Week One

We have come to the end of week one and haven't done as well as I had anticipated.

We have had to add a few pieces of rubbish into the bucket including an empty packet of LSA, foil bag from tea, and some left over goodies from mum's visit (peanut slab and two Kapiti ice cream wrappers). Annoyingly, Josh bought a box of organic pasta and unknown to him it had a plastic liner inside, so into the bucket it went. A few other bits and pieces went in, but I am happy to report that none of it was "new" rubbish, all just stuff we're using up.

As I mentioned in the first post we are slowly swapping our products over to eco-friendly options when the old ones run out and we are also trying to cut down on products that come in plastic, recyclable or not. I've been learning a lot about recycling and downcycling as we have been preparing for this challenge and through doing the recycling at my work. There's a great YouTube video that discusses the life cycle of plastic bottles and how unfortunately plastic always eventually ends up in landfills as it loses clarity and strength making it un-recyclable, unlike glass and metals which can be recycled again and again. With this in mind, when possible we are consciously avoiding all plastic when buying items, brown paper bags and stainless steel containers have become our new best friends (which we re-use of course).

Last week I bought a shampoo bar from Commonsense Organics in Paraparaumu which is made of all natural ingredients and comes in a paper sleeve. I was dubious about using it as I had heard a lot of negative things about them like it would make my hair greasy, or it would make my hair "squeaky clean" and dry. I gave it a go and I can honestly say it was nice! I didn't have to use conditioner after and my hair was still tangle free and soft, this will definitely be a product I will keep using (I can't remember the brand but will find out next week and let you know).

I have also bought bamboo cotton tips and toothbrushes which can be put into our compost bin to decompose - both products can be purchased from New World supermarkets and organic stores. For more information on the bamboo products click here

For food this week we were lucky enough to have a voucher in our Entertainment Book for organicboxes where we got two mixed fruit and vegetable boxes for the price of one. We went halves with Hope and got this delicious box of fresh organic fruits and vegetables delivered to our door.

The boxes usually cost $60 each including delivery/pickup and come with a selection of fruit and vegetables to last two people for one week. They got delivered to our house in a polystyrene box, wrapped in burlap with ice packs to keep them cool and fresh. Then I phoned the courier company and got the box picked up so it could be re-used again. I didn't figure out weights of the items so I can't accurately compare it to how much we would spend on the same items if we were shopping at our local organic store but I will do this when our next box arrives to see if it is better value or not.

Despite the fact that this weeks rubbish count was higher than we hoped for, we have learnt a lot and are discovering new products that are available to help the earth :) I hope you find the links useful and inspiring!

Work recycling was the lowest count so far, with just under 3kg. It didn't even fill up my two recycling bins today! This means that there'll be more encouragement at work this week with reminding people of what can be recycled ;)

Day One

And so it has begun...

Day one of the rubbish free challenge today and already I have 4 items to add to the bucket... Two are foil wrappers from Easter eggs which were given to me, another is a piece of tape from a blanket my mum bought Josh and I, and the last is the annoying plastic wrapper my organic coconut oil came wrapped in....

Day One Rubbish :(

Easter proved to be not too difficult to manage rubbish free.  I went to the supermarkets and other big stores and was so disheartened to see the large amounts of foil and plastic wrapped chocolates that were available. I only found two different types of chocolates that were in cardboard which could be recycled. I did my Easter shopping at the chocolate factory in Paraparaumu as well as buying some loose chocolates from Butlers (in a paper bag). I ended up getting some neat little bunnies as well as other goodies from the chocolate shop and they went down a treat, not to mention the benefits of supporting a local business :)

My mum is over visiting from Australia this week and she is taking to the eco-friendly lifestyle with some enthusiasm. I am pointing out now that any rubbish she collects during her stay she is taking with her to dispose of elsewhere so as not to interfere with our rubbish total. We are planning to go for a bush walk tomorrow and we have some sewing to do over the next few days which should be nice :)

Work recycling was another success this week with a total of 4.2kg worth of recycling not ending up in the landfill!


Well that's it from me tonight, will update again next Monday to let you all know how the first week has gone.

The Rules

So it's been a busy week trying to get our house ready for the challenge to begin.

I had the dilemma of deciding whether or not any of the plastic or non-recyclable materials we currently have before the challenge contributes to our total at the end of the 6 months - e.g. a bag of rice we already have in our pantry but will use within the next 6 months. To try and make it as fair of a challenge as possible I have bought glass and metal storage containers and transferred our open packets of food or baking ingredients into them, any unopened products I have donated to the food bank. In future I will buy these items in bulk or in recyclable containers or we will go without. Anything I haven't been able to transfer over or use before next Monday and we use it in the next 6 months will be counted in our total rubbish. 

I would like to point out that we are also trying to buy organic food as much as possible and I am unable to find any organic meat that is packaged in anything recyclable and our local butcher doesn't sell organic meat. I don't generally eat meat and Josh is happy with 4-5 vegetarian meals a week but we will continue to buy organic meat that is unfortunately packaged in plastic until I can find another alternative. If suitable, the packaging will be cleaned and put into our bucket, otherwise it will be put into landfill.

Whilst we won't personally be buying non-recyclable products, if someone gives us something wrapped in something we can't re-use or recycle, we won't be rude and not accept it! We will also add this to our bucket. In saying this, I won't persuade or ask people to buy us these things as a way of cheating!

