Zero Waste Week - Day 2

I'm feeling good about my empty carrier bag store and I've managed to mend the drying rack.

Today it is all about reusing glass.

Here are some of the things I already do.  We are fortunate to have a milkman so we get our milk delivered to our door in reusable glass bottles.  We also buy orange juice in reusable glass bottles from our milkman.  I'm sure this makes a big reduction to our weekly packaging output.

I'also refill some rather lovely glass decanters with rape seed oil and sunflower oil from SESI in Oxford.  It has unfortunately recently been made illegal to refill your own containers with Olive Oil, so I now buy my olive oil in a big tin.  However, you can still refill your own bottles with oil oil mixes such as olive oil and rosemary or olive oil with chilli.

Here's the legislation about the olive oil refills ban for anyone who would like to know more about this.


Inspired by today's Zero Waste Week email I'm planning to tackle a storage issue I've been stressing over for a while now.  It's the tool shed.

Everything is a mess in here.  It always takes a while to find what we need when we need it, so I'm implementing the glass bottle storage system so we can see everything and so we can make much better use of the shelving.  I don't have time to do it today, but I've glued one jars lid to the underside of the metal shelving and filled it with some screws.  I'll see if it holds and then if it does I'll do some more!  If it works, I'll make sure I add nice clear labels to my jars too.

I love Zero Waste Week!

Happy New Year!

If you've read my blog before, you might know that I love a New Year's Challenge.  In 2013 I did a year of Swishing which changed my attitude to shopping completely. This year I pledged to buy no  new books (except as birthday presents).  I've managed far more trips to the library and got pretty organised about ordering books for collection - a great service that libraries provide.  I've also given away 10 books each month - well - at least up until November.   When I finish this blog post I'm going to select my final 10 books for 2014 and then contemplate whether I can possibly carry this on into 2015.

But even if I do carry on the book challenge, I always like to have a new challenge too.  And next year will be, without doubt, the toughest yet…

A year without single use plastic.

This is not something I've just dreamt up today… oh no.  I, or rather we - the Pitt family - have been contemplating it for a while now.  I think it was around October time that I first suggested the challenge to Mr Pitt.  He was tucking in to a packet of crisps at the time.  "Can't be done!" was the initial reaction.  But then gradually came more and more comments like "We won't be buying anymore of these, then."  Soon after that came Mr Pitt's home-made potato peel crisps.

We've been doing our bit for naked shopping for a while now, so we are well practiced at buying fruit and veg packaging free and in recent months I've discovered options for buying a whole range of goods packaging free.  You can read more about this in previous blog posts.

A fairly typical Pitt shop.

So why are we doing it?

Firstly, we have been a 'Zero-Waste' household for quite a while now.  It is many years since we had a rubbish bin in the house and because of that we always think of our 'rubbish' not as 'rubbish' but as 'resources' and as such we put what ever it is we have finished using into the appropriate place to be reused or recycled.  We don't just 'throw away'.

But, over the years that I've been researching waste management and recycling for my books, and talks as well as my own family life, I've started to look more carefully at what I do and at what businesses and organisations do in terms of waste.

As I see it now, there are two schools of thought about Zero-waste.  There's firstly the 'Zero-waste to land-fill' school of thought and that's what we've managed to achieve for many years now.  But how?  Well, there has for a long time been very little in Oxfordshire that doesn't get collected for recycling.  The local council here even collect quite a lot of 'flyaway plastic' as long as it is clean and bagged up so that it doesn't fly away to pollute the countryside when they are collecting.

But there're still a few things that aren't recyclable - and guess what - these are all mainly plastic or plastic based packaging items.  We have generally tried to avoid such items, but when we have had them, we have disposed of them by using them to light our wood burning stove and wood-fuelled cooker.  Plastic is much better than paper at this task, doesn't stink like firelighters, but I don't know the full extent of the pollution it may be causing in the atmosphere.

The second school of thought is not just Zero-waste to landfill, but Zero waste at all. And that's where I want to be a year from now.  I'm not wanting to demonise plastic completely, but it is responsible for a great deal of pollution on our lovely planet.  Our oceans are full of the stuff and it is high time we did something about it.  So I've taken a good look at what we consume, how we consume it and how we pass it on to its next purpose - whether that  is to be reused, recycled, composted or burnt by us or by the local council at its new energy from waste plant.  My conclusion is that to move from Zero-to landfill (we are 99.99% there) to being Zero Waste, it is the single use plastic that we have to say goodbye to.

Home-made potato crisps

Home-made butternut squash crisps

Dry goods you can buy in your own containers at SESI, Oxford

Weighing out dried mango at SESI

My packaging free dry goods will come from SESI.  It is easy
 to buy and store enough for three months.

Now why do I think it is going to be so hard?

Our lives are so full of plastic.  It is everywhere we turn.  In the last couple of months I've been really taking note about how much stuff we have that came here by means of plastic packaging.  We use plastic all day, every day it seems.  If we wanted to say that from the 1st of January to 31st December 2015 I would use nothing that involved plastic a whole lot of stuff would go to waste - and we don't do WASTE.

So what can we do to achieve our plastic free - zero waste lifestyle?

These are the Pitt family rules for our plastic free 2015:
1. Buy nothing new that has any plastic in it or around it.
2. Collect and weigh all recyclable plastic that arises from purchases already made in order to raise awareness of the plastic in our lives.  We will recycle or keep this plastic for reuse.
3. Collect and weigh all non-recyclable plastic that arises from purchases already made.  We will accumulate this and photograph it and hopefully see it diminish month by month.

