Week Two of my two-week waste challenge: completed!

Here's the rubbish I was personally responsible for over Weeks One and Two combined:

And here's the spreadsheet breaking down the items in those bags.

So, what now?

It has been interesting seeing how much I send to landfill and recycling (fortunately, mostly recycling) although there are quite a few items I have in my list that I now need to check up on to see if my council recycles them. Different areas are capable of recycling different things, so it is worth checking your local council's website to see what their policies are.

Karl helped out by thoroughly washing out cat food tins and the like so that they wouldn't smell while we kept them, which made it much easier for me. It made me think how even leaving a small food remnant inside a container could stink up a storage area while waiting to be recycled. I'm going to try and make sure I thoroughly clean any plastic I send in down the track.

Karl also helped out by helping me find brands that actually used recyclable materials for some of the packaged food we buy - some the things we had bought previously just had the "Please dispose of responsibly" label but weren't actually recyclable when you actually gave them a close inspection! "Don't litter" is a great message, but it's only the first step...

As part of the Living Smart course I learned that recycling depots also have a policy of chucking anything that still contains liquid, as they can't guarrantee what the liquid is. So going to make sure I thoroughly drain anything I have to recycle.

In the long term, I'd like to significantly reduce my consumption of goods requiring plastic packaging. I'd also like to try halving my non-organic rubbish generation, although I'm not sure what timeframe is reasonable to commit to for that. I'm still trying to reduce the clutter of unnecessary items in my house in a responsible way - ultimately I want to sell, donate, or gift 50% of the things I currently own (I only use about 30% of them regularly anyway!) Once I have achieved that goal, I'll try set a deadline for reducing my waste by half. However, in the meantime I will make as many small changes as I can towards that goal - and if I reach it before I get a chance to set a deadline, that's fine with me!

One change I'm making this weekend is to go to an organic food grower's market, which includes locally 'grown' meat as well. I think it will be easier to avoid excess packaging if I buy from a local producer's market rather than a supermarket. Plus, it means I'm supporting local growers! As I only use public transport to get around it is the distance I have to travel that makes things like this fiddly, especially on a weekend, but I think I should be able to get it all sorted.