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!