Day 2: Zero Waste Week 2014

I’m loving Zero Waste Week. I like having a task to focus on, and the ‘One More Thing’ challenge is getting the cogs of my brain turning a bit quicker than usual.

Graphic from http://www.zerowaste.co.uk

I’m also a big Twitter fan so I’m embracing the interactive side of #zerowasteweek – there are lots of conversations to be had as well as new blog posts to read courtesy of the team of Ambassadors. In fact, I’m having to work hard at ignoring the beep beep beep of my phone as new alerts ping in while I’m busy with other things…

Yesterday my self-set task was to sort through a bag of old clothes, in an attempt to find materials that I could upcycle before I recycled them. The aim was to extend their life and to prevent me from consuming new things before I truly need them. The task took a mere five minutes! Delighted, I’ve been scratching my head to find a low effort/high impact job for today. It hasn’t take me long to discover one…

…The Rubbish Diet

First of all…that name! J’adore! As someone who eats what I like, when I like, I would be no good at conventional diets so to me, The Rubbish Diet sounds perfect. Of course, however, this diet has nothing to do with food…unless you put food in your bin that is…

The Rubbish Diet describes itself as the Slimming Club for Bins, and the website states:
We share ideas to make it really easy to create less waste, protecting our environment and saving money.

This is totally my cup of tea and, to be honest, I have been meaning to sign up for months. Since I started blogging about sustainable issues 18 months ago, I have reduced my waste significantly and estimate that as a household of four people, which was putting out three black bin bags of rubbish each week, we are now down to three quarters of a bag. However, I have been distracted from simply reducing my general waste because I have been focussing on quite specific topics on my blog, for example, minimising single-use plastics. Now though I am looking for something exactly like the Rubbish Diet to help me go the extra mile towards zero waste. By checking out the website and signing up, I am setting myself up for a slimmer bin in future, plus it ties in amazingly well with my sustainable goals for this year. I outlined them in this post written in January, and point 5 on reducing my rubbish needs attention.

So I fired up my laptop, grabbed a cuppa and a Mars Bar (what did I tell you about diets!), and checked out the Rubbish Diet site. While I’ve read parts of it before, and some posts by the lovely Karen Cannard ‘Bin Doctor in Chief’, I realised that sitting down to really absorb it was a first.

I wasn’t disappointed. It is a website packed full of great ideas about avoiding waste in the first place, recycling and – I really love this – slimmers’ stories. It’s worth checking out, especially if you are taking part in Zero Waste Week. I certainly picked up some tips and felt inspired to try harder to reduce those bin bags. It even crossed my mind that, like a conventional diet, I could use the bathroom scales and weigh my rubbish each week, but perhaps that’s getting carried away…

Now I’ve signed up, I am to receive regular emails from the Rubbish Diet team, the first of which came through as I drafted this post. One excellent tip in the newsletter was to set yourself a goal. I’ve therefore decided that mine will be to write a list of everything that goes in the bin over a 24 hour period, and then I will assess each item to see if:

• I really needed to have it in my house in the first place*
• It can be disposed of (or reused) in another way

Let’s see if I can slim that bin further!

*I fear for the future of my Mars Bar

Plastic-free Me: The cost of a sneeze

One thing that really annoys me is products that come packaged in plastic when there is just no need!

One such item is the humble paper handkerchief. This is a brand I sometimes buy.

I’ve no idea why plastic section in the middle exists when surely the cardboard box is doing its job perfectly well…

And here it is in yet more unnecessary packaging double-wrapped as a twin pack.

My frustration with the plastic prompted me to think about the waste caused by paper hankies. Think about it…

Energy and resources are spent producing the hankies…they are then transported to the shops…I (often by car) go to the shops to buy them….and then journey home with them.

At home I use them once.

…then I put them in my bin where they are collected by a lorry….which ferries them to landfill.

That’s a lot of waste! Plus I pay anything between £1 and £2 per box, depending on supermarket deals at the time. As we, a house full of allergy sufferers, get through maybe a box per week, we are looking at a cost of at least £52 a year.

This weekend I decided to make my own handkerchiefs.

I went to a bag that I keep damaged clothes in – things that we have worn out or that have been moth eaten. I usually take the contents to the Rag Bag bin for recycling. I picked out an old patterned top and cut out a square. I then hemmed round the side and…Ta-Da! My very own home-made hankie!

Except if you look closely – actually you don’t need to look too closely – it turns out the sewing lessons I had in primary school didn’t pay off so I’m rubbish at sewing and the hankie is very amateurish.

