The planet is our home; we need to be more responsible. Here's what I do.
I was inspired to write this post by this project where photographer Greg Segal did a study of trash.
He photographed people lying surrounded by their own rubbish.
Apparently the average US citizen generates four pounds of rubbish per day. That’s 28 pounds in a week. That’s 12.7 kg!
So I wanted to talk about our rubbish.
Generally we don’t have much rubbish. I need to weigh it but I would estimate that we have around 1lb per week between two people.
That’s what goes in the main Rubbish collection bin. We often neglect to put it out for collection for several weeks at a time.
That’s not to say we don’t have other waste but here’s what that involved.
In our kitchen we have three steel bins. We used to have one bin for general waste and one for green or biodegrade able waste. In The Netherlands this is called GFT: groente, fruit tuinafval or vegetables, fruit and garden waste.
The second larger bin was for general waste. But three years ago our district introduced another separation system called plastic heroes so we changed our bins around and found a third bin. The largest bin now holds plastic waste and a smaller bin takes the less easy to deal with stuff.
Then there’s a bag hanging up where we store paper waste.
This bag holds the plastic just before we deal with it. That involved a walk to the end of our street. Under the leafy canopy at the end we have a bottle bank, a paper bank and the plastic hero recycler.
We separate our bottles and jars too. The jars are stored for jam and honey. The bottles are divided too; some can be returned to the supermarket for a cash deposit refund of 10 cents a bottle.
The paper carrier bag is storing this fuel. We do take some to be recycled but we also use some to make briquettes for the wood stove which I’ve blogged about before.
The suitable scraps from the kitchen feed the hens, the less suitable scraps feed the worms. In turn their waste feeds the garden.
The egg shells are ground and added to the chicken feed so the next egg shells are strong.
Toilet roll tubes are saved for growing seedlings for the garden.
By developing these habits we have easily managed to produce less than that one day average per week in our house.
Our wheelie bins have digital chips now but this is yet to be used to calculate our council bills for waste. I’m quite keen to see them start measuring our waste!
a blog by a multilingual expat-since-birth, linguist, researcher, mum of three, living in the Netherlands and writing about bilingualism, multiculturalism, parenting abroad, international life...