talking rubbish

Well, we did it! This is two weeks of rubbish you see here - comfortably fitting into one 45L council rubbish bag. By far the biggest contributor was switching to cloth nappies for night-times. Incredible. I knew it would make a difference, but to go from slightly over 65L each fortnight to about 45L, with very little effort or change in routines surprises me.

Changes:
- The biggest change has been deciding not to use disposable nappies any more (except as emergency back-up). We now use a towelling nappy at night which just soaks up stuff like nothing else. We have had no major leakages as yet, and we've been doing this about 2 weeks now, so things are looking good.

- All our vegetable waste goes into the compost heap (or, now that we have one, the worm farm!). I'm now starting to compost some paper waste that is not readily recyclable too. We had a BBQ on Sunday evening and used paper plates for people who wanted plates (and it was quite a hunt to find paper plates and cups in the supermarket - they were mostly plastic). I soaked these plates in some water and stuck them into the compost heap, so hopefully they'll break down nicely in there.

- I repair crappy plastic toys if I can now, rather than just throwing them away. Often they really are just junk, but sometimes I've been able to fix them with a bit of thought and inventiveness.

- All recyclables get recycled. We are fortunate to have a pretty good kerb-side recycling scheme here - just wash 'em and put them in a blue bin out with the rubbish on collection day. very handy.

So pretty much the only thing left in our rubbish bag is non-recyclable plastic packaging, along with some meat scraps and the soiled non-flushable nappy liners (makes for a pretty stinky rubbish bag!).

My next target will need to be trying to reduce the amount of plastic packaging that comes into the house. Which will be tricky. Vegetables come from the market in plastic bags. Rice comes in plastic bags. As does pasta, soap, raisins, toilet paper, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Could take some thought.