How to reduce waste

ani*fan

For many years I lived in a country cottage where we did not have a bin to empty as the minimum amount of waste produced was used to start the fire in the evening. Recycling happened once a month and peelings and coffee grinds were composted. All good.

4 years ago I moved to a city where there wasn't even recycling facilities anywhere close to me including my local supermarket carpark. It was miserable to travel for miles and sometimes I didn't do it, and the amount of waste I produced began to sky rocket. To make it worse, I used to drop a black bin bag down a chute to the ground floor, so I didn't even really know how much I was producing. Not good.

Things have changed now in this city, not before time, and I now have doorstep collection of recyling, rubbish and compostable waste. I've had this for 8 months. The recycling wheelie bin is collected every 2 weeks, we fill it every time, and the rubbish bin is also collected every 2 weeks, this one is often not full. The compostable bin usually has one or two wee food waste bags in it and some leaves and whatever from the garden.

Now I can see what's happening, I am horrified by how much waste we are producing. I cannot quite believe I have gone from practically nothing to this. Every time the bins are emptied I think I'm going to make more of an effort not to fill them but then it happens anyway.

There are only 2 of us and 2 cats. I recently moved the cats from pouches to tins as the tins can be recycled. They are also eating less food as both were at the top end of a healthy weight. They have a litter with wood pellets and I have started to scoop the poo down the toilet and then compost the litter. I will wait to hear from the council (and our bin collectors take great pride in telling you when you're getting it wrong) if that's ok. So the cats are fine, it's the humans that are creating problems.

I honestly cannot tell you what we are throwing away. Maybe I need to keep a list? My work shoes fell apart this week so I bought a new pair and put my old ones in the bin yesterday but really, should i rummage through it to see?? I can't think what we are doing that makes this insane amount of rubbish.

One of the things is wallpaper, we stripped the tatty old paper off the bathroom last week. I tried to find out if it could be recycled and learned that no, too polluted with chemicals and dyes and such. So it's in the bin.

Does anyone have any suggestions for how to start pulling this in and producing less waste? With one bin uplift every 2 weeks, that's 26 a year, half are mine, so I am essentially producing 13 wheelie bins full of rubbish every year, just for me. Wowzer. :eek: Me and OH are also trying to have a baby, and I am already up against the nappy police telling me I'll need to use disposables. I don't want to and I want all of this sorted out before that time comes.

Any help and advice gratefully received.

ani*fan

At the risk of sounding like a complete nutter, I have gone and had a look through my bin. Here's what I found.

1 pair of shoes, totally worn to bits.
6 x crisp packets
1 x large bag the crisp multi pack came in
1 x garlic bread wrapper
1 x bread roll wrapper
1 x biscuit wrapper
3 x paper items that got moved to the recyling bin

SO a few things...

I need to double check all the recycling is in the right place.
I need to reduce the amount of junk food being eaten.
I need to make more things from scratch like bread and biscuits.

As a result I am keeping my eye out for a bread maker from freecycle. And I'll make some biscuits today.

What else?

Katiehound

The only thing I might suggest is the shoes- there are shoe bins situated inside/outside shoeshops and cobblers. (Locally Clarks have a bin)
Shoes are sent overseas (to Africa?) and whatever can be is reused and recycled. Generally the heels on mine are worn away at an angle but the uppers & maybe soles are fine

Ben84

Personally, I'm not interested in household recycling at the moment. This has motivated me to reduce the waste we produce instead. Our household of three adults typically throws out a supermarket carrier bag of rubbish a week - but the yearly average will be a bit higher as there's the odd occasions we decorate the house or have a worn out coat or something to throw out. The bin goes out every few months when I remember, but I don't tend to wait so long it's filled up. So, I think we do pretty well, but there will always be some need for packaging - so I try to get the most efficient options.

In terms of raw material/energy use and waste reduction, going from cat food pouches to cans is a bad move. Pouches are lightweight and are made in large part of plastic - a much lighter, less energy intensive material than steel. I found a study on pet food packaging:

http://www.wrap.org.uk/sites/files/wrap/RSC003-009%20Pet%20Food%20Report1.pdf

They say the lightest metal can containing 400g of cat food weighed 41.9g, while the lightest pouch containing 100g of food weighed just 3.21g. So, 400g of cat food from these pouches would be 12.8g. That's a big saving in material mass and a good fraction of the packaging is a much less resource intensive material.

