Charlbury Area Waste Action Group

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Last updated 7 December 2008

The CAWAG Chairman's quest to become a Zero Waste household

i.e. nothing going to Landfill!

6 December 2008 - Been 2 years now since putting anything out for landfill - can't imagine why the Council still needs to come round every week and why households have to be given such huge wheelie bins. We don't buy things in packaging that can't be recycled, we reuse things and I suppose we have generally reduced our consumption. We have a weekly veg box for fruit and veg to supplement what we grow and the cardboard veg box gets reused again and again. Paper consumption is very worrying and at every opportunity we choose recycled paper products and pursuade others who are responsible for buying paper in organisations to only use recycled paper too. Weeks ago we started using hankerchiefs again rather than tissues and don't know why we ever stopped using them all those years ago - they are so much more comfortable to use. Though when the next cold comes along then tissues will be preferable! Next Saturday at our CAWAG stall at the Farmers' Market in Charlbury we'll be showing ideas for a greener Christmas, using waste material for wrapping presents, those stretchy fruit and veg nets are great for tying up presents, gift bags can also be made out of newspaper and gift boxes can be made out of magazine picture pages.

25 August 2008 - Still going strong, just collecting a few composite things in the landfill bin and using them as examples for displays. What is exercising me now having just read Paper Trails by Mandy Haggith is my level of paper consumption. I now have a dilemma about composting paper and cardboard, it really needs to be recycled rather than composted - fibres can be used up to 9 times, but even in Germany paper fibres might only be recycled twice. I am no longer buying Kleenex tissues since they use virgin fibre - soft tissues are just NOT worth the devastation of clearcut logging of natural forests around the world. So I now buy Papura tissues made from sugar cane residues and also CottonSoft tissues made from organic cotton waste.

 31 May 2008 - Just to say that since November 2006 the little landfill bin in the kitchen has filled up twice and the contents decanted into a carrier bag for further inspection! The items will be photographed and published here soon for all to see.

The compost bin has been half emptied once and the compost put on the garden. Found that the hard bio-degradeable plastic doesn't break down at all, nor do avocado stones - in fact we now have several avocado plants around the house. Mango stones take ages to compost but at least they partially decompose. Egg shells stay intact so we've started handling them differently, we wash the gooey stuff off and leave them to dry, then crush them with a pestle in a small pot and use them around the plants to stop slugs eating them.

28/01/07

21/01/07

14/01/07

November 2006 - Installed a Green Johanna compost bin - this can take kitchen waste including meat and dairy products, cardboard, garden waste. This bin is vermin proof with a sealed base and can be located in the shade.Transferred contents of the large open compost bin into the new sealed bin - 3/4 full already.

We are a vegetarian household - apart from the cat - and we used to throw the left-over tinned cat food out as landfill - this was thrown out in a tiny plastic bag with other items that couldn't be composted or recycled. However, now we can compost the cat food we are endeavouring to not need to throw anything out to landfill - and haven't done so since November 2006 - we are just accumulating the landfill stuff in a small bin in the kitchen - when it gets full we'll investigate what it contains and see how we can dispose of it,

The three bins in the kitchen:- a small bin specially for the cat food, another small bin just for stuff we can't recycle or compost, and a larger bin for the plastics.

We have a nifty draw under the sink which contains two plastic bins, one for tins and bottles, the other for items heading for the Green Johanna compost bin -  this gets emptied about once a week.

The biggest problem is what to do with composite materials that contain plastic but can't just be recycled as "plastic" because they contain a lot of paper and they can't be composted because they will leave a plastic residue that is a huge nuisance when using the compost on the vegetable garden. Found it was actually very easy to soak the cardboard carton at the end of washing up the dishes and it easily separated out into the plastic sheet which can go in with the pastics and a cardboard pulp which can be easily composted.

Although the information on the chocolate wrapper describes it as aluminium and paper it leaves out how to go about separating it!

Turns out the composite paper/foil chocolate wrappers are very easy to separate if you soak them first, but some composites are much harder where the edges have been crimped tightly together e.g. this Lemsip wrapper. 

Things that end up in the landfill bin are composite things like the plastic/foil caps to wine bottles - will have to find out from the Council if these can go in with either plastics or metal.

Most supermarkets do now have some compostable plastic wrappings and some delis use compostable see-through rigid containers that look exactly like plastic but are made from starch. Both types of non-plastic "plastic" would contaminate the real plastic if disposed of for recycling as plastic, so look out for the symbols - some are clear like on this tomato pack from Sainsbury's, but Waitrose kiwi fruit wrappings are very discretely labelled on the inside of the pack on the back of the label. However, the compostable plastic feels different to normal plastic, it is softer and tears more easily.

Tissues, cardboard, paper receipts, fluff from hoover, vegetable waste, cardboard cartons, compostable plastics all get composted. There are thousands of worms processing the waste - they are usually deep down but they come to the surface each week when the contents get stirred.

The level of compost in the Green Johanna never really gets to the top, each week it settles down a few inches.