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A timely waste audit

Tuesday, 3 February 2009

This morning I awoke to the sound of the garbage truck rattling down our street collecting garbage... It struck me immediately that this was the third week in a row that I'd forgotten to put the bins out... The first week wasn't really my fault, I didn't know which day the truck was coming! The second week I just completely forgot, and because of Australia day I was out of synch with the week... Excuses excuses. I didn't jump out of bed, grab the bins and chase the truck down the street as we used to do at mum's though... I didn't need to. In the 3 weeks we've been here we still haven't filled up any of our bins. The green waste is reused as compost, the recycling bin is enormous and we just don't consume that much 'stuff' and we're getting very good at reusing our waste so even the small green rubbish bin is not even half full. Of course I do have a cupboard full of empty jars, bottles and boxes but I maintain those will come in handy one day!

Of course we will need to put the bins out eventually... so I decided to conduct a waste audit to find out if we could actually remove the need to have waste collected altogether... then perhaps we could stop paying the council for a service we didn't use too - bonus!

Basically our waste consisted of:

• Some tea bags that missed the compost bin (whoops!)
• Dishwashing powder packets (my fault completely - I bought the environmentally friendly, non chemical powder but forgot to check whether the packets were individually wrapped or not)... having never had a dishwasher before we're still assessing whether or not it's better that we do the dishes or the dishwasher does... I think it's more conservative with water than I am... When I wash the dishes half the water ends up on me!
• Non recyclable food packets... a few icy pole wrappers from when we were too hot to go back home and get the homemade variety! A popcorn bag from when my brother came over to watch movies... Plastic wrapping without the recycling symbol on it... And the little foil wrappers from the cadbury brunch bars... And a plastic bag from a bag of home brand sultanas...

As usual it all comes down to appropriate choice in the supermarket... We have to stop buying things in packets if at all possible (much harder in heidelberg west where 'organics' don't seem to have taken off)... Focus on markets... and read all labels before purchase... Until we become more disciplined with this we'll have to continue footing the bill for waste collection!

Labels: audit, waste

posted by genloz at 9:30 PM 0 Comments