Taking the Rubbish Diet Challenge

In 2008, spurred on by a challenge from her local council Karen Cannard, aka Almost Mrs Average, decided to embark upon a rubbish diet and to set up a blog to chart her progress.  I heard her talking about it on Woman's Hour and decided to find out more.

Recycling: Cardboard, Tetrapasks and mixed plastics

Since then I have given my rubbish a bit more thought, recycled a bit more and tried to bring home less packaging.  However, I did not feel I could dictate what the rest of my family bought as they were either adults or very nearly adult, and my son was doing his own cooking, as well as spending his wages on various items that came with lots of packaging.

Now the kids are both at uni, I'm thinking it should be easier to control the amount of potential rubbish I bring into the house, so I thought I'd see what I can do to further reduce the amount of rubbish I create.

This week has been an ideal time to start as hubby has been away. Since I last emptied the kitchen bin on Sunday I have mostly thrown away the little plastic bags that dried goods come in as I can't buy everything from Suma.  I'm not really sure if I should be recycling them as I don't know what kind of plastic they are and I wouldn't want to contaminate the plastic bag collections at our local supermarkets.

As far as I can remember, I have also thrown away the skin from one cooked chicken breast, some bits of Parmesan cheese I cut off because it looked like it was starting to go a little mouldy, a few bits of burnt chips,  and today I emptied the contents of the vacuum cleaner in it.  I nearly put a piece of dry bread in there as it will attract rats in the compost, but as it isn't mouldy I decided I'd feed it to the birds.

Not very interesting or appetising stuff.

My sink-side bin for vegetable peelings etc.

We also have separate containers for raw, vegetable kitchen waste, cardboard, recyclable plastics not collected by our council, recyclable metal and plastics collected by our council, waste paper and also bottles for kerbside collection and tetrapaks. I put receipts and other personal papers in with the compost.

Now I know there are just two of us living here most of the time, but even when there were four of us being what I'd call extravagant in the amount of rubbish we created, one dustbin full a week was plenty, so I'm not sure why the Daily Mail think it is so terrible that some councils are only allowing residents 80 black bin bags a year.
 
Of course we always recycled our newspapers and glass, and more recently tins, but now nearly everyone has these and more collected from the kerb outside their house what excuse can they have for throwing that sort of thing in their bins?

So, all that remains is for me to weigh my kitchen bin bag.  The scales didn't move, so I emptied the other bins into it.  There wasn't much but the scales moved to near the two pound mark if I put the bag down firmly enough.  Mind you this is only 4 days' rubbish.  I'll try to weigh the bag again on Sunday.