ZERO WASTE WEEK: The FINAL Weigh-In

Today is Monday 17th March, which marks not just the end of St Edmundsbury's Zero Waste Week, but the end of my personal 8 week challenge to reduce the amount of waste that my family sends to landfill.

So after eight weeks of buying less, learning new habits, double-checking recycling opportunities and being ever mindful of what I'm throwing away, here's the moment I've been waiting for........


CUE DRUM-ROLL FOR THE FINAL WEIGH-IN......


So without further ado .... the contents of this week's black bin are.....


1. One Plaster (from my finger injury on day 1)


And that's it....Just one itty bitty first-aid plaster (band-aid), from when I cut my finger last Monday! If you look carefully at the photo, you can see it sitting on wheel of the bin!



...and that really is the total amount of landfill rubbish that our family has created in one whole week!

BUT PHEW....IT WAS CLOSE!

There was almost my tube of toothpaste, which Mr A tried to bung in the bin, but I rescued it, rolled it up and gave it some extra squeezes and I reckon I've got another day before its contents are exhausted.

But there have been some other candidates too. When I looked in the bin yesterday afternoon there were:

1. Two Butter Wrappers (teetering on the edge, awaiting their fate)

2. A small length of scrunched-up sellotape (thanks to my renegade 3 year old)

3. Some used cotton buds (thanks to Mr A. I suppose he's not done badly, but I knew there would be something to contend with)

As it's Zero Waste Week and I possess the tenacity of a dog with a bone, I was determined that nothing else was going to be thrown away. I have already declared the plaster, despite a couple of suggestions to burn it or run it down to the local hospital, but with my sense of fairness its only fate is landfill.

However, I needed to do something with the rest of the stuff, which called for extreme measures.

I discovered I could tear off the plastic film that coated the inside of the butter wrapper, but I was still unsure whether either of these components are recyclable. As for the cotton buds, I thought the best bet for those would be to stuff them in an old sock and bung them in with the next load of washing. They came out clean and I tore off the cotton wool and put it in the compost bin, which only left the thin plastic tubes.

Hmmmm, not bad, but I said I was tenacious!

I knew I needed some back-up and my secret weapon came to mind...

...a-Ha...

No, not the 1980s Norwegian pop-group with the dulcit tones of Morton Harket, but my three year old who constantly begs for opportunities to make things.

"Mess to Impress" is his tagline!

So, I called him to my rescue and gave him some paper, glue and the little bits of rubbish that I'd rescued from the bin.

He couldn't believe his luck and got to work on some junk art, combining the plastic tubes, sellotape and butter wrappers with other bits that he's collected, all following the principles of "Reuse". It's a bit abstract, which could be appropriate when I think back to my challenges with recycling.

He couldn't think of an appropriate name for it, but I'm going to call it "Unburied Treasures". One thing's for certain, I daren't ever throw it away but I suppose I could always put it on eBay and hope for a fiver.

And that's where the story of my own Rubbish Diet challenge ends....at the end of Zero Waste Week, with our black bin containing just one plaster!

Personally, I am amazed at the results.

Even though it set out as a challenge to reduce my rubbish, the effects on other areas of my lifestyle have been incredible. I now spend less on food and am more thrifty. I am more organised with shopping activities and have got into a routine of using a range of outlets, which provide more eco-friendly options.

What has been great is the immense enthusiasm and support from the Internet Community. The comments have been fantastic and inspirational and it is the advice from our "unsung heroes" from across the globe that has led to the success of my own personal challenge. I would like to thank all contributors who have made suggestions, sent comments of motivation, shared their stories and have helped to promote the wider issues. Big thanks also go to Woman's Hour, Radio Suffolk, Ireland's Newstalk, Sustained Magazine and East Anglian Daily Times for promoting the blog and the challenge. I never expected it to get such attention, but it's been great and I owe a big thank you to Cybele at Freecycle for that. Thanks also to Wiggly Wigglers for helping with my composting queries and inviting me onto their podcast, which is coming up this week.

