After collecting data on our family's waste for two weeks, I have discovered that we throw out a lot but most of what we throw out should not end up in landfill. The type of rubbish we produce the most of is food waste, with over 8 kilos created in two weeks. We produce less waste than Suzie's family, but she has more people in her family.
There are many different solutions we could use to deal with our waste.
The first solution is to refuse or reduce the things we buy with packaging or choose those that won't end up in landfill.
For the food waste, and some of the recyclable waste like paper and cardboard, composting or a worm farm would be solutions. You can buy worms and worm farms from places like Bunnings.
These are very expensive though. You can actually build your own out of boxes like this
and get a friend to give you worms from their farm, to keep the cost down.
Or you can get some chickens and they will eat your food scraps, give you eggs and make great pets!
Another thing that you can do with waste paper is that you can use it to make new paper, like this
For soft plastic waste, reducing the amount you buy in it is good, but when you have to get some there is a company named Redcycle that have bins in some supermarkets, like these.
They will recycle your soft plastic into things like benches and tables.
For other Recycling and landfill waste, you should reduce what you buy in packaging and reuse and repurpose what you can't avoid as much as possible to give it new life, like in these images below.
Hi Ruby,
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed your blog! I loved how you caught most of the weights on the scales in your photographs. Making paper is a really great idea for reusing paper, I'm going to try it.
Did you know that there are also people making instruments out of things that they found in landfill? They made a documentary about it. This is the trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJxxdQox7n0 It is kind of amazing, providing new possibilities for the waste and the people!
I also thought it was interesting when you pointed out how Suzie's family made more waste than yours but there are more people in her family than yours. The fact we all have different size families would really affect how well we are able to compare everyone's data. I wonder how we could get around this? Maybe we could divide the amount of waste each family produces by the number of people in the family and compare that number instead of the overall total.
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