Generally, high efficiency packaging comes with the downside of limited recyclability, often it's composite materials like metal foil bonded to plastic, which is challenging to separate, and the low volume of material makes it worth less effort too. However, producing them is much more efficient and they do make less solid waste. They are small volume, non-toxic items when landfilled, and if your rubbish is burnt to make electricity, as is increasingly common in Europe, they are largely combustible material. I don't believe we should stick with high mass, high energy materials like metal, glass and to a lesser extent paper/card just because it's easier to recycle. Recycling isn't the only eco-option, and it isn't environmentally neutral, it is a process that consumes energy and materials.

I'm a big fan of things like cat-food pouches, the plastic coffee and detergent refills. I also tend to buy products I use a lot in bulk. One big detergent bottle uses less plastic than multiple small ones. I do a lot of household cleaning with soda crystals, they're pretty benign for the environment and come in a lightweight plastic bag. Rice, pasta, beans, all that I buy in the largest sizes in lightweight plastic bags. It produces a few grams of plastic per kg of product. Lightweight plastic, and in some cases modern composite packaging similar to cat food pouches is a big part of how we make so little waste. Would it be greener for us to go back to using large amounts of heavy and energy intensive metal, glass and card? Metal and glass have to be melted in furnaces! This is energy intensive material. Wood has to be boiled to make pulp.

ani*fan

Many thanks for you replies Katiehound and Ben84. I have done a quick search of where to take my shoes and have come up with nothing. I'll keep trying. My aim at the moment is to reduce the amount of stuff that I send to landfill that sits there for decades before decomposing, if it ever does, so the cat tins stay for now.

Anyone have any other ideas about how to reduce the amount sent to landfill?

Katiehound

ani*fan wrote: »

I have done a quick search of where to take my shoes and have come up with nothing.

I just know where the shoe bins are in town- I doubt very much that it's mentioned online.
Another place you can (maybe) put old shoes is 'ragwaste.' Certainly our local hospice shop takes bags of 'rags' for which they are paid. Rags in this instance can be material, clothes, belts, shoes, bags. Ask at your local charity shops

Ben84

ani*fan wrote: »

Many thanks for you replies Katiehound and Ben84. I have done a quick search of where to take my shoes and have come up with nothing. I'll keep trying. My aim at the moment is to reduce the amount of stuff that I send to landfill that sits there for decades before decomposing, if it ever does, so the cat tins stay for now.

Anyone have any other ideas about how to reduce the amount sent to landfill?

Unfortunately, I don't know of any options for my old worn out shoes except in the bin. I've been trying to buy more durable shoes to reduce this, and that's helped, but few things last forever and shoes aren't one of them. My synthetic 'leather' shoes I've been buying more recently however have been consistently more durable and long lasting compared to animal leather. Although this is swapping leather for plastics, making real leather is usually a pretty toxic process with various harmful chemicals to preserve and dye it, so although at this point I don't have specific data on synthetic vs. real leather, I don't consider real leather an eco-friendly material. Plastics could be better even in this case.

Well, I would always keep in mind the environmental impact of consuming material things is a multi-part issue. We have the raw material collecting and processing, the manufacturing of the item, packaging and delivering to to consumers, how long it is useful to them, and finally disposal. The disposal stage is just one part of the total picture, and strong advantages in other parts can sometimes - actually I believe often - outweigh the ability to recycle the item. Focusing on just one or two aspects of the whole situation can lead us to environmentally worse choices. It's challenging, but there are various angles to approach more sustainable living from. I have often seen a focus on zero landfill waste lead to choices that have big impacts in other areas like material mass, how much energy it takes to produce it, and energy costs to deliver it. Some attempts to be greener have I think made things worse.

For me, waste reduction led to a choice - use the lightweight, but often less recyclable packaging, or stick with the heavy metal, glass and paper? I picked the first option, and it has made a big difference in terms of how much materials and energy we're consuming in the resource extraction, processing and item manufacturing. Also some advantages in delivering products now they're lighter. But our rubbish, although much reduced, does largely go in the general waste bin for energy recovery.

