Carton recycling trial

Good news for all you zero-wasters, the City Council have just introduced a new carton recycling scheme at some of the larger recycling centres in the city. There are new banks for paper-based liquid food and drink cartons at

• Sainsbury's, Brooks Road
• Tesco, Newmarket Road
• Waitrose, Hauxton Road
• The Beehive Centre, Coldhams Road

There is more information on the City Council's website at www.cambridge.gov.uk, as well as a map showing where these sites are.

One man's waste is another's treasure

I have just weighed our household's bag of rubbish on the franking machine scales in the office, and it comes to 220g exactly. If the average UK citizen produces around 7 times their body weight in rubbish every year, and I assume that I can divide this weight between the 2 people in our house, then if I carried on at the same rate I would produce 1/3ooth of the average persons rubbish! Luckily, we didn't have any 'unusual' waste this month, like broken globes etc.

I have written a list (which I won't bore you with) of all the things in my bag, and there are 65 separate items, every one of them made from plastic of some description. We used any plastic bag that didn't have holes in for clearing up after the dog, so I suppose if I count those (Mostly bread bags, they all went in the red council dog waste bins) there would be an extra 60 items, and if you count the contents (yuk!) separately then that's 185 items in total. I imagine that would add a considerable weight - should have got the dog loo sorted out!

Anyway, I'm pretty pleased with our effort, but would like to try for a real Zero next year. I think this would require more advance preparation, as most of our rubbish was from things we already had in the fridge or cupboards. There are definitely some things I started doing during the ZWC that I will carry on, like making fishcakes, but I can't promise we won't go back to buying Magnums with their plastic wrappers...

What I would really like to see come out of this is a wider recognition of the importance of waste reduction and reuse. Even if we recycle as much as possible, there will always be some things that are not easily recyclable, but are easy to avoid. I also think people need to recognise how much waste is actually a resource, either for yourself or someone else - Neil's sink is a great example of something that in other hands could have ended up in a skip! I am a skip-diver myself, and have fished out perfectly serviceable garden benches with many years of use left in them. It is truly amazing what some people throw out.

Well done everyone!

Everything, including the kitchen sink

It's now eight weeks since my black bin was last emptied, and almost five weeks since we started the Zero Waste Challenge.

My last week of the challenge certainly stepped up a gear, I had four lodgers arrive. Imagine their surprise when they discovered that they had stepped into the challenge too. In that week they generated a whole handful of plastic wrapping to go in the black bin. Everything else, they diligently recycled or composted.

My, or should I now say "our", total for the month is: 3 plastic bags full of plastic wrapping that is not yet recycled in my part of town (apparently it is if a visit to Waitrose is convenient); and, a kitchen sink.

Having an unwanted kitchen sink is the typical problem of having things that we don't need, but are in good working condition (in fact this sink, after many years is 'as new' apart from the tap, which is a little aged).

Perhaps most people's response to this challenge is to put it in a skip (or perhaps let the builder do that), take it to the 'dump', or, if small, put it in the black bin. Nowadays, though, many of us recognise that someone else might be able to make use of it, and hunt out a charity, such as Emmaus, who will take, and often collect furniture.

My solution has been to re-give it, via a site that I was involved in creating, called Fridge Mountain (named in honour of all those fridges that got piled up a few years ago, most of which were working!).

Having done quite a bit of building work recently, it's been perfect. Someone who came and took away the wood from my old roof has built a chicken shed, and another person who turned up with a bicycle with a clever trailer, took away a pile of off-cuts for her wood burning stove.



And lastly, a word has to go to the people at the opposite end of the scale, my former neighbours, who left recently. In one day, they produced 6 black bags of rubbish, most of which was bottles, cans and compostable food.

They managed to produce around 30kg of 'waste' in one day, where the results of my challenge was 1kg in 3o days!

I think the only answer has to be to follow the Zero Waste Challenge with the Zero Waste Barbeque, complete with kegs of local beer...

All the best,

Neale

Where are the maggots?

Catching up, rather apologetically, with what others have been doing and writing, it seems that for one reason or another I have done little to change what comes into the house, but have had a good look at what would be going into the bin in an normal month.
I have collected it in the back porch, sorted it and photographed it.

The big plastic bag at the back is the DIY debris.
The big white bag is food packaging, the blue carrier bag is office waste (mainly plastic bags from magazines) and the Waitrose bag is miscellaneous household.

But where, I ask, are the maggots?
This month included more meat packaging than normal because we too had an end of term BBQ for my husband's tutees, complete with Waitrose burgers and sausages. I have used meat from the freezer bought from Aldi long before the Zero Waste Challenge, all in plastic boxes. The simple answer seems to be to rinse the packaging at the end of the washing up, and there is nothing to attract the flies.

I have had my baby granddaughter to stay without her mother, so I have had special little plastic bags of breastmilk in my freezer. These have proved very useful, washed and dried, for freezing portions of raspberries from the allotment, but some of them are damaged, and have to go in the black bin. Fortunately my daughter has decided to go for reusable nappies, so I have not had to store any used disposables in the porch for a month! Phew!