@abasket @MaineLonghorn @Creekland thank you for letting me know I am not alone in my suffering with Perfect Lawn Man next door!!
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So much judgement and virtue signaling in this thread. I thought it was just for tips on trash reduction. Perhaps we should stop talking trash about our neighbors.
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Well, there’s no trash on their lawn. 
On ours we keep the decomposing trash out back where people can’t see it.
'Tis tough not to be judgmental when the health of the planet is at stake TBH, but I save my venting for message boards I know they aren’t on vs saying anything in person. It’s not much different than folks who talk about various houses for sale or clothing people wear and whether they like them or not, etc.
Personally, I’m glad to find there are others out there who also care and am getting inspired to do more for less trash than we already do. My youngest has shown us many options, including making his own soap, etc, but I’ve got a little bit of “old dog, new tricks” in my brain yet. I’m adjusting slowly, then I wonder what took me so long! (Like with ditching store bags in favor of my own.)
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Pardon for the distraction and straying from the topic. Not the first time, not the last!
And I do love my neighbor - even with his quirks - as I’m sure they think we have quirks too! But none the less, we have been good neighbors for 25 years.
Back to the trash talking at hand.
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We figure they’re on some message board somewhere complaining about how poorly their neighbor keeps up their yard.
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Or puzzling over their neighbors that have a lot of “fake friends” online, chatting over number discussion threads 
I tried laundry sheets from the bulk store. My husband does not think they work as well as our All pods (which are also fairly compact for shipping), so I only use on loads that don’t have any of his clothes.
Tell me more about the shampoo bars / pucks (?)
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I buy very expensive Kerastase shampoo and conditioner in 1 L bottles. Those last me more than a year. Some ingredients in conditioner are liquid at normal temperature, there is no way to incorporate them into a solid. I’ll pass in those. Just buy the biggest bottles you can afford and find, and you will eliminate a lot of landfill-bound material.
I saw that Oribe now makes refill pouches for their big bottles. I like Oribe products, so gonna look into those.
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I often do the jumbo bottles of Biolage shampoo and conditioner. They are pretty heavy, so I like switching to pump top.
Don’t know if this counts or not, but I buy Costco sized containers of stuff like laundry soap, and re-use normal sized containers to put it in once I’m home.
I try to use my own bags often, but we do grocery pickup at the curb, and they give us new (paper) bags every week.
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This is a little thing and I admit to being annoyed that my H has always done this - but now see the value…
The plastic bags that mulch comes in…we cut them open near the top and then save the empty bags and use for yard waste throughout the year. We don’t have separate yard waste pick up in our city besides leaves at the curb, so this comes in handy to not waste other garbage bags when picking up twigs, pine needles, plant waste, etc.
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I don’t buy the huge containers of things, since it’s just the two of us. In general, I’m a good citizen of the earth – I recycle everything that I can, don’t buy much “stuff” at all, and for a while was refilling Dawn dishwashing bottles from a huge jug. (Don’t do that anymore; it was difficult to do all that squeezing and I decided the money saved wasn’t worth it to me.) I buy large cardboard boxes of powder laundry detergent.
H would love the No Mow May. His philosophy is if it’s green, it’s fine. One of our neighbors is a lawn warrior type. I would actually like our lawn to look better, and I recently bought some kind of weed 'n feed.
My city was going to enact a plastic bag fee. I am against that. I recycle my plastic bags (the ones I don’t use to line small garbage cans). I wasn’t one of the ones littering the waterways. The city councilman who was so gung-ho about the plastic bag fee is no longer on the council, so I don’t know what’s going on with that. I AM all for saving trees and open spaces.
I don’t buy a lot of stuff, and my car isn’t driven much at all. Our house is a great size for us now, but was a bit tight when all of our kids were growing up. Our carbon footprint isn’t that large. I’m doing my part.
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We don’t have yard waste bags. It just has to go in an open trash can, or big sticks stacked at the curb. Come leaf raking season, just dump them along the curb. Once a week the truck comes by to vacuum them up.
It wasn’t long ago that our residents didn’t have to take the trash to the street. If you wanted, the garbage men would go around your house and get it themselves. We always took ours to the curb, but most people didn’t. We had lots of angry people when that was stopped.
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I don’t use those and I don’t think my kids do either. I believe they make their own. I’m like the others and just buy a big bottle which lasts forever. It’s then put in the recycle bin since it’s a 2.
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We have a big yard waste bin. It gets emptied like a big trash bin and then I think gets composted. We use it some but do a lot of our own composting.
We don’t have a lawn at all. No grass to mow. Or yard is wooded with a mix of native and non-invasive non-natives. My husband grows his own tea camellias.
