It's getting tough out there. Feeling the pinch?

YoungBlueEyes

That's exactly the sort of thing I was interested in Jackie. What waste do people have that say they have no waste  

We have 3 bins here - recycling, garden/food, landfill. It's my recycling that gets full the quickest, the other 2 I don't often put out because the lorry's a bit rough with them, and we had to buy all new ones when we moved here so I'm more careful with them now.

Longwalker

Very very little waste here. We were sent out huge big wheelie bins for garden and food waste, but it sat there so long in the summer we got maggots so never used it since.

Cooked food from the plate usually ends up in the dog or out for the birds - crows eat anything and we have thousands of them here. Vegetable peelings - compost. Coffee grinds - garden. Eggshells compost. Chicken/meat bones , when stripped of everything edible either by us or the cat and dog , out for the foxes ( we live in the country, we arent attracting pests, we live amongst them ) 

Like Jackie, theres always wee bowls in the fridge with odds and sods, usually cooked veg, I tend to make bubble and squeak once a week, esp if we have had a roast

I do my best to portion meat up before it goes in the freezer so there is no waste. Sausages come in 6's, we only need 5, single sausage goes into the freezer for example. 

The one thing I am very guilty of is wasting bread. Mum likes the loaf she likes, Mr L only eats white, I eat the rare bit of wholemeal and I rarely have freezer space. Sure it gets chucked into the field for the crows, but still Im wasting at least half a loaf a week. Theres no point me wasting time and energy and often more money turning it into something else when at the end of the day that also wont get eaten. Im. weaning Mr L off his dependency to bread, but mum is stuck in her ways and likes a sandwich for lunch 

Its our recycling bin that gets full. We dont have the luxury of being able to buy loose , our Tesco closed their deli during lockdown and never reopened it so all deli stuff is packaged. Where as I make my own yoghurt, mum buys the corners, so theres those, then the milk and juice cartons and our tins, tinned drink of which theres always loads , juice bottles, cat food trays, paper, cardboard - its full every fortnight. General waste bin, unless Mr L has a project on the go rarely gets halfway full 

Ive a corner of the garage where I have a box for batteries, containers of used cooking oil, any obsolete small electricals, paint in tins, all that sort of stuff you really dont want to go into landfill , waiting to go to the recycling centre. Our council is very good with what they do recycle - if you take it in 

Food waste here goes to one of those incinerators that generates electricity so we are very strict in work about separating the food from the rubbish. Its much cleaner and faster to scrape the contents of a returned plate into one bin, but there may be empty sachets or foil dishes mixed into the mess, got to pick it out. The council are very strict about what actually does go in the food waste bin 

ladybird1106

Hi in regard to banana skins we cut them up, store them in a container and use it to feed our roses throughout spring summer and autumn. It does smell, but it's free plant food. 
Love 🐞

ancientmum

I have a small waste bin that I take to the compost heap on the allotment but at the end of the summer it got plagued with fruit flies so I haven't used it since.  I'll probably restart now it's cold, and keep it outside.   Eggshells get washed and crushed to put round young plants.

London_1

I don't eat a great deal of fresh bread at all so I usually buy a brown wholemeal loaf and divide it into four slice portions and freeze.Then a portion once defrosted maybe does me 2-3 days as if I eat it as a rule its buttered with some HM soup for lunch or perhaps with cheese and beans on for lunch /tea.As I vary my main meal depending on whats available if I eat it at lunchtime then its something on toast for tea or if I have a light lunch then main meal in the evening..I do like the M7S  brown wholemeal loaf and its around 75p and you get four good portions plus the two outside crusts.Often they are quite thick and I slice them into two slices and use with soup or toasted with cheese on. So every scrap is used. I grew up in the 1940s/50s and to waste food was regarded most as a capitol offence in our house at least. My late Mum ensured that what ever food she had managed to get with her ration books went to feed her three children irrespective of wetherwe liked it or no  you weren't allowed to say "I don't fancy something' there was no alternative you ate what was on your plate as there just wasn't a choice at all. 

But today life is so much more different and children can choose to eat what they want, and often sadly turn their nose up at perfectly good food, and their poor Mum ends up binning it  

Perhaps the CoL crisis has done one thing at least made folk more aware of how much food does go to waste and they but only what they need.