I would also like to extend special thanks to Melanie Rimmer at Beansprouts for her great tips at the beginning of the challenge as well as Kate McFarland at Edmundsbury Council Council for her advice along the way. As well as to all my friends, thanks also go to Tracey Smith at International Downshifting Week for being a fabulous mentor and to my good friend Christina Surdhar of About Bury for sticking by me, allowing me to extend my deadlines and letting me bore her with my talks of rubbish! I'm sorry if I've omitted a mention, but it's beginning to sound like an Oscar speech!

However, I would like to make one last thank you. The biggest thanks go to Mr A and the Junior Posse, for putting up with my ideas and my nagging over the last few months. Thank you guys for the big effort you've made and long may it continue. You know it's worth it.

So what's next? Well, Mr A has been so bowled over by the results of The Rubbish Diet, that he now wants me to move onto tackling our Clutter, Energy use and Spending, but first things first Mr A. We've got to make sure the rubbish is kept down before we go onto the next challenge, which means The Rubbish Diet is here to stay for a little while longer. I know I said it would be just eight weeks, but there's so much that's been left unexplored and I am now officially hooked!

So what can you expect from here-on in?

Well there's going to be less about me and more about others, much to the relief of some. Here are just some of the things I'm planning to take a look at:

• Waste Management in Switzerland, a country which has the reputation of being one of the top recyclers in the world.
  
• How restaurants cope with food waste?
• Getting the low-down from packaging companies, how do they see the future?
• What happens at a materials recycling facility?
• More solutions for recycling some of the tricky little things.
  
• Some fabulous products made from recycled materials.
• Indeed profiling anyone in the production/waste stream that is making interesting progress in the right direction.
• I might even ask Gordon Brown about his own rubbish! Strange, but I'm now finding the idea of rummaging through the trash at No. 10 quite appealing.
  

I am also going to include a series on our "unsung heroes", profiling stories from people who are already making the effort, no matter how long they've been doing it or why. Whether it's down to a generational difference, lack of money or concern for the environment, it's other people's experiences that are truly motivating, so please send me your stories as it would be great to promote case studies that illustrate best practice and which help to inspire others.

The site will also feature the progress of other people who decide to take up The Rubbish Diet and attempt Zero Waste for themselves. So, if you would like to rise to the challenge, get some help and feature your story here, then please get in touch. All enquiries and information should be sent to enquiries@therubbishidet.co.uk.

And now I'm off to celebrate...but not with champagne .... oh no!

Today is Bin Day and I am going to celebrate by NOT PUTTING THE BIN OUT...

because for the first time in my life as a responsible adult...there's no need to.....HOORAY! Indeed, if I keep this up, I won't have to put it out for weeks or months!

So I'm now going to take a few days off and enjoy the celebrations, but please come back in a couple of days time for the next update, or sign up for the RSS Feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheRubbishDiet

In the meantime, I am going to leave you with a final message in the form of an illustration that I commissioned from the brilliant artist Ray Smith of www.thegreenpen.co.uk. For best effect, click on the picture to enlarge it and enjoy!

(The Rubbish Diet, copyright Ray Smith. Please do not copy without permission)

There are more great cartoons at Ray's website, so if you're in need of a distraction, I recommend that you go and have a look.

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Slow Down and Green Up with Tracey Smith

Today's guest post is by Tracey Smith, the writer and broadcaster who has launched the successful awareness campaign National Downshifting Week. Since submitting this article, it's even been supersized to INTERnational Downshifting week, as Tracey inspires people all over the world to take things a little easier.

Of course, you can make efforts to slim your bin whatever your pace of life, but in Tracey's words, there are times when it's easier to slow down. Tracey tells us how she started and how her slowing down helped her to reduce household waste. So while I sit and relax, it's over to Tracey...

"Some 30-years after Tom and Barbara first graced our screens in “The Good Life”, we’re still glued to repeats of this BBC classic and looking to the radical ‘Surbiton Two’ for advice on greenfly and for a jolly good belly laugh.

For some however, a deeper motive lurks behind this façade – they’re watching for inspiration as they plan their escape from the dirty ‘Rat Race’.

My husband and I spent about a year preparing for our downshift. We cut up the credit cards, got rid of the second car, started buying all (yes, all) our clothes and household goods from the charity shops and cooking meals from fresh, ditching the pre-packed options and take-aways.

