Zero Waste Week 2015

Have you signed up to Zero Waste Week yet?  This year it is taking place from 7th to 13th September and it is all about reuse.

You can sign up on the Zero Waste Week website for a series of daily emails from Monday to Friday taking a different waste stream each day and giving you tips on how to reduce that waste through reuse of materials.

I've taken part in Zero Waste Week for the last two years and I've found it a great opportunity to have a good clear out and cut down on the amount of unused resources around the house.  The 2013 waste week was all about reducing food waste and I enjoyed the challenge of using up everything in my fridge. Here's my blog post all about it.

In 2014 the theme for the week was 'One More Thing"  and my "One MoreThing" pledge was to GET MENDING.

In the summer of 2013 I had a huge clear-out and parted with 80 bags of bits and pieces to recycling bins or to my local community shop.  With my daughters to help out, we went through every room in the house and cleaned, tidied and sorted out the things we didn't use and popped them into our bags to take to the charity shop or relevant recycling point.  Clearing out on such a huge scale meant that speed was of the essence and that meant not dealing with the bits and pieces that we couldn't give away because they were broken or needed a thorough clean or some other time-consuming treatment.  That's what led me to my 2014 Zero Waste Week pledge to GET MENDING.  I'm not naturally good at mending stuff.  I find it a challenge and so that's why I thought that making this my focus for Zero Waste Week would help me to finish off the clearing out job that I'd started the previous year.  And it did!  With the help and advice in the daily emails and my own daily blog posts about the mending experience I successfully repaired and often re-homed several more items.

For a while these lovely ladies graced the window of our community shop.
  I'm sure they preferred the view here to being stuck on top of the wardrobe gathering dust!

I successfully re-homed an old saddle and bridle after giving them a really good clean.  They were put back into service on a pony.  I parted with some netting from the village cricket nets to an allotment, to be used as a fruit cage I think.  I mended a porcelain doll and gave this away to a children's entertainer.  One thing I didn't manage to find the time to mend were some very lovely, but broken chairs.  Thanks to freegle I gave them away to someone who would mend them!  I also patched a pair of jeans with some snazzy material from an old sheet.  It was great to realise that I can actually still sew.  All in all, it was an excellent week of getting some resources back into use.  Each day I managed to mend at least 'One More Thing'.

So…What's it to be for 2015?  This year, I've been cutting down on packaging, particularly avoiding single use plastic.  It has been very hard and not entirely successful, though my packaging has been drastically reduced.  One of the things that my plastic free year has brought to my attention is just how much plastic packaging we already had around the house, and in fact just how much stuff we still have despite our efforts at clearing out and de-cluttering.  So this year for Zero Waste Week, as my contribution to 'reuse' I'm going take a good look at all the stuff that we have around the house and see if I can again get some of it back into reuse, by re-purposing it, by giving it away or getting it into a recycling bin to be be turned into something that would be of use.

To sum up, my pledge this year is to GET REUSING or GET RECYCLING.  Zero Waste Week 2015… bring it on!

Sign up and join me.  Click on the Zero Waste Week logo below.