Reducing our household waste...

I'm going to do some posts on environmental issues that we've been looking out in our house.

Reducing our household waste further is something I have been focusing on for the past 6mths. I always thought we did pretty good, but in reality, we were shocking! OK, so possibly not as bad as it can get, but I was pretty unaware when I now consider what I know and do!

As more and more discussions appear on The Nappy Network, TV programmes are produced such as Wa$ted, from reading books and internet browsing, each make me think, reassess and implement another little change. Some of them I've just been plain lazy about and others just totally ignorant. This seems strange to me - I am a thinker, I am a woman of action - why have I had my head in the sand for so long??

So, I've taken action over the last 6mths and these are the changes I've made which have been a long time coming.

* All wet waste is now distributed between - The Dog gets all surplus food scraps and leftovers that have been lying around (we generally eat left overs for lunch the next day that haven't been served up) - said dog has actually put on unnecesary weight and therefore will be sharing his scraps with the chooks when we get around to getting them (we no longer need to buy the dog any food aside from dog biscuits that he gets for breakfast); vegetable/fruit scraps/teabags/vacuum cleaner dust gets popped into the compost bin (I tried a worm bin, but it didn't work too efficiently for us, so I have reverted to the compost bin which we relocated so it was easy access, close to a water source and "brown" material). We compost 1-2 x 2 litre ice cream containers of scraps a day!

* All paper is now recycled. This is the most embarassing one for me. I can not believe I wasn't using the kerbside recycling which is provided (we don't get kerbside recycling offered for plastics/glass etc yet ALWAYS take it to the recylcing station every few months - this is why I felt we were doing pretty good). However, we were tossing the 3 weekly local rags in the bin, all junk mail, boxes from cereal packets etc and other random paper. We had already put a No Junk Mail sign up about the middle of last year and that in itself made a huge difference (I never join mailing lists to receive newsletters). Now I put out one large grocery shopping bag of paper per week. (When I refer to "grocery bags", well they're not really because I don't receive any, but it's how I think of "size").

These were the two major changes I made to our rubbish. I am amazed to say that we have now reduced our weekly rubbish from a small wheelie bin (about 4 grocery bags) down to ONE grocery bag (in fact I no longer need to use a bag as a liner in the bin because it just doesn't get yucky from wet goopy things anymore). It is full of plastic wrapper type stuff only. It occasionally has meat bones. We have always been great at not buying goods that use excessive wrappers or little boxes or whatever else - so really our problem was paper and wet waste. A few days ago I cancelled our wheelie bin which we have been forking out $$ for!