Rubbish reduction challenge
Aug 8th, 2008 by Dani
Here’s a challenge for you. How little non-recyclable rubbish can you create per week?
I recently succumbed to a long standing case of Bokashi lust and bought myself the full starter pack. I really struggle with maintaining my traditional three sided compost mound and it takes such a long time to break down into something I can use. Plus I like the added benefits of the bokashi such as reducing carbon emissions as compared to traditional composting (probably outweighed when I have new additive stuff delivered admittedly) and the fact that I can add things like cooked bones that aren’t safe for the animals and things with dairy in them that the animals won’t eat.
Our household had never been a big producer of non-recyclable rubbish and our council has a good system for collecting both recyclables and green waste. In the three or four weeks that we’ve had the bokashi system up and running, our rubbish has reduced even further.
All our non recyclables are collected in this skinny little 10 litre bin. As you can see, it’s not quite half full. As anything wet or dirty tends to be organic, I don’t even need to line this bin and stays perfectly clean. What you see there is a full week of rubbish. That’s it. The rest is either paper, cardboard, glass, cans, compostable or green waste. I continue to look for better ways of doing things and reducing my families foot print but in all honesty, I will struggle to produce much less rubbish than this.
That’s amazing Dani! Good for you. It really puts my pile of recycling to shame. I try, but really must try harder.
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Well done Dani! We’ve been working on ours for a while and it’s down to around 3% of the average US household’s garbage now (using these calcs -http://calculator.riot4austerity.org/ )
We have quite a lot more rubbish when we have visitors - mostly drink bottles, but also prepackaged food they bring to share.
The people across the road have their fullsize bins literally overflowing each week; I find it mind boggling.
Love the bokashi bin - esp for the protein scraps, we can’t compost those.
That looks good. We create quite a bit of rubbish because we don’t have a compost. Might speak to my landscape guy about that, he’ll have some tips. But thankfully these days we have about 5x the recycling we used to put out, thanks to the council who came into the 21st century last year and distributed wheelie recycling bins AND started taking cardboard and other things they used to refuse. *roll eyes*
Thanks for the info on Bokashi - decided to keep my green rubbish for our 3×4m front yard and this is just the answer - no dirt out back to keep old style compost and wife who won’t let me keep compost out the front.
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