Fred Horch thinks he has a way to save the planet, and the secret is in your trash can.

The Brunswick man is working hard to make “zero-waste household” into, well, a household phrase.

“If you have a zero-waste household, you’re not buying anything you don’t need to buy, you’re reusing everything you can reuse, you’re recycling everything you can recycle and you’re composting everything you can compost.”

The idea is simple and big at the same time. By reducing household trash flow to as close to zero as possible, he said, families can attack everything from global warming to deforestation.

It’s hard for the modern American – especially during the peak consumption season from Thanksgiving to Christmas – to imagine the waste bin becoming obsolete.

Horch insists it’s possible if you are disciplined enough. Horch, his wife and three young children haven’t got all the way there – they broke down and switched from cloth diapers to disposable ones for their third child, for example. But his farmer grandparents did it without even trying, he said.

The idea is to move toward zero, he said. “It’s the journey, not the destination.”

Horch is a soft-core Maine version of No Impact Man, a writer in New York City who is living for one year without making any trash.

No Impact Man and his wife and daughter also are going without plastics, toilet paper, carbon-fueled transportation and lots of other modern conveniences in kind of a Internet-age, urban Henry David Thoreau experiment.

(You’ll hear more about No Impact Man. There is a book and a movie in the works.)

“He’s going whole hog,” Horch said. “He’s kind of like one person doing everything, and I’m trying to get everybody doing one little thing.”

Horch presented his grand-but-simple plan at the Green Expo held on the University of Southern Maine campus this week. He also spreads the message at F.W. Horch Sustainable Goods & Supplies on Maine Street in Brunswick.

The shop he started in July 2006 is a for-profit business – at least he hopes it will be – but it’s more of a vehicle for Horch’s primary earth-saving goal. That’s obvious when he explains the first step toward a zero-waste household.

“When you’re about to buy something, the first thing to ask is ‘Do I need to buy this at all?’ ” he said. Unusual advice from a guy who owns a retail shop.

And when you really do need to buy things, he said, choose items that can be reused or recycled and avoid plastics and unnecessary packaging – the two biggest challenges for a zero-waste household.

Horch sticks to glass and metal as much as possible. Unlike plastics, they can be reused and recycled over and over and won’t last virtually forever in the environment the way plastics do.

While paper waste can be recycled, Horch recommends composting it along with food wastes to create home-made fertilizer. That way, he said, it doesn’t have to be driven anywhere and reprocessed and can actually benefit the local environment.

Composting may be Horch’s biggest passion. A simple backyard compost bin, or an enclosed, odor-free worm bin in the basement, can take a huge bite out of the household waste stream, he said. He feeds both his food waste and his paper waste to the worms.

“Worms are great pets. They never need to be walked. They can be cold and wet, and they eat your garbage,” he said.

The best thing about zero-waste, he said, is that it breaks down huge problems into small steps.

“Everybody’s looking for solutions,” he said. “It’s something you can measure and see that’s in front of you.”

E-mail this entry to a friend