The other week I make some chicken curry and I had been given a packet mix from a friend who said she was clearing her cupboards out and wondered if I could use it (I think her DD had given it to her and she didn't fancy cooking it )

 Anyways I looked at the packet and I had all the ingrdients bar tomato puree. I certainly wasn't going to traipse across to the shops in the pouring rain to buy some, so instead I just dolloped two big spoons of ketchup into the mix instead.

 I don't eat ketchup, but keep a bottle of Heinz in the cupboard for my grandsons who love it when they come to dig my garden as I usually do them bacon rolls.
 Well the chicken curry turned out fine, and I hadn't had to buy anything as I was using up some of the many chicken bits from my freezer. So its really about adapting, and using what you have before buying more.Although it done me a favour as I had forgotten I'd run out of the tube of stuff so its on my small shopping list for Monday

The small portion of curry that I topped my sweet potato with last night was the left over bit from the big potful I had made and portioned up. I got 6 portions plus a little one and used up two large thighs and two large breasts from the freezer.  so in effect 6 and half meals I phoned my friend and said thanks for the packet mix it was very nice ,she said I knew you would use it up as you never bin anything even my friends know what I'm like.

I'm getting a nice bit of wriggle room in my freezer at the moment so when the xmas veg war starts I will load up with veggies to freeze, or turn into bags of soup for the cold January days. Lots of warming soup when its cold and made from the 19p cheap veggies. Forward planning wins the day   

 JackieO xx

Katiehound

Just to say that it is actually illegal to put household waste into litter bins!  so next time you put your poo bag in the bin let folk assume that it is really a poo bag! 

I admit I do transgress very occasionally, if I have something really smelly (like a chicken carcass I had forgotten about at the back of the fridge: I know a BIG sin) and rubbish bin will not be emptied for 2 weeks then I sneak a bag into the public bin.
We don't have food waste bins here.

leftatthetrafficlights

YoungBlueEyes said:

I've been thinking of asking this for ages - what ends up in your food waste bin? Or on compost heap or whatever? 

Mine is about the same week after week. Banana/orange peel, apple/pear cores, olive stones, tea bags, seeds and green top bits of peppers, the very ends of cucumbers, veg scrapings. Like that.

We live a low waste lifestyle in general.

We don't have a food waste bin but we don't have any cooked food waste.Everything that is cooked is either eaten, repurposed or frozen for later. Its a vegan household so no bones, eggshells etc to get rid of.

We have four compost bins - two hot and two cold - we add to the hot and one of the cold and the other cold is the maturing bin. All veg/fruit peelings that can't be utilised elsewhere, cardboard, garden waste (we grow a lot of veg) and shredded paper is composted - I don't regard any of that as waste, they're ingredients for my 'black gold' 😉

I buy in bulk and cook from scratch so there's very little plastic waste produced here - I do buy a lot of berries though so there is soft plastic waste from the lids of those (I reuse the actual punnets to start off seeds) which goes to the soft plastic recycling bin at the supermarket. I make my own oat milk so no tetra packs, cook my own beans and freeze my homegrown tomatoes so very few tins are used - alcohol bottles are probably our biggest waste product but they're recycled. 

I use a refill service for any laundry/cleaning/toiletry products that I don't make myself. 

Our recycling bin needs emptying roughly once every six weeks and our general waste bin probably every 10-12 weeks. 

ETA:forgot to say that I make my own chutney/jam/condiments too so I reuse old jars (which I generally get from relatives!) 

otb666

our council takes electrical items that can fit in carrier bag which comes in handy I have also left a hoover which they took.  This was very handy when clearing out hoarder house i had a lot of hair electrics and 25 electric toothbrushes. I have been clearing out sons freezer as well i have discovered i like quorn mince I made a lovely spag bol. I will buy my own in future as cheap and nutritious

Floss

I don't have a food waste collection but do have weekly recyclable & general waste collections. I take soft plastics to my nearest big Tesco once a month & take any plastic trays / pots etc to my local tip each month too - both of these are stored up in my bin-shed along with dead batteries, and any other stuff for the tip such as green waste.

Katiehound

I do wish the recycling rules were universal. For example I can put all my plastic pots & trays in (except black & brown : another moan at suppliers!) but a friend can't even put the clear soft fruit punnets in theirs. It's a crazy situation.

Equally our rubbish is collected every 2 weeks, the cardboard/paper goes once a month & the other recyclables also go once a month. Obviously we don't pay sufficient council tax to have the bins emptied more often . In hot weather that was a real pain- other bins  (all parked in an alleyway) were 'alive!'