Buying from the bulk bins at the store really helps cut down on a lot of stuff we throw away because it reduces the packaging. I usually get it in the small paper bags the store provides or bring my own container. I can recycle or compost the paper bags.
Plastic is what I try to avoid if possible. It is rarely recycled even if your town picks it up or you can drop it off at the grocery store. There was a good piece on the BBC recently about reducing trash. I’ll see if I can find it and link it. So when I am grocery shopping I try to buy things that are not wrapped in plastic, or in plastic containers, but it’s hard to avoid. Just being conscious of it helps though. I remember to pick up the loose tomatoes instead of the tomatoes that are wrapped in plastic.
Here’s a challenge for y’all. My D22 got really into bubble tea in high school and we started going fairly often. This was about the time that the no straws thing became big but to drink bubble tea (if you don’t know) you have to have an extra double wide straw to suck up the boba bubbles from the bottom. Unfortunately if you don’t bring your own straw or your own cup you they will give you a big plastic straw and cup. We did get some reusable bottles they sold (but they were smaller than the plastic cups) and some reusable straws but we also started saving our cups and straws and refusing the straw and reusing one we had saved.
My challenge to y’all is not to just try to take reusable containers and your own straws but every time you get a drink with a straw or in a plastic cup take it home and rinse it out and save it. We started doing that to reuse the straws and because we reuse the cups to plant veggie and camellia seeds in and the amount of cups and straws we accumulate over time is pretty eye opening. If you think about how many it is per person over their lifetimes it’s just staggering.
So try it for the summer and it will help you realize how much plastic is out there. We do reuse the cups but dang if it isn’t a lot of cups! Would work for Starbucks cups or anything else too.
So often we just throw it away or wish-cycle it away but if you actually hang onto it for a season you will see how quickly it accumulates.
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What makes me mad is the trend to make holes in the bottom of plastic bags. Presumably to prevent babies from suffocating. The bags instantly become trash instead of being useful for something else! If the bag is big enough, I tie it into a knot at the bottom and use to clean cat boxes. Sadly, most of these end up in the trash because the holes render them useless.
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In 2023, we have to pay 10cent/bag at every store. (Store keeps 40% for admin, municipality gets 60%). Starting in 2024, only recycled paper bags will be available.
In recent years, we’ve brought our own bags to grocery store. But we sometimes used to forget. The new law has made us and everybody more likely to remember reusable bags to grocery store. (We keep ours in the car trunk and can go back to get them if needed.) And to decline bags elsewhere if just a few items (I used to be worried about being suspected of shoplifting.)
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Plastic grocery bags have been long eliminated around here. Only allowed for those items the health department deemed appropriate (chicken, meat, fish). It is either a paper bag for a small fee or a reusable bag for $1-2 if the store is out of paper and you did not bring your own. Was not a big deal for me. I always have a bunch of Baggu in my purse or pockets for those non-Costco trips. People protested and complained when this was instituted, but everyone seems to be fine with this now.
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I also keep my reusable bags in my car trunk AND I keep 1-2 Baggu bags in my purse - they fold up pretty teeny tiny but are actually a good size! So if I forget the bags in the trunk when walking in the store, I can haul quite a bit in the Baggu back ups! Highly recommend adding one to your travel purse as well!
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In AZ, we have rock, synthetic lawn, and drip irrigation for desert plants, no grass allowed on resident properties in our community so no mowing, just blowing. We are also a dark-sky community and a solar farm for our local electric provider. We have a golf course that is gray-watered with a solar-powered irrigation system (though, ironically, no golf course can claim to be green). We have large, city provided trash and recycle bins. Yard waste is allowed in the trash bins though most people have yard services that haul away whatever their routine blow-out/pruning produces.
In Maine, plastic bags were outlawed,* so we use our own bags that we keep in the car. Because we need them in ME, and they are always in the car, we also use them in AZ now. We don’t have a lawn in ME, just a patch of weedy ground cover in the front and back of the cabin that DH mows occasionally with an electric push mower. We don’t groom the forest. We have to take our trash to a transfer station eight miles away, so we are very conscious of producing as little as possible to save on trips. Right now, we have to keep the full trash bags in the cabin to avoid attracting bears. We are building a garage this summer and will provide large bin space in there to cut down on transfer station trips in the future.
*Per @MaineLonghorn’s post below, they aren’t exactly outlawed, but there is a charge to avoid.
ETA: One thing we do is save our coffee. We use refillable Keurig pods and empty the coffee into a container that we eventually use on plants in both locations.
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Maine law got rid of plastic bags in most stores. You have to pay 5 cents for paper bags. Walmart provides no bags at all.
Try as hard as I do, about 90% of the time, I leave my reusable bags in the car. I don’t know why I have such a mental block.
Fortunately, I could see the writing on the wall and started saving plastic bags a few years ago. I have many of them in my closet. 
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