Benchmarking: I dug into the bins again.

The production and recycling of plastic is heavy on the environment. I am not talking about plastic in general but single-use plastic. Plastic is a very useful product for all sorts of applications.

But it is not just the production and recycling that is heavy on the environment. I just learnt that plastic waste releases greenhouse gases whilst decomposing. So those of you who think plastic and climate change are separate things are wrong!

And that is just about the greenhouse gas effect, let’s not forget the horrible sights of waste on beaches and all animals suffering from plastic that has ended up in their habitats.

The good news is that reducing our consumption of plastic (especially single use) is something we can all do, and I am about to prove that to you.

You may remember one of my first blogposts, a snapshot of all our household waste that I had measured in September 2017.

Well, I did it again. I held on to all of our waste for an entire month. I wanted to measure the impact of our efforts. We haven’t finished yet. There is still so much more to do, but I wanted to know where we stand at this moment.

Again, I didn’t keep all waste. For instance, I didn’t hold on to food leftovers, Q-tips, kitchen towel, tissues and well… toilet paper.

Furthermore, this is just a snapshot, rather than an average. Different seasons produce different waste and sometimes you go through unusual circumstances such as exam periods, lots of work in the office, preparing for holidays and renovations. These periods can come with more waste, just because, for instance, buying ready meals is more convenient than having to cook for yourself!

While I was collecting waste and saw this amount of plastic growing every day, I didn’t expect the impact of our efforts to be as big as they were.

If you want to know what exactly we did and you don’t want to read all the blogposts again, there is a bullet point list of things you can do at the end of this blogpost.

OK, here we go:

	2017 kg/month	2019 kg/month	Difference in percentage
Cardboard and paper	9.28	2.2	-76.29
of which unsolicited mail	3.1	0	-100.00
plastic	3.7	0.8	-78.38
food packaging	1.6	0.5	-68.75
bottles	2.1	0	-100.00
drink cartons	0.7	0.39	-44.29
Cans	2.8	0.09	-96.79
coffee pods	0.34	0	-100.00
Other	0.3	0.5	66.67
Total	17.12	3.98	-76.75

This time, all of our unrecyclable waste of one month fitted into one (1!) 45 gram bin bag. That is 540 grams/year (12 bin bags) instead of 2,340 grams (52 bin bags).

So this is the result of what exactly?

·         Food leftovers are kept out of the bin and are being composted;

·         We have tackled and will keep tackling all unsolicited mail;

·       We don’t buy bottled water anymore. We filter tap water with carbon sticks and we bought a soda stream for soda water;

·         We don’t buy fruit and vegetables in plastic anymore; meat and fish remain a challenge;

·       We squeeze our own fruit juice and fill our own glass bottles at the milk truck every week. In January the truck didn’t show up. That’s why there were still some drink cartons in the statistics. I am looking for a second milk provider;

·         We stopped using coffee pods, at home and in the office (just me);

·       We don’t buy beer cans anymore. We buy beer in glass bottles and take the empties back to the shop.

The two cans in the January statistics are cans I found on my doorstep. They were in fact not ours. I also used 2 cans of corn, which I normally buy in a glass jar, but they were not available when I needed them. Well, I say “needed”. We mostly only think we “need” stuff. Very often this  is actually just “want now”. I could have made something else instead.

So step by step, over a period of 16 months, we have managed to reduce our waste by more than 75%.

And there is still so much more that we can do. I am being fed ideas by people who read my blog - thanks for that! You know who you are.

If you want to find out what these are: stay tuned!