No matter, I attempted again, hemmed a second piece of material slightly differently and hankie number 2 was made. The sewing was just as terrible so I decided simply to cut out squares and stop sewing. I know that hemming will increase the life of the hankies but I figured that I had lots of scrap material and I can maybe attempt the sewing again when I have more time and have found some pins and a measuring tape.

I am keeping my new hankies in an old margarine tub (which the children will hopefully decorate) in our sitting room. My kids love using them – blowing your nose on mummy’s old top is really fun! – and when we are finished we just throw them in the washing machine instead of the bin.

I will keep a box of paper hankies out for guests so I’m on the lookout for some that come without any plastic in the packaging – please let me know if you have any suggestions.

Plastic-free Me: introduction

Welcome to the first post of my new blogging series Plastic-free Me. This is to be a collection of posts I will write as I prepare for Plastic Free July 2014. July is the month that has been earmarked by a campaign, initiated in Australia, that now aims to raise awareness of the massive consumption of single-use plastics throughout the world. The goal is to cut out completely (eek!) those plastics that we use for sometimes just a matter of minutes that potentially end up in landfill forever more.

So, what am I talking about? Let me give you some examples…

Shampoo bottles, drinking straws, plastic shopping bags, clingfilm, toothpaste tubes, bin bags, cellophane wrappers, liquid soap dispensers, disposable cutlery, sweet wrappers, freezer bags, plastic food trays, yogurt pots, milk cartons, nappy sacks, plastic packaging….

Get the idea?

For those of you that follow my Meaner Greener Me blog series you will know that I flirted with Plastic Free July in 2013, made a bit of an effort and changed a few of my habits – some were temporary and others have stuck. The underlying mood of my posts though was I can’t do this! I can’t do this!

However, the concept of single-use plastics somehow lodged itself in my mind and wouldn’t get out. No matter how much I didn’t want to feel guilty about buying biscuits double wrapped in plastic packaging, I did start to feel the negative impact… Suddenly single-use plastics that were just background to my life were jumping up and down, waving their arms and reminding me that I am contributing to a serious global environmental problem.

So instead of allowing them to taunt me, I’m going to take some action.

I intend to take part in Plastic Free July 2014. This time, instead of thinking that I can’t really do it, I’m going to give it my best shot. I have nine months to prepare. (As a mother, I am only too aware of the amazing things that can be achieved in nine months…) I am going to observe where I consume single-use plastics in my life and see what changes can be made.

July is only 31 days, how hard can it be?

Anyone want to join me in committing to Plastic Free July next year?

As ever I welcome your feedback and comments. If you have any plastic-free tips for me, please let me know so that I can tackle this challenge with gusto and enthusiasm and aim to succeed.

PS: For a bit more reading please see the official website http://www.plasticfreejuly.org/ and the post I read on this excellent blog http://treadingmyownpath.com which I found hugely inspirational and me interested in Plastic Free July in the first place!

Relevant posts on my blog:

Meaner Greener Me: Plastic Free July

Meaner Greener Me: Plastic Free July Day 7

Meaner Greener Me: Plastic Free July Day 16

Meaner Greener Me: where has all my rubbish gone?

I’ll start with an apology for my absence. We had some unexpected work carried out at home which meant that we moved out for a fortnight and life got in the way of the blogging. I missed it though and felt especially sorry that I wasn’t able to continue with my Plastic Free July posts while it was actually July. However, I will do another Plastic Free Post to update on how life has changed since I started considering the amount of plastic in my life. Today’s post is about the reduction of our household rubbish inspired by a day about a month ago when we put out one bag of rubbish for the weekly refuse collection. Usually we average three. It was a complete surprise. Because we haven’t been at home for a few weeks, I have been unable to monitor if this was a one-off.

It has made me take stock of the changes that I’ve implemented and ponder over what has caused this dramatic (and sudden) reduction in waste. Obviously this blog is specifically helping me to work towards responsible waste disposal but what actually happened?

A factor has to be that a couple of months ago, we breathed new life into our compost bin. Before Meaner Greener Me, composting wasn’t something I thought about. My other half had set up a compost bin years ago in our garden. He was the one who tended to it and then stopped because…well…he couldn’t be bothered any more! The fact that it existed in the first place barely touched my consciousness…

However when I started this blog I looked at the huge piles of vegetable peelings that amassed most nights and realised it would be responsible to dispose of them somewhere other than the kitchen bin. Finally I showed a bit of interest in our poor neglected composter and my surprised, but obliging, other half helped me to revive the old thing.

