Waste Watcher’s-the end..?

So here it is. The end of the Waste Watcher’s Challenge, and the Rubbish Diet.

And I am more than a little sad.

During the course of the eight weeks, I have:

• met some fabulous, inspiring people during the eight week challenge, including Emma from Wiltshire Wildlife Trust, Sarah from the fab blog, Everyday Life on a Shoestring, and even the Rubbish Queen herself, Karen Cannard, of The Rubbish Diet!
• learnt to make some homemade cleaning products, run workshops (!) and been on an Q&A panel after the screening of Trashed….
• learnt about home-composting and Green-Johannas, and that we can recycle more than we thought we could…
• run a min-series of Waste not, want not blog posts to help stop food waste….
• gone on a Top Secret Blogger’s Mission to London, to learn all about Ecover’s awesome new plastic’s initiative-their Message in our Bottle…

AND we have indeed Slimmed our Bin!

This was our bin at the start of the project:

Our wheely bin was about 1/3 full-we guesstimated it at about 80 litres

And this is our bin at the end of the 8 week challenge:

About 20-25 litres

(I realise it is hard to really appreciate the difference from the photos-it is hard to get any sense of perspective when photographing the inside of a bin-I had intended to take a picture of it outside the bin, but hubby came over all efficient and emptied the house bins before I got a chance, and I drew the line at bin diving..)

Not zero waste by any means (I have to confess I wimped out of attempting zero waste week), but given that I thought we were already pretty good, and that we wouldn’t really be able to Slim our Bin by much, to have got it down to a quarter of what it was, is, I think, pretty awesome!

And once SmallSmall is out of nappies, we can get slimmer still (he wears disposables at night).

So, is this the end of our Waste Watcher’s journey? I sincerely hope not. It sounds ridiculous to get passionate about rubbish and waste, but from watching Trashed, and from speaking to inspirational people like Karen and Emma, it really is one the biggest issues facing us today. And it is so so so easy to do something about it. If we all recycled what we could (it really is not difficult to just put the things in the right bin is it?) and gave it a little thought, it could have MASSIVE implications for the future of the planet…