How Green Is Your Home? Take the Hillside Family Eco Quiz

Some families sort every scrap. Some families are still figuring out the pizza box thing.

No judgment here — we’ve been in the recycling and composting business long enough to know that most households are doing their best with incomplete information. The rules are confusing. The labels are misleading. And nobody handed you a manual when you moved to Omaha.

So we made a quiz instead.

“How Green Is Your Home?” is a quick family activity that tests what you know, what you actually do, and — here’s the fun part — lets your kids be the ones asking the questions. Eight questions. Two rounds. One moment where your eight-year-old realizes they know more about compost bins than you do.

It takes about 90 seconds. At the end you’ll get a personalized action list based on your real answers — not generic recycling tips, but specific next steps matched to where your household actually is right now.

Whether you’re a Zero Waste Hero or a proud Seedling just getting started, there’s something here for you.

Ready? Hand the phone to a kid and let them run it.

So, how’d the family do?

Whatever your Eco Level, the most important thing is that you know where you stand — and you’ve got a clear path forward. That’s genuinely more than most households in Omaha can say.

A few things worth knowing as you take your next steps:

On composting: The barrier is almost always “I don’t know how to start” — not “I don’t want to.” If that’s you, starting a backyard compost pile costs nothing and takes about fifteen minutes to set up. If you’d rather hand it off, Hillside’s Compost Club picks up right from your curb. Either way, your food scraps don’t have to go to the landfill.

On recycling: The recycling triangle doesn’t mean what most people think it means. It identifies plastic type — not whether your bin will take it. When in doubt, OmahaRecyclingGuide.org is the most specific, accurate recycling resource in the city. It’s free, it’s Omaha-specific, and almost nobody knows it exists.

On soft plastics: Bread bags, produce bags, zip-lock bags — these can’t go in your curbside bin. But they’re not trash either. The Hefty Renew orange bag program gives them a legitimate second life. It’s one of the easiest habit swaps a household can make.

On your workplace: If the quiz got you thinking about where your office, school, or place of worship stands — that instinct is worth following. A lot of commercial buildings in Omaha are recycling and composting nothing, not because nobody cares, but because nobody’s asked. Hillside offers free waste audits for commercial accounts. It costs nothing to find out what’s possible.

Hillside Solutions is Omaha’s locally-owned recycling, composting, and waste management company. We’ve been helping households and businesses do this better since 2010.

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Brent Cramptonrecycling, composting, family, Omaha, zero waste, Compost Club, eco quiz, omaha