Do you know what? It was pretty darned easy!

Here’s the bin (we inherited it from a family member who had a spare – much environmental family friendliness!).

We checked the internet, which advised watering it and stirring up the contents with a garden fork, washed out our old food caddy which had been relegated to the shed…

…and started filling it with scraps!

Some days we have to empty it more than once, so logic dictates that the composter can be credited for us putting less in the rubbish bin.

Another factor has to be that I am cooking and baking more than I did when I started the Meaner Greener Me Blog. I will speculate and say that this is cutting down our rubbish, For example, when I make bread in the bread maker I use ingredients from the kitchen cupboard. Only if a packet is finished do I produce any waste and most of the ingredients come in recyclable packaging.

I bake most of our treats now so we no longer have biscuit wrappers to throw away – the biscuits we ate were often double wrapped in plastic packaging plus and cardboard box (think Jaffa cakes).

Finally another obvious factor in the reduction in our rubbish is that we are potty training our toddler and so the use of disposable nappies has dropped by about 5 per day.

I have to confess that before I was Meaner & Greener, I made the decision to use disposable nappies. At the time I chose to prioritise convenience over….well…faffing about with horrible cloth nappies and doing extra washing! I knew that parenthood would bring with it challenges that I couldn’t avoid so I opted to avoid the ones I could.

I have now become ‘acclimatised’ to parenthood and if I were to have another baby I’d almost certainly go for reusable nappies. I know it’s cheeky of me to say that when I’m almost certainly not going to have another baby, but I know it wouldn’t bother me to be dealing with, shall we say, the messy side of cloth nappies the way it would have REALLY affected me with my first child!

So there we go, I reduced my rubbish without even trying to do it – a bit of effort in some areas seems to pay off in others. Let’s see if those bin bags stay in the cupboard over the next few weeks instead of ending up in landfill each week!

Meaner Greener Me: What it’s all about

Welcome to my blog, thank you for coming to find out about my next project. This new idea has evolved easily – a good sign I hope! – and has already made me think a lot about the way I live my life. I am eager to start investigating, writing and, most of all, improving some of my practices and kicking old habits. I hope you enjoy it and please feel free to provide feedback (by blog or Twitter), I love the interaction!

In this project, I aim to tackle the issues of consumption and waste.  I am interested in the way that many of us in the UK ‘over consume’, how we purchase and later dispose of the things we’ve acquired.

My motivation for this topic has come mainly from two sources;

1 A passionate yearning for the eradication of poverty and inequality.  I cannot bear to watch the gulf grow in the UK between rich and poor – recent policy changes have led to tax breaks for the most wealthy while there is an increase in the use of foodbanks by the most vulnerable. (If you want to read some of my thoughts on this subject please see my posts Against the Welfare Reform and 10 Things I Hate About You: The Bedroom Tax in Scotland.)

Global inequality was highlighted last month when a clothing factory in Bangladesh collapsed, killing hundreds of employees who made goods to be sold in countries including, from what I can gather, the UK. Such victims were working in terrible conditions for others, like me, to be able to buy things at low cost.

Surely therefore those of us who can afford to live comfortably and sometimes stretch to luxuries need to take responsibility for how we consume and which businesses we hand over our money to?

2. An increasing feeling that I need to work on reducing the waste resulting from the things I purchase.  It is a privilege to be able to live comfortably and it is important to acknowledge this and ensure that my own consuming causes the least damage possible.

In this blog I want to look at the way that I personally consume:

• Do I actually need what I am buying?
• Can I source what I need ethically?
• How do I get rid of things I have ‘consumed’ so that others may be able to use them?
• If they are of no use to others, how can I limit my contribution to landfill and pollution?

I will expand on these points as my blog goes on and hope to give you lots of colourful examples from my life of how I currently spend my cash and throw away my rubbish.  Stay with me as I tidy cupboards to find out what I actually have, start composting and perhaps the biggest challenge – plan a child’s party without causing excessive waste!

If you want to whet your appetite for this topic, please take a look at my Supermarket-free Me posts – I aim to follow a similar style.  Furthermore, that project gave me a real taste for ethical shopping and challenged me on many of the everyday shopping decisions that I make, almost on auto-pilot.

I aim to initially blog on this subject for three months, posting on average a couple of times a week at least (I may have spells where I post less or more frequently).  My next post will tell you a bit more about me and how ‘green’ or otherwise I am.  It’s fair to say there’s room for improvement…