Our challenge: A Week without waste! Day 1

We've signed up to be part of the City of Moreland's Zero Waste for a Week challenge. As the name suggests, the challenge is to live for a week without producing waste (besides that which can be recycled, composted or green wasted). The comic above is a bit cheeky but it's also true based on organisations I've worked for!

As part of the challenge we received a package of goodies in the post: a Zero Waste for a Week booklet of tips, some info on recycling and disposing of hard rubbish, info on composting and worm farms,  a sticker for the recycling bin, a keep cup, and some net bags for the veggie shop and a reusable lunch box. Handy stuff, but it would've been nice to have Green Renters included in the resource list. Hopefully we can rectify that for next year's challenge?

We do pretty well in general. We have a worm farm, Bokashi bin, green council bin (the bin is for gardening green waste and costs $45 from the council), and we usually produce about 1/3 a small wheelie bin worth of rubbish each week and a half to full bin of recycling. Our green bin is emptied fortnightly and is always full! We don't use plastic bags and take cloth ones where we go. We try not to eat a lot of packaged food in general and don't use glad wrap or stuff like that. We have no children or pets. We generally get hard waste collection once or twice a year.

Our challenges

• We produce more veggie scraps (we're vegetarian, we cook a lot , work from home and grow our own veggies) than our worm farm and Bokashi bin can handle. We'll need to bury some of the scraps this week in our front garden.
• We eat tofu which is sold in plastic (I've never seen it sold any other way). The plastic container is recyclable but the peel off top isn't.
• I sell make and sell crafts and  whilst I favour reusing craft materials (old fabric etc), cut threads and bits and pieces like this can't be recycled and they'd cut the worms in half in the worm farm!I do have an intention to make some soft toys for a charity drive coming up however, so I might use the scraps as stuffing.
• We live in on a busy street and invariably get other people's rubbish flying into the garden, including non-recycled crap from the McDonalds at the other end of our street. We clean up other people's rubbish everyday.

I'm going to post a bit each day as well as do an audit at the end of the week of all our rubbish to see what we have. Should be interesting!