PHOENIX — For 10 years, Phoenix resident Kami Galvani has been practicing what she preaches.
"Use less stuff, less energy, just less, less, less," says the north Phoenix resident on a Tuesday morning as trash and recycle bins are picked up by a city dumpster truck.
"I mean this isn't just a problem in Phoenix, this is a problem nationwide," she adds.
The mother of three took the time to show ABC15 her system to minimize her footprint on this Earth.
"I don't know how to convey to people how important waste reduction is in the whole grand scheme of things," she says.
Galvani has two compost bins on the side of her house. In the compost she places things like egg shells, banana peels, flowers, anything that isn't meat or oily foods.
This helps create a system where her trash and recycle bins don't get used as often.
"Mostly just paper, we have preschoolers and a second grader so we get a lot of school work....we just don't accumulate a lot of trash," she says.
Inside her home she has a compost container where she puts scraps before taking them out to the compost bin.
"I'm not kidding when I say a week ago I put our jack-o-lantern in here do you see a jack-o-lantern, it's totally gone!" she says.
"We probably put out our recycling bin every other week and then our trash gets put out about once a month," she adds.
And as earth friendly as she is, she knows very well that recycling-although good-isn't working like it should.
"Sometimes they know very well but they use the wrong bin because it's more convenient or because they don't care. Those are the kind of issues that got us where we are now," she says.
Assistant City Public Works Director Jim Giudice says the City of Phoenix is currently considering four options for a rate increase. One of the options is reducing the recycle bin pickups to once every other week instead of weekly.
"We used to receive somewhere between eight to 13 million from the sale of recyclables and this year maybe we are getting three million dollars in revenue," says Giudice.
For Kami, it's the best decision on the table right now. "Hopefully we will start to find some domestic uses for it and then we can find ways to resell it and reuse it, but we are not there yet," she says.