A selection of oils and vinegars I can buy in my own containers

I will hopefully be keeping you posted of our progress as we gradually eradicate single use plastic from our lives.  If not then I'll be sharing a moan or two.

Locally made washing up liquid.
  I'll take my own bottles to refill.

Can we do it?  How long will it take to be single-use plastic free?

One month?
Six months?
A whole year?

We'll see.  Bring on the 2015 challenge. Happy New Year!

Zero Waste Week 2014 - Day 6

Looks like today's Zero Waste Week email was written specifically for me! (Or are you thinking that too?)

I was feeling very pleased with myself yesterday after cleaning out my fridge and de-cluttering my kitchen.  But that was before I looked behind the curtain. (What else are curtains for but to hide the clutter behind them?)  This is what awaited me this morning on my kitchen table.

I will have to find a home for this lot today but last last night I couldn't be …

Yep… procrastination!!

So, where's it all going to go?

Well, the stamps, foreign coins and beads will go to Against Breast Cancer, so that's easy as I have a permanent box on the go for them.  If you don't know anyone who collects this sort of thing and several charities do, then maybe you could set up a collection point at a local school, playgroup, library or café?

There are some safety pins, which have a place in my sewing box, but this makes me think that I actually have so many safety pins I really could part with a few, so I'm going to put a packet of them together for Junior Daughter's ballet school - where they often need them for emergency costume alterations, repairs and keeping the halter-neck catsuits in place when the velcro fails!

There are some odd bits from games, which I will re-house, for now in my box for lost games and puzzle pieces (yes…more procrastination but..).  It might just mean that another game gets completed and so can then find a new home.  There are several metal screws, washers and nails and a picture hook, which will be put in their proper place with the tools in the utility room and a couple more bits of metal and hard plastic to be housed in the appropriate containers in the garage.

I need to do a bit of research on the contents of the hand-warmer as, if I don't know what's in it, I don't know how to dispose of it safely.  TAKE NOTE MANUFACTURERS OF SUCH STUFF!!! IT MAKES ME MAD, MAD, MAD.  I try not to buy anything that I don't know how to dispose of at end of life these days, but I haven't always had that at the forefront of my mind and I also have to deal with things other people bring into the home.  It really should be made illegal not have accurate information about what something is made of, or if it needs to be a closely guarded secret for commercial reasons then it should be the law to provide an address to send it back to for whatever form of reuse or recycling is possible.  Don't you think?

Anyway, I'm procrastinating again!  What I was really going to say was… Wish me luck… I'm going in..and Dad's coming too! 

We may be some time ;)

The Best Food Waste Bin Ever

Yesterday I spent the day talking rubbish!  I do a lot of that.

I was at the RWM Exhibition - which is all about Resource Efficiency and Waste Management Solutions.  My Dustbin Diet mantra is 're-thinking rubbish as resources' and at RWM more than anywhere, that mantra is very apt.

I was researching a topic very important to me and that's recycling the stuff that many people think can't be recycled and in my explorations around the vast exhibition hall I was able to add to my list of things that get recycled or reused in and around the UK. Look out for the book next year!

One thing that caught my attention towards the end of the day was this fabulous food waste bin.

500L Food Waste Bin by Storm Environmental Ltd at RWM 2013

I'd love a mini one of these as my kitchen food waste caddy, wouldn't you?

Earlier in the day, I'd attended a session about behaviour and habit in relation to waste reduction, and we heard about a project looking into reasons why people still put their food waste into their landfill bin rather than using the food waste caddies their council provide.  One of the reasons given was that the food waste containers are ugly and spoilt the look of their lovely kitchen.

This brought to mind one of the outcomes of my first Dustbin Diet course at The Marlborough School in Woodstock.  The students suggested that instead of ugly recycling containers hidden away in dark corners of the room or school site, recycling collection points should be bright and colourful and a pleasure to use.

Wouldn't you agree?

Recycling your mascara

I don't do landfill.

But even in West Oxfordshire, where there is a fantastic kerbside collection for most packaging, there are still sometimes things that can't be collected by the local council for recycling.

So, what to do with them?

I have a policy that, unless I really feel I need something, I will avoid it if I don't know how I can recycle or reuse it at the end of its life.

But, I have a family and I have friends, and thats' not a rule that is always at the forefront of the mind of everybody who has cause to dispose of something while in my house.

So, I have a little collection in my 'recycling cupboard' of things I don't know what to do with.

One of those things, until recently was cosmetics packaging.  The problem with cosmetics packaging is that it is often made of mixed materials, and often made in part of hard plastic, two things that make it hard to recycle.


So I was excited to find out that the cosmetics company Origins have set up a recycling scheme at their cosmetics counters.  The great thing about their scheme is that you can recycle any cosmetics packaging through them, not just their own packaging.

So, I used the locator on their website to find out where their nearest collection point was and then planned to go there yesterday after a meeting I had nearby.  I had a fairly large bag of various packages - my own, Senior Daughter's, Junior Daughter's and JD's best friend.  So I felt the extra mile to pop in to the town centre was well worth it, and I was rewarded with a free sample of Origins products, Recyclebank rewards (and a warm, smug feeling from doing my bit for the planet).  I'd recommend it!