It’s Zero Waste Week this week and I’m joining in with Katie’s ZeroWasteChallenges. Firstly, what is Zero Waste Week?
Zero Waste Week
Zero Waste Week was founded by Rachel Strauss and is an annual week long event to reduce landfill waste. There is no doubt that this is a brilliant idea. I hate seeing all the plastic that we go through but I don’t know how to stop it! So I’m hoping that taking part in #ZeroWasteWeek I can become much more conscientious.
Take The Challenge
Katie at Living Life Our Way has set us 5 challenges:
- Audit Your Waste – take the time to log everything you throw away and think what happens to it after
- Tackle a Weak Spot – after doing the audit, find your weak spot and tackle it.
- Shop Thoughtfully – or as Katie says, shop plastic free!
- Refuse and Return! – refuse the plastic waste or send it back
- Spread the Word – we all know that plastic is a real problem but let’s spread the word and save the world!
Audit Your Waste
So let’s get straight into the first challenge – Audit Your Waste! Using the handy little pdf from the Zero Waste website, I documented our waste for the weekend. The results were as expected – mostly plastic waste! I think we do well to recycle most of our waste but there’s definitely room for improvement. My main problem when completing this audit was finding out what actually happens to the waste. I’ve blogged about it previously, but I was shocked to understand that the recycling we do gets shipped abroad to be someone else’s problem!
The shipping abroad part is the thing that annoys me too. I wish I could do more, but I don’t think I can. As it is, I’m using single use plastics more than once. I re-use water bottles (handy for have in the car when we are travelling with the dog, as he needs lots of water and those are easily refillable), I use the plastic bags (the single use ones, not the ones that I can change for free at the supermarket) as a bin liner, and so on. But I can’t do anything about the packaging that is used for food. My carrots, grapes, strawberries, onions, potatoes, all come in plastic bags. I wish I had other options.