Medical rubbish is another area we are willing to not cut back on i.e. pill packets and plasters. Also our cats are not required to adhere to the rules of the challenge as I feel that de-fleaing them monthly is necessary and due to the fact that I have a cat who gets beaten up too often I will still use throwaway gauze to clean him up. Their cat food however does come in recyclable tins and I have just found one brand of cat biscuits with a recyclable box (Purina) and biscuits are also available in bulk at a wonderful new store in Paraparaumu I have discovered called Bin Inn - see their Facebook page here

Any rubbish that we get in the next 6 months will be cleaned and stored in a bucket and I will post regular photos to show you (hopefully) how little rubbish we actually have! The challenge will officially begin next Monday, the 21st of April, as this will give us enough time to ensure that everything is ready! I will do weekly posts, generally on a Monday, to update you all and share some handy tips.

Work recycling out for curbside collection today

On another note,  yesterday I emptied four days worth of recycling out of the bin at work and got 12.6kg worth! That is a huge improvement and I'm so happy! I've noticed that my eco-friendly ways are starting to wear off on my co-workers and a few are telling me of ways they have improved at home :) 

Workplace Recycling

As I mentioned in my last post, I work as a Registered Nurse. I'm currently working in a rest home and am finding it increasingly difficult to accept this throw-away profession. Of course for health reasons we have to follow strict protocols for hand hygiene, wound care etc etc, and this unfortunately means using what seems to be an excess amount of paper towels and chemical laden soaps and sanitisers (even though our paper towels are sourced from renewable sources), as well as single use sterile dressings, each in their own individual plastic wrappers. I felt that there had to be something I could do at my work to decrease our carbon footprint, so my first project is workplace recycling. 

To be honest it is pretty shocking that we have not been recycling much at work except for cardboard boxes, the occasional milk bottle (when people can be bothered rinsing them), and some of our tins go to the Scouts. Being a decent sized rest home with 80+ residents living in the area where I work, the fact that all of these people's personal care products (shampoo, body wash, lotions and creams), medicine bottles and boxes, and drink containers (soft drinks, wine and beer)  are all just being thrown in the bin when finished is pretty terrible and awfully lazy of us! The majority of staff I have talked to about recycling do it consciously at home, and they said that the main reason they weren't doing it at work was because there was no system in place. 

So I hassled the people at work who can get me things, and a lovely green container was produced for me to use as our temporary recycling bin until a better system can be put in place. The idea of this bin is that people will put recyclables into it (hopefully after, but not always as I have learnt, rinsing them) and I have taken it to be my personal responsibility to ensure that the items are sorted, clean, and recycled either in my home recycling bin or by taking it to our local recycling centre.  

The bin has been in place for about two weeks now, and unfortunately (but also thankfully!) the first bin full was recycled before I thought up the idea of documenting what people were recycling so I could offer some statistics to people about how well, or how much better we could be doing. After work today however, I had two separate bin fulls of recycling at home from work which I cleaned, weighed (yes, on my kitchen scales!) and then created spread sheets to show the data...

Some of the recycling that I had sorted

I weighed and documented 76 different recyclable objects, then counted and worked out the amounts of these objects I had received and the total weight of each bin load (I'm still trying to remember learning about spreadsheets and for my life I couldn't remember how to even to sums of the rows so I had to use the handy calculator on my phone and input them one by one). Each bin contained 3.6kg (or 3600 grams) of recyclable goodies. Each bin contained about four days worth of recycling.... which in the scale of things isn't particularly great considering the amount that could be in there. I haven't yet figured out how to make those pretty graphs on Excel to show to people and explain to them that although some effort is being made, surely we can do much better! It's also interesting that only five empty toilet rolls have been put into the recycling bin in the past 8 days despite everyone, staff and residents, actually having to use this!

I will empty the recycling bin again on Sunday and write up the data; hopefully I'll have a fancy graph to show in a few months of our increased recycling efforts!

Still working on our rules for garbage free living, but should have these up and ready by Monday for us to officiailly start our challenge!

Where to begin...

The overall aim of this blog is to give me a place to share our journey in trying to live more environmentally friendly.

It will include links to e-books and blogs which have inspired me, and websites which I find to be great sources of information to making living without plastic or buying local organic produce a bit easier.

So first things first, why Josh and I are even bothering to do this.

We recently watched a 3 part documentary on YouTube called "Garbage Island: an ocean full of plastic" which hit us pretty hard and created the desire to strive for a clean planet. I would encourage everyone to watch this documentary - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D41rO7mL6zM

It truly lets the viewer see the effects that plastic is having on the ocean and the marine life, and how this comes back to people via the food chain. It also iterates the point that the problem is no longer "fixable", instead we need to try and stop it from getting even worse - please note there is some inappropriate language in the clip.

Following watching this documentary late one evening, I went to bed and must have had a minimum of 4 hours sleep as I lay awake trying to come up with ways to save the world, some doable, some seemed a bit far-fetched. I went to work the next morning, my mind bubbling with ideas of how I could decrease rubbish, increase recycling, get eco-friendly products and get the other staff on board with saving the planet. It appeared I had a lot to learn about incorporating changes into a large company, especially in such a throw-away job as nursing, but that will come in another post.

We have been slowly changing our cleaning products over to "eco-friendly" brands as we use the old stuff up, we are buying more local and organic foods and I am trying to ween myself off of an online shopping addiction - consumerism at its best. Last week I tried on all of my clothes and with the help of Josh's sister Hope, we culled half of my wardrobe. The items to get rid of were either donated to a local op-shop, sold on trademe, or handed down to a younger cousin of mine. I am now trying to buy clothes and shoes only if I need them, and sourcing them either second-hand or buying fairtrade, organic products if I buy them new.

We are aiming to create a garbage free lifestyle and we will work on a set of "rules" for us to follow in order to achieve this which I will post when they are ready and we can get started on this journey!