— Jack Wakefield
Hurray! The week has come to an end, and what a week it’s been.
We’ve learnt so much about the challenges involved with trying to completely remove rubbish from our lives, but also how easy it is to reduce the amount we throw out significantly. It really isn’t difficult to be more prepared and that makes a big difference.
Tomorrow, Mum and Dad are doing their first waste-reducing weekly shop, for an ordinary week. It’s not going to be difficult, they’ll just have to remember their own bags, a few boxes, and go to the right shops in town instead of just filling a supermarket trolly with plastics. It’s just a new habit or rhythm to develop which will make a great difference.
So how did we do? Here’s our rubbish from day 7:
- Our standard surface wipes, this is now our top priority when it comes to cutting out rubbish, and you’ll see why a bit further down the blog…
- The film around tea bags – we’re still yet to sauce plastic-free ones, the boxes are either wrapped in a plastic film, or inside a non-wrapped box are little packets of tea bags.
- The foam from inside new photo frames
- A milk top seal – we ran out of milk in glass bottles, and don’t get a delivery until tomorrow morning, so sadly we had to buy milk in a plastic bottle, and throw away this seal
A pretty good end to the week, I’d say! We’ve been collecting our rubbish in a mason jar during the week, and put nothing in our bin- so that we could see how much rubbish we collected as the seven days went by.
The photo on the left is all our rubbish for the week, it’s well packed but all of it fits in one mason jar – far less than we threw out the week before.
The photo on the right is our rubbish minus the surface wipes – these make a massive difference, and as our main source of trash will be something we’ll try to eliminate if we can.
Thanks for following the blog this week, and seeing how we got on! The blog is far from over, so please do stay with us – if you would like, click on the menu icon at the top right and sign up to receive each new post via email, using the ‘follow’ button.
This is a challenge we’d like to turn into an everyday normal part of life, and as I head back to Oxford I want it to become normal for me too. I’m also helping to run a zero waste week in Oxford for students, as part of my role in Just Love, so you’ll see updates about that too. The blog isn’t mine though, I’m one of a collective of people choosing to live differently in a world caught up in consumerism, and each of us will post now and then with ideas, recipes, swaps we’ve made or reflections on our changing lifestyles. Hopefully as time goes on the collective will grow, so if you feel challenged or inspired by what we’ve been doing and you’d like to try to make this part of your life too – then get in touch and you’d be welcome to join us.
Thank you for all the encouragement, ideas and feedback so far!
For some reflections from our collective on what we learnt from the week, you can continue here
Or to read of how my Mum found the whole experience, try this one instead 🙂
we talk rubbish 