I've been thinking about this for a while, since I've been leaving the house quite early that past few weeks on bin day and noticing many many many regularly overflowing gargabe bins (the big green ones tha garbage truck picks up)...
I get that larger families will probably have more waste than my small family of 3. But we get a small bin bag of rubbish a week. Probably takes up about 1/3 of our bin.
Our recycling bin is often full to the brim by our fortnightly recycable collection, but this seems to be the opposite to most in our street, most of who rarely if ever put their bins out (ok this sounds like I monitor the bin habits of my neighbours, which I don't, this is just something that catches my eye each week/fortnight...). We do recycle awarely (awarely? is tha a word?) and only recycle what is able to be put in the bins, so it's not just full of crap hahahahaha. We also try to buy awarely and avoid too much excess packaging and plastic bags where we can to reduce our wastage and resource consumption.
I just wanted to ask, and maybe offer a small challenge to reduce your wastage!? It makes me sad that in my small street so many overflowing bins are put out each week... imagine if this was happenign in all the streets in my town, in your town... in Australia... that a lot of rubbish EVERY WEEK. It has to go somewhere...
We generally have a couple of standard garbage bags full each week, and the recycling full to the brim every fortnight. We don't make an effort to buy non packaged stuff, but we do make to effort to deal with it properly. Thats for the 2 of us
we do about 2.5 bags a week so we can miss a week with our rubbish collection(not that we try to but just cos sometimes we forget) but it is FULL after 2 weeks.. our recycling is always FULL every fortnight and our green waste bin usually half full a fortnight(we can put food scraps in ours but it gets to stinky)
With the 4 of us we generally have 1 medium bin bag of garbage which takes up about half of our small size wheelie bin and a 3/4 full huge size recycle bin. We also put about 4 icecream containers of scraps into the worms.
we have 2 standard sized kitchen bag full and a full recycling bin but using cloth nappies makes a difference we used to have about twice that much when we were using disposibles
Half a large wheelie bin of rubbish. LOTS of nappies in that. Sometimes the bin gets full of packaging if its been a heavy week of getting parcels in the post.
We don't have recycling, so everything goes in the bin. We had chickens and they got all our food scraps but they got killed by a dog recently The amount of food we throw out is phenomenal. I swear toddlers only eat 20% of whatever you give them, no matter how much or what you give them.
We have lots of demolition rubbish though and I'm busily cutting down trees at the moment so we really need to use our new mulch machine or we'll need to get a large skip. The neighbour gets the bigger bits of our trees for firewood.
LOL I write this with my own bin sizes in my head. Yep, ours are like your Lulu, small general waste bin and large recylable bin. Wish we still lived in an area with green waste bins, they were great!
ETA: Oh yeah, nappies would make that a huge amount! We use cloth nappies and wipes, as well as cloth pads and we don't use tampons either. We've really become focused on our impact. It's scary to consider the amount of waste dumped unnecessarily!
We've just requested a smaller bin. We're getting a green waste bin, which they'll empty fortnightly and we rarely fill the normal bin (the recycling is another issue with DH's Coke habit) amd it'll be even less when DH has the new bin for grass clippings. The only time the normal bin was full is when we moved, bith at the old house and at the new one.
We fill a garbage bag nearly every single day. I have no idea why it gets so full so quickly, must be having 3 little ones or something....... but yeah - most of it is wasted food unfortunately.
Oh and our collection is only fortnightly which we hate because ours is overflowing by halfway through the second week.
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Oct 2007
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Our council bins for the garbage is mega small. The one for recycling and garden waste is the big bins, so we have no choice but to reduce waste if we want our house to not smell of rotting garbage that doesnt fit in the bin!
But i must admit, i throw alot of food away which i bought too much of and it has gone off ... i really need to rethink how to reduce waste this way.
We have a little garbage bin and a big recycling bin. We average about 1 large bin bag, from the kitchen, a couple of plastic bags of rubbish from DD's room (wipes & nappy liners, have to empty it at least twice a week or it starts getting stinky!) and maybe one plastic bag from the bathroom. That generally fills the bin, but doesn't overflow. Our recycling bin is usually full when it gets emptied fortnightly. I try and sort as much as I can, but often DF doesn't care and just puts rubbish wherever..annoys me to no end!
ETA: I'd really like to start a compost heap...I throw out a fair bit of food, between scraps (stuff that can't go to the dog), food that DD throws on the floor or doesn't eat and food that just gets wasted...I think that would cut down our rubbish a bit.
We also fill the better part of a bag of rubbish a day. So by the end of the week our (large) wheelie bin is full. But we don't have recycling out here in the sticks! If we did, it would be half as full I would think! I also need to get a compost heap happening. That will reduce our watse even more. Plus I'd like to start using cloth nappies, though that's a matter of funds....we're not exactly abundant in cash at the mo! We have only moved here recently though (about 7 weeks ago)...it will all happen, one day!!
We don't have a lot maybe one to 2 bags a week. Our recycling bin is always full and we have a compost bin for our food scraps which dh puts on our little veggie garden. I try to avoid over packaged things in general. Its so much waste!! Even if packaging can be recycled it still needs energy for it to be made and disposed of.
At work I'm forever pulling cans and recyclables out of the ordinary waste.
Did you see on the 7pm project the waste pile that is the size of NT floating in the Pacific Ocean!!! Its terrible!!!
We have a big wheelie bin with a divider down the middle, half is for recycling and half is for garbage. The garbage side is usually 1/3 to 1/2 full, the recycling side is usually jammed full. Our council is talking to switching over to smaller bins for garbage, then having the whole large wheelie (divider removed) for fortnightly recycling. This is how we had it in the ACT and it worked quite well. We also have green waste bin but you're not supposed to put kitchen waste in it at all, it's just to keep garden waste seperated, it has a ventilation insert and is collected once a month only. We keep a compost bin and also feed scraps to our little doggy.
We currently don't have recycling at all and usually have a full bin (though that's with a recent move).
Prior we half filled our regular bin (that was a big sulo) and maxxed out the recycling. When we lived in Sydney, what feels like many moons ago, we enquired about getting a small regular bin and the council said fine, but we'll up your rates for your effort!!
I am fairly conscious of packaging and we use cloth nappies as well, so I'm hoping our consumption goes down...would dearly love a worm farm, but DH refuses to have one! He is also another who couldn't care less what goes in what bin, so for him the current situation is great
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