3 Easy ways our family reduces household waste
How do you get rid of household rubbish? Do you walk down your driveway with a fully loaded wheelie bin and have it emptied by someone else? Lucky you we don’t!
This is how you can stop your weekly wheelie bin overflowing. The jungle dwellings household rubbish:
Recycling
We keep glass jars and large yoghurt containers for a kids bowling alley or DYI projects and storage. We recycle milk cartons, and cans. In winter our fireplace helps burn paper and cardboard. This way we only have four garbage size bags of recycling a month. If a friend visits with a carton of beer, we make them take the empties home with them. Yes, I really do! Most visitors understand that we drive it to a recycling facility.
On the weekly shopping trip we personally deliver our recycling, to the local council free recycle drop off service, with two categories:
- glass/plastic/cans
- paper/cardboard
Compost
We have chooks and a homemade pallet compost, oh and a worm farm. Our compost is in high demand between feeding the chooks, worms and random wildlife. In the city you can have a worm farm in your back yard, patio or porch. Or attach four old pallets and create huge composts, like us. It is easy to move and access your wonderful supply of compost mulch. Mulch your gardens, and as a reward you will have very lush looking gardens.
Rubbish
Look at products that require unnecessary use of packaging, just look at them, but don’t encourage the process. Seek the unpackaged more labour for yourself products e.g mushrooms. The packaged variety is in a plastic tray and plastic wrap. It may sometimes be cheaper but, the difference between choosing a paper bag over plastic is discouraging the supply of packaged produce.
With all of the above, for a family of three we manage with only one large bin bag a week! It takes us a month to fill a wheelie bin with rubbish. Our council charges for the dumping of general rubbish charged by weight. We are very careful what goes into the rubbish bin.
I challenge your family to try the above for a week, and who knows you might do it forever.
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