Introducing Mrs Green and family

Say a big hello to Mrs Green and her family.

She lives in a semi-rural village in Gloucestershire and together with her husband, their daughter and the cat, she has agreed to sign up for The Rubbish Diet challenge.

Yes, we did need agreement from the cat, as she is a key contributor to food waste but we took a purr and a wink as a sign of compliance before letting her settle back to her cat-nap.

The family are at home for much of the time as their daughter is home-educated. They often have the opportunity to cook from scratch, which means that they are able to keep unnecessary packaging down to a minimum.

Being environmentally-minded, Mrs Green has made previous attempts to slim her bin but also being human, the frustrations with taking the kitchen peelings to the compost bin at the bottom of the garden on wet and soggy days have often led to it being sent off to landfill.

Combining problems with plastics and issues with Tetra Paks, the Green's weekly rubbish collection regularly amounts to one old-fashioned dustbin plus two swing-bin bags of waste.



With concerns for the environment being a key motivator Mrs Green has decided to go for it big time, with an immediate decision to try and cut all that rubbish in half.

They are already keen recyclers. After recycling glass, tins and paper through their kerbside collection, they hold on to their plastic bottles and card to take to their village collection point and to recycling centres further afield. Since completing the audit, Mrs Green is also pleased that recently Tetra Pak recycling has been introduced in the village and is already seeing a positive impact on her bin.

However the key problem is food waste, especially as Mrs Green is vegetarian, Mr Green isn't and Little Miss Green is just 7, which means that Mrs Green has a huge juggling act to pull together the nutritional needs of all the family, including the cat who also eats fresh food rather than tinned meat.

There's not much the family can do at present to reduce the cooked food waste, except for reduce portion sizes or perhaps invest in a Bokashi Bin, but the great news is that Mrs Green is now very committed to making regular visits to their compost bin and is more determined than ever.

And I don't think composting will be particularly difficult anymore, thanks to a new visitor, whom I had the pleasure of meeting last week. He and his friend can be found regularly hanging out in the vicinity of the composter and are always ready to help. And NO, I am not talking about Diarmuid Gavin of WRAP's compost campaign. No, this visitor is just a little more hairy than celebrity gardener Diarmuid.



But with this kind of help, I don't think there's much hope for successful composting, do you?

So while I work on her Rubbish Audit, please pop over to Mrs Green's pad and say hello. Apparently, there's a bit of a recycling party going on in celebration of Recycle Week.

But before you go, here is the best news ever. I am very pleased to hear that Mrs Green is also hooked on talking rubbish and has set up a dedicated blog to track her family's progress. Called My Zero Waste, you will find her regular musings plus loads of other useful information and news items that she's found along the way. Don't miss it, it's excellent.

_________________________________________________________