Bin Night

Tonight is bin night. Part of my endeavours with going green is reducing the volume and content I add to landfill. Sounds easy doesn’t it? Well it isn’t. I have significantly reduced my weekly contribution to landfill. On average I add one plastic shopping bag a week to landfill but being results driven I would like to continually reduce that.

My most recent reduction to my rubbish was the pet food wrappings. The food I was purchasing was in those little foil satchels. The cats are still resisting my tempting offerings however the dogs are devouring every last morsel. Yay for my cooking!!

In 2008 Whitehorse City Council believed that residents in their area sent a whopping 20000 tonnes of food to landfill a year. The problem with sending food to landfill, apart from being wasteful, is that it contributes methane gas to the atmosphere. Methane gas is a major contribute to climate change. It can also be toxic as residents of Cranbourne found out.

Last year I got a Bokashi Bin. It uses a fermenting method to compost ingredients you wouldn’t normally put into a compost bin or worm farm. Ingredients like meat, bones, onions and dairy products. But you can put anything into the bin; it is just advantageous to be able to compost bones for example. Each week you mash it down and sprinkle a little of the Bokashi mix, which looks like a grains and herbs mix, over the top.

I also found this great little site www.onyabags.com.au They sell heaps of different bags that all tuck down to small little pouches. Each one has a caribiner clip so it is easy to hook onto your handbag, back pack, pants etc. They also come in funky colours too. My favourite find on here was onya weighs. You can use them when buying fruit and vegetables. Because they are made of light netting material you can wash your fruit in the bag. The bags dry quickly and wash well in the washing machine. I also have an onya back, onya side (came in very handy when I was last at Salamanca Market!!), dump it onya and an original onya bag. And onya is an Australian company.

One thing that had me stumped for a little while was my sandwich or biscuits. Normally we wrap our lunch in cling wrap or foil (really bad for alzheimers). Well, now you don’t need to. www.4myearth.com.au has washable and reusable wraps for sandwiches, muffins, nuts, you name it. I have been using mine for nearly two years now. While I don’t take a sandwich to work I do take nuts, muffins and biscuits. I have small and medium pockets and small and medium wraps. They wash easily with all my clothes and tea towels. I no longer have to worry about my goodies being wrapped up in plastic and adding to landfill and I bet you thought I was gonna tell you about my Tupperware.

There is also a shop in Croydon that sells bulk flour, pasta, lollies, cereal, nuts etc. You can take your own containers to be refilled instead of purchasing disposable non-reusable packaging. They also make their own fresh peanut butter – very yum. And there is also their bulk honey and molasses. There is also organic and gluten free options.

I have also been reducing my dependence on plastic bags to line my bins. Now I use newspaper. I fold it around the inside of the bin so when I take the rubbish out I can kind of wrap it up. A lot of the plastic garbage bags on the market claim to be biodegradable. The hitch is that even though they claim to be biodegradable in actual fact they are not. Plus there is also the manufacturing process, petroleum used in production and the energy and water utilised. Paper has its environmental drawbacks however from a composting, degradable viewpoint paper is streaks ahead of plastic.

These few steps plus taking my lunch in reusable containers, using ‘green’ shopping bags or string bags for shopping, picking products with less packaging all help to reduce my contribution to landfill.