the day to go in the aforementioned compost.
• We reuse old clothing as rags to clean up around the house. Who needs to buy mops and sponges when you’ve got old t-shirts galore to wash the floors, counters and the windows? When the rags are too threadbare to use anymore, I might give them away on Freecycle to a crafter looking for fabric scraps, or I toss them in the compost.

What about you? What are some of the things you do in the name of frugality that are actually all about zero waste, too?