These progressive adjustments presented us with their own challenges, but because we were eager to ‘positively embrace’ living with less, the overall effect was rather pleasing and certainly not spiked by feelings of missing out, to the obvious shock and horror of some of our friends and family.

We tried earnestly to grow our favourite fruit and veg but mostly it was a crash-course in cultivating chaos and we learned more by our trials and errors.

Thankfully, we ended up with bountiful crops of the things we loved and the joy of working out what to do with that abundance was almost indescribable.

It fuelled our passion to do better the following season, growing organically of course. That itself is a huge challenge, particularly when there’s not a handily placed, green-fingered parent to hand, to advise on coping with inevitable pests without adopting a chemical stance. One of the other amazing bonuses came in the form of reduced packaging and waste, which had predominantly come from our groceries.

Last year, I discovered a fantastic book called ‘Organic Gardening, the Natural No-Dig Way’, by Charles Dowding - I only wish it had been my trusty companion when I started out, as there’s been many a hot-water bottle placed on my achy bits as a result of excessive and unnecessary spade-action.

As a writer, it was fantastic to focus my attention on journaling and uncovering the secrets of simple living. I pulled in a few commissions and before I knew it, there was a column, then the odd bit of radio, even a bit of telly, all probing and undressing the very broad subject of downshifting.

Emails came from all over the world and it seemed there was an enormous collective of people who had ‘stuff’, money, houses and cars, but no work/life balance or contentment. They were looking for a way to explore downshifting, generally cutting back and embracing living with less and needed reassurance they weren’t the only ones with these mad ideas.

One extremely cold November afternoon (we had no central heating), I sat typing an article on how to downshift abroad (my general advice being, downshift in your own 4 walls in England and see how you feel about it long before you reach for a map and your wellies), two of our kids had chicken pox, money was frighteningly low, the septic tank was giving us untimely gip, one of my ex-battery hens had just committed suicide by getting her neck jammed in the gate and I had the light-bulb in my desk lamp perched directly over the keyboard to keep my fingers warm, so I could continue typing.

Then suddenly, I had a brainwave about putting together an awareness campaign called National Downshifting Week. It hit me like a smack on the rear end and I could see, this would be the way to give people a ‘hook’ to hang their (not so) crazy ideas about pulling back from a super-consumer society and getting more enjoyment from life by spending less!

My husband passed by me in the hall and I blurted out the news….he smiled, laughed gently and said something like, “Oh yea! Great! Will it pay the bills honey (small though they were, we still had bills) – can’t you just focus on getting a few more articles out there instead?”

Naturally, his worked like the proverbial red rag to a bull and I steamed ahead, fiddling around haplessly, trying so hard to get all my thoughts into tidy boxes on a website I proudly called www.DownshiftingWeek.com

When it was finished, it looked like a dogs dinner in terms of layout, but the content was bloody brilliant! And so National Downshifting Week and her simple suggestions were born.

Tonight, I’m still sitting in a house with no central heating, a jumper and a scarf, but no lamp over the keyboard, I’ve just got used to it and I’ve put many more hours of work into this labour of love I call NDW.

It’s like a 4^th baby and needs more attention than my kids ever did!

She (of course it’s a ‘she’) exists purely to encourage participants to slow down their pace and lean towards the green and I still love getting emails that say, “Where on earth do I begin?”

I am full of admiration for projects like Karen's (aka Almost Mrs Average) 'Rubbish Diet' and my hat goes off to her for getting this simple topic between her teeth and shaking it to an upbeat conclusion. Another shining example is the Zero Waste Programme being run by St Edmundsbury Borough Council, which is set to inspire folks up and down the country to trim back on their superfluous waste!

I think the most effective campaigns are the ones that are the easiest to get involved with and this one couldn't be simpler. It's shocking when we sit back and actually take stock of the crud that surrounds us and we must be mindful of the fact that 'most' of it could be avoided with a few savvy changes to our shopping decisions."

To find out more about National Downshifting Week,which runs from 19th-25th April visit www.downshiftingweek.com. Also, for some great music and top advice, tune in to Tracey's regular weekly slot, 10am-1pm on Wednesdays at Apple AM.

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