Many years ago I won a speech competition on the subject of litter is a load of old rubbish! One of the points I made was how few rubbish bins Auckland Council seemed to provide which I felt encouraged littering. Today I am an obsessive recycler, we have two blue recycling bins, a worm farm, and I am regularly visiting op shops or the City Mission or schools with clothing, toys and books we no longer need!
An article in the Sunday Star Times caught my attention today, Welcome to the Wasteland. It’s all about how much rubbish kiwis chuck that is edible or recyclable. Curiously in a trial it reports the homes with teenage boys threw out the least amount of food!
The story says, “Of the 702,800 tonnes of organic waste that went into dumps around the country last year, by far the greatest proportion came from our kitchens.” And each year the amount increases by nearly 1 per cent. Why not worm farm, compost, or even more novel, buy less food!
Too much food and green waste is chucked. Not in my house! Every morning I feed the birds with left over rice, pasta, potato, of course bread and any fat left over from cooking or congealed is added to it. We have a wonderful range of birdlife in our city garden and every morning there seem more birds than before. The worm farm gets the vege scraps, potato peelings, broccoli stalks, even the handy towels and it makes my garden soil so rich!
Anything else the dog gets! So each week our red lidded bin goes out with perhaps only a few bags of rubbish that can’t be recycled. My neighbour counts on me so she can then fill it!
We moan about rates going up but forget to look at why. It is costing more to move our rubbish into other people’s countrysides. I can’t wait for user charges for rubbish. It’s so easy to worm farm, check out Hungry Bins for a clean and simple solution.
Any other ideas for putting out less rubbish besides consuming less?
.
