Zero Waste Update

One of my two readers asked me the other day how my zero waste thing was going. So, herewith, an update.

I haven't posted any piccies in a while because our rubbish bags are back to one 45L bag each week. This is due to my decision to put Miss1 back into disposable nappies at night-time, following her horrible week-long open-sore nappy rash that cleared up overnight when we reverted to disposables. This, in addition to 3 additional disposable nappies a week from my friend's little boy, and voila - you have a recipe for full rubbish bags.

I am going to stop worrying about it. But perhaps we could keep our eye out for compostable disposables - I know they exist - but, in reality, how much composting goes on in a landfill anyway? Practically none. (Because most of the pile of refuse is anaerobic, so composting doesn't happen). So it would be a complete waste of money. So perhaps not :)

There, I've just talked myself out of a move that, while on the surface looks cool and green, is actually just a big waste of money. Go me... Read more...

Zero-waste catch-up

Well, we're not doing so well this week on the whole Zero-waste thing. Miss1 has had a bad nappy rash, which I was attempting to treat with lots of 'nappy off time'. But after 2 days in a row of hunting down where that smell was coming from and inadvertently stepping in it and having to bath a poo-covered baby, wash my shoes and scrub the carpet, I have decided that 3 days of disposables with frequent changes to keep her dry will be better for my sanity, if not the environment! Happy to report that the rash is much better. But I've wiped out about 3 weeks worth of progress as far as waste reduction goes.

I think that we'll go back to using disposables at night - perhaps every second night. She does seem to get quite soggy at night-time in cloth, and if she's eaten something a bit acidic (oranges, tomatoes, yoghurt...) then her poor wee skin takes a hammering.

In other news, I am starting to pull more stuff out from the cellar and list anything vaguely sale-able on TradeMe. Babysteps though - I don't want to get overwhelmed with too much stuff sitting in the house waiting to be sold! Just a couple of items at a time. And I'll freecycle or appropriately donate anything that doesn't sell. Listed this today.

It feels good just to have moved something out of the cellar and to be doing something with it! There is in unbelievable amount of clutter under there - the previous owner was a builder and he stored anything that 'might come in handy one day' under the house. Vast quantities of random bits of wood etc. Also lots of 'empties' - empty boxes, empty sacks, empty bottles, jars, buckets, planter pots... lots of stuff that will go straight to freecycle or a skip I think. Read more...

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. Read more...

One week of Zero Waste-wards

This is our waste that is going out for collection in the morning. The plastic tub is for the Recycling collection, the white supermarket bag is our mixed paper, sitting in front of our one cardboard box. The black bag is a 45L Council Rubbish Bag. Tying it up tonight was a breeze - it's already much less full than even a week ago. Perhaps those occasional day-time disposables were more frequent than I thought. I also find that I'm more careful about putting the paper into the paper recycling bag rather than the rubbish bin.

I'll probably find that I'm subconsciously hoarding rubbish in an effort to keep the bag empty - perhaps I'll stumble upon a huge pile of non-recyclable margarine containers behind the bed, or just discover that I can't find the desk anymore because it's hiding under a pile of plastic wrapping papers or something. No doubt the rubbish bag volume will stabilize somewhere above this first 'bag of consciousness', as all the things that should have been discarded this week eventually do find there way out of the house. I am determined that, in the process of trying to keep stuff out of the landfill, that this house will not become the landfill.

Tonight I'm trying the baby in a cloth nappy. Eventually I will probably do this every night, but for now I'm just trying it out. Today I realised that I'd been wanting to use up the disposables we'd already bought before going to cloth at nights, but that's just silly. They will probably get used every so often anyway - it's handy to have one in the car in case of emergencies, and tummy bugs are simply not to be contemplated with cloth (not for this mummy, anyway). If she grows out of the ones that we have, then I can always pass them on to someone else!

I think that just getting rid of disposables will drop us down to one bag every two weeks. The problem will be the smell. Our rubbish tonight is only one week old and it stinks. I forgot to rinse out the meat wrappers, but even then - what will I do about bones? I shall investigate what to do about bones and meat scraps - cos even if I boil them up for stock, I still have the bones, and lots of things I've read have said not to put meat into the compost heap.

Perhaps in the mean time I can have a 'meat waste' bag in the freezer and try to remember to put it in the rubbish bag before putting it out to be collected.

Oh, and one more thing - we're now collecting beer bottle-tops, to make one of those rattly beer-bottle stick things that folk musicians use. I think Miss3 would really like it, and it's one less thing int he rubbish bag. (so far, I've collected 1. We're not big beer drinkers - it could well take us several years to collect enough for a rattly stick thing). Read more...

I have dirt under my fingernails

Even with the gardening gloves on, I have dirt under my nails. Because... (and I'm pretty excited about this!)... I actually did gardening today.

