We don't have compost because every time we do we end up with rats and wasps. I don't do wasps (or bees for that matter ... and I don't really want rats either, frankly). Once these are resolved, I'm happy to start composting again.

I would try a worm farm though ... happy to look into that further.

A lot of our rubbish is poor planning, frankly - food that's gone off, and excess packaging would be the main ones. In an ideal world almost all our food would be in string bags or cloth wraps from the farmer's market, and we'd cook and eat everything we bought and only eat out when pre-planned, but my lofty ideals and DH's reality (as the at home parent with two kids and part time uni) are very different. We dabbled with Aussie Farmers Direct, but it's not the same as picking your own produce, and when push comes to shove no one can do everything no matter how much you'd like to ...

With recycling, we have a LOT of paper - largely because I read and highlight things in hardcopy and I'm trying not to hoard these days - and DH drinks a LOT of soft drink and the boys drink a LOT of milk. As a household, we'd easily go through 10L of each in a week and then there's cans from stuff you thermomixers all probably do from scratch (lentils, beans, crushed tomatoes, etc). And then there's my wine bottles ........

So yeah, a lot of it would not be there in an ideal world, but until there's an extra few hours in the day, uni is over, the boys happily come shopping and fit in a trolley with all the shopping, I have a thermomix (or a free chef ... I'd settle for one of those...) and we're all in a fallen world, I suspect we will continue to fill up our rubbish and recycling bins.




But I'm sure we're the only ones :P


**potters off to google worm farms**