Could you live trash-free? A young couple spent the past year figuring out whether that's possible. Their answer: absolutely.

"It was actually a lot easier than we expected," says Amy Korst, 26, a recently laid-off high school teacher in Dallas, Ore. She and husband Adam bought only items they could recycle or compost to avoid adding to landfills.

Their only trash for 12 months -- about 75 scraps such as eight used razor blades, a burned-out light bulb, two Theraflu pouches and a broken Christmas ornament -- fits in a shoebox that weighs about 4 pounds.

The Korsts are among a growing number of Americans trying to lighten their landfill load in a country where the average person generates 4.5 pounds of trash each day.

"Their experiment shows we've come some distance, but there's still more we can do" to live sustainably, says Eric Goldstein of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a private environmental group.

Recycling rates have skyrocketed, from 6% of solid waste in 1960 to 33% in 2008, the Environmental Protection Agency reports. The amount of trash generated, after increasing for decades, has stabilized since 2005.

"Part of this is recession-related," Goldstein says, noting people have less money to spend.

Yet there's also an increasing desire to live more simply, says Colin Beavan, who launched the No Impact Project after his family spent a year trying to live without using any power or generating any trash in Manhattan. He wrote a book about it.

"There's a huge amount of grass-roots efforts to change how we live," he says, noting that 10,000 people have signed on to do his one-week, zero-waste challenge since October. This fall, he'll run his week-long "carbon cleanse" at 11 universities.

"What's difficult is the habit change," Beavan says. He completely changed how he shopped for groceries, bringing bags or containers to buy from bulk bins.

"It's a mind-set change," says Amy Korst, who began her "Green Garbage Project" on July 6, 2009, and finished it this month. "If we can't recycle it, we don't buy it."

She started a compost bin in the backyard, grew produce and negotiated with a Safeway manager to be able to take food home from the meat and cheese counters in her own containers.

"I have a kit in each car," she says, that includes mesh produce bags water bottles, coffee mugs and Tupperware containers. If they go out to dinner, they bring a container for leftovers. Whatever she can't recycle curbside, she takes to a recycling depot, or in the case of batteries, an electronics store.

The year, though relatively smooth, was not without its challenges. Take Halloween, for instance, with all its individually-wrapped candies. She and Adam debated what to do.

"I'm not giving them (kids) pencils," she told him. "We went ahead with candy. I have this "trash is a splurge" attitude," she says. For Christmas, though, she skipped using candy canes as tree ornaments.

She says she and Adam were always bothered by the trash they'd see backpacking in the wilderness. After reading Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (P.S.), about eating only home-grown food, she asked herself: "What can I do?"

Korst plans to write a book about her experience and keep living trash-free. She says, "There's no way I could go back, because it ended up being so easy."