Weeding, and trimming back the hedge so people can open the gate without fighting off the Ent. Very satisfying, although, as usual, I've left the weeding until after the weeds have set seed all over the place. But satisfying all the same :)

Zero Waste stuff:
- last night I made a cloth menstrual pad, as per instructions from here. Very straightforward instructions and easy to do if you know how to make your sewing machine do 'zig-zag' (or 'serge', as the instructions call it). I had made one ages and ages ago, using the same instructions, and do very much prefer cloth to plastic, but just hadn't gotten around to making any more. In combo with the Keeper, (which I've been using since after Miss3 was born, and wouldn't be without now) I think I'd only need about 4 or 5 pads.
- biodegradable baby wipes go all fluffy and like cotton wool if you put them through the washing machine. I have thrown them into the compost heap and will see what happens to them in time. Read more...

budgo catchup

Zero Waste news
- Menstrual products - the keeper and cloth pads
- Our council does not appear to recycle yoghurt pottles or polystyrene of any type Read more...

Happy 2008

Having spent all of Sunday night, and all of Monday feeling decidedly ill with a (hopefully) 24 hour stomach bug, the New Years was celebrated in an extremely low-key way in this household. Until... I woke at 12.05am to the sound of gunshots.

Now this is not the crisis that it might be in more urban parts of town - we can actually see farm paddocks from our house and it is rare but not unheard of for farmers to be night-shooting for possums (an introduced, TB-ridden pest species in this country). So after lying there for a bit, wondering what people were doing shooting things during the holiday week (and, I admit, wondering if there was a mass-murder occurring in the neighbourhood), I checked the time, did some more waking up and worked out it was fireworks.

Which was confirmed split seconds later by several "sphizzzz pop pop pop"s, as opposed to the BANG BANG BANG which woke me up.

And that was that - 5 minutes later it was all over and I rolled over and went back to sleep.

May all your 2008s be as peaceful and ultimately uneventful!

Zero Waste news:
- Cloth nappies are great, but do not contain diarrhoea very well.
- Sometimes you can fix broken useless plastic toys instead of throwing them away. Today I fixed Miss3's plastic hammer.
- Ditto for crockery cups - the handle came off one of our coffee mugs and instead of chucking it out I sealed over the raw edges with nail-polish. It remains to be seen how good a fix this will be, but in the mean-time only the handle has gone into the bin. Read more...

Zero Waste - can we do it?

Merl gave me this book for Christmas (Teach yourself Green Parenting by Lynoa Cattanach and BabyGROE). On the whole it's a very good, pragmatic book. It's British, which makes it that fraction more culturally accessible to me than US books, and I agreed with almost everything.

Almost. I have some hesitation about the advice given about birthing choices - a first time Mum could definitely come away from a hospital caesarian feeling like a failure if she took that chapter too much to heart - OK, sure, giving birth in your own home and cleaning up afterwards is more 'natural', but then so is dying in childbirth (which people still occasionally do - even in the superduper West). So personally, give me an Independent Midwife-managed hospital birth any day. But each to her own.

Enough of birth politics, however, because the real reason I'm writing about this book is that it has sparked me off on another journey of discovery. What might Zero Waste look like on a family scale? How low can we go?

So, having assimilated the truth that I can bite off more than I can chew, this will not be a 6 week crash landing into the world of fully biodegradable everythings, this is a slow and steady evaluation of our personal waste stream and a sustained and sustainable effort to reduce it. (not very exciting, but there you go - hopefully interesting, if only to myself!).

What do we currently throw out you ask? How big is our waste problem? The broad brush stroke estimate is that if we buy the small City Council rubbish bags (45L) we use one a week, plus our recycling bin, but if we buy the big ones (65L) we use one every second week (or possibly 3 out of 5 weeks). My half-thought-about mostly pulled out of the air goal is maybe a 45L bag every second week? Can we halve our rubbish output?

Already I've identified some things that will need to go (disposable nappies, synthetic nappy wipes) and some things that bear further investigation (how expensive is a hand-cranked paper shredder and does our Council recycle yoghurt pottles or polystyrene meat trays?). The nappies shouldn't be too big an ask - we already use cloth for most of the time, but I put the baby into a disposable at night to keep her drier, and I generally use one if we're going to be out and about for a while for the same reason.

So. Goal for this week - cloth nappies only during the day. No more trusting to petrochemicals and bizarre absorbant gels to keep her dry while I actually leave the house. No more tripping out the door encumbered only with small-bottomed child, one spare nappy, wipes, toys, food, bib, and all MY essential items. Oh no, from now on it is large-bottomed child, wipes, two spare cloth nappies, one spare overnap, one change of clothes, two plastic bags, toys, food, bib etc etc.

Cloth is good, but the poo can be messier.

Oh, and a change-mat for changing pooey pants on other peoples' floors.

It's not as cumbersome as it sounds. Honest. Most of that stuff can just live in the car in case I need it anyway - i do not need to bring the whole lot inside with me everywhere I go. And I did this all the time with Miss3 - it's only with the baby that I've taken up the cheater's option of disposables while out. But I did so enjoy the freedom :-)

But a little footloose environmentally irresponsible freedom is a small sacrifice. And it will be cheaper too - always a good thing in a one-income family!

Now that's looking on the bright side :-) Read more...