Well, another way to reduce landfill (assuming that's where your waste goes? Some regions send it to energy recovery now), is composting. Well, landfill or energy recovery, composting makes sense. It's an easy at home solution for people with gardens to turn some of their waste in to a useful material. Keeping it out of landfill reduces methane from landfills, and keeping wet material out of waste to energy plants improves their energy recovery rate as they don't loose energy boiling off the water. I also choose to compost a lot of paper/cardboard as I find it makes good compost, reducing my need to buy more in.

Anyway, what kind of items are filling up your bin?

zeupater

Ben84 wrote: »

... Our household of three adults typically throws out a supermarket carrier bag of rubbish a week ...

Hi

That's in-line with what we throw ... our wheelie-bin is collected fortnightly and there's usually only one or two carrier-bags lurching at the bottom ... thinking about it, volume-wise we'd likely not even fill the wheelie-bin to the top with a year's worth of rubbish ...

HTH
Z

EricMears

Ben84 wrote: »

. . Keeping it out of landfill reduces methane from landfills . . . .

Not sure that's strictly true. Methane from landfill sites is often collected and used to generate electricity whereas if you compost the stuff at home any methane that is produced will vent to atmosphere.

But I broadly agree with the rest of that post.

fabulous_girl

I too have become very interested in waste reduction recently ,having seen some shocking pictures online of the amount of plastic that washes up on beaches, and triggered in part by the new 25 year plan to reduce plastic from the government (25 years is too far away, I am starting now!).

Many supermarkets have a shoe bin outside, in their main recycling areas. There is also one at my local council recycling facility. Hope that helps.

Things I've changed already/have started looking into in case it gives you any inspiration/or provides a talking point!
- I've changed to a milkman delivering glass bottles instead of buying plastic. It is more expensive, but worth it for the plastic reduction (we have a 20 month old), and means the dairies get a fair price.
- I got a reuseable bamboo coffee cup for xmas so I have been taking it everywhere - normally a filter coffee in Pret is 99p, but take your own cup and you get 50p off so it's only costing my 49p for a morning coffee
- I went shopping at my local Lidl the other day. It's REALLY hard to shop and take into account a budget, a diet AND being eco friendly. I just tried to limit the amount of plastic packaging I bought! I'm going to check out a local (ish) store where you can take your own containers and buy food by weight, which I am quite excited about!
-i've also added a yoghurt maker to my amazon wishlist (birthday in a few weeks!) so we dont have to keep buying it in plastic tubs.
- we did charity shop christmas with one section of the family and I'm aiming for eco/handmade/non plastic/recycled gifts for birthdays etc this year.

In terms of nappies, there are a couple of versions of middle ground nappies, not reuseable, but eco friendly disposables which I am looking at. Naty and Moltex are eye wateringly expensive compared to Lidl and Aldi ones. You could also sign up for a nappy recycling service. Unfortunately those are things we can't afford right now, so I am going to concentrate on my plastic reduction instead!

Ben84

EricMears wrote: »

Not sure that's strictly true. Methane from landfill sites is often collected and used to generate electricity whereas if you compost the stuff at home any methane that is produced will vent to atmosphere.

But I broadly agree with the rest of that post.

Generally, it's safe to assume there will be little or no methane made when composting vs. landfill because the environments are different. Waste in landfills receives little oxygen - well, when it's sufficiently deep, so it decomposes anaerobically (without oxygen) while in a compost bin it will normally decompose aerobically (with oxygen).

Fully oxidising the carbon materials to CO2 requires oxygen, and when doing this microbes can remove the most energy from the waste. With limited to no oxygen, carbon is increasingly turned in to CH4. Methane of course can burn when there is oxygen, showing how it still contains potential energy that couldn't be accessed by the microbes without oxygen. This is why two different types of decomposition take place depending on the availability of oxygen in the environment. Aerobically yields the microbes the most energy from the materials, but if there's no oxygen they'll make do and release methane instead of CO2.

Although landfill gas can be collected and burnt, I don't know how many landfills do this, or how efficiently they capture it. I'm also not sure if they have to wait until the landfill is capped to start capturing, because if so the landfill could be producing methane for years while it's being filled. I'd have to explore this, but with what I currently know, composting it at home seems a safe option if you're trying to avoid making methane. How much that matters though will depend on how well it's captured by your local landfill and burnt (ideally to use the energy).