Rubbish Free Year Blog

One year out

One year out since the challenge finished and six months since our last blog.  A lot has happened. So many bloggers blog 3 times a day, I am the opposite, I have been meaning to one for the last couple of months!    So old school.  Since we last spoke… we have different professions, live in […]

Hiatus

Matthew and I have been doing our thinking out loud since the challenge finished 6 months ago.  We knew that we would continue to commit to living rubbish free and that we would embark on learning about other aspects of sustainable living but we didn’t know how things would take shape.
As it turns out,  some […]

The Politeness of Certain Unsustainable Actions

Just got back from a funeral on the West Coast.  Its a 4 hour drive from here and we could have car pooled with my cousin, but because he was going over and back again in a short space of time, Matthew and I decided to drive our otherwise empty car over so we could […]

Organic Fruit and Vegetables

Already it seems that our post challenge ’sustainability journey’ is of a quite different nature.  The Challenge was triumphant in tone, really.  There were a few down days, but we overcame.  I think we had decided even before we started that we could do it and we were keen to convince as many of you […]

An Ordinary Mantra

It’s now months since we finished the challenge and yet in every day it is with us in someway.  Oddly we have received a flurry of belated interest from North American media, websites etc (to be fair it takes a carrier pigeon a heck of a long time to fly that far) and we […]

One Month Out

It has been a month since we finished the Rubbish Free Year challenge and so far our prediction that we now have ingrained rubbish free habits has proved correct. Although Rubbish Free Year was all our own creation, it created a strong sense of accountability which helped when defenses were low and temptation was present, […]

Week 53 - All wrapped up

This is our last official duty of our rubbish free year, to report on our rubbish free party and to do the final telly of whats in our bag.
The party went well.  Rubbish aside the biggest worry we had on the day was actually the weather!  The forecast was for a gale force southerly and […]

Week 52!!!

Well, as I write this there are two days of our challenge year left and a party still to have, so next week’s blog will be the last official rubbish free year blog, and will have the final update of the rubbish we collected during the year.   But we will keep blogging, if for […]

Week 51 - Say it with flowers

We are in down to the last week now!!  - And plenty of room in our one rubbish bag.  I did an interview this morning for RDU (Christchurch student radio) and the interviewer suggested that we had a week to rush around filling it up before it was all over!! Hmm, typical of student radio.  […]

Week 50 - Ordinary, thoughtless and rubbish free.

We have been enjoying having extra family  around over the holiday period.  One day, after taking the nieces and nephews climbing we spontaneously invited everyone back to ours for lunch. With out any thought, we bought pies, fizzy drinks and juice for the kids.  Then when we got home produced tomato sauce, tea, coffee and […]

Week 49 - Happy New Year!

 As our Rubbish Free Year draws to a close, with just three weeks to go till the end of the challenge, the most commonly asked question has changed from “What do you do about…?” to “What will happen once your year is up?”.  Currently, we have three responses.
Firstly, rather than feeling like we are now […]

Week 47 - Christmas Blog

 
Christmas was always going to be the riskiest time of our rubbish free year, and I suspect that had we just started the challenge it might have blown us right out.  However, we, and more importantly, our family and friends have had almost 11 months to get our heads around doing Christmas rubbish free.  Everyone […]

Week 46: Peace be upon the recyclers

We had Campbell Live here with us this week, some of you would have seen it last Thursday night.  They requested that we have a Christmas tree.  So we found a young self-seeded one on Matthew’s parent’s property and borrowed our mates Christmas decorations!  There we go, secrets out.  It did look really good on […]

Week 45 - Future forests

We have had an amazing week.  Believe it or not, more surprises to do with flying.
Early last week Matthew got an email from the Air New Zealand Environmental Trust inviting ‘influential bloggers’ to attend a day at the Mangarara Station in the Hawkes Bay to see their tree planting work.  The funny thing is Matthew […]

Week 44-Flying away

I had a great birthday surprise last weekend, we did go camping but with a twist.  On Saturday morning Isacc, a friend of ours who recently passed his commercial pilot’s license, knocked on our door.  I instantly thought to myself, things have taken a positive turn… sure enough Matthew announced that we were off on […]

Week 43- fat lips, socks and other surprises

Well summer is upon us and our rubbish free year is soon coming to an end - two months to go.  We are starting to think about what on earth a rubbish free Christmas will look like - what to buy, how to wrap , how to post …  more on that when we actually […]

Week 42 - Canon vs Sony

Firstly, apologies for the complete absence of a blog from us for the past couple of weeks.  A perfect storm of travel, exams, work and life meant that we didn’t get a chance to sit down and write, but the storm has now moved on and the forecast is looking good for future weekly blogs!
One […]

Week 39 - Tired tires

We decided not to blog last week due to it being Labour Day Weekend and we were out of town and for those of you who have noticed our absence from the NZ Herald, we have been bumped in the interests of increased reporting on the election but apparently will reappear after we’ve all voted!
We […]

Week 37 - Restaurant leftovers

On the odd occasion that Waveney and I go out for dinner we can generally be found at a Chinese restaurant imaginatively named ‘The Great Wall of China’.  When we went a few weeks ago we ended up with a lot of food leftover and were about to ask for it to be packaged up […]

Week 36 - a brighter future

We have had a few family members visiting in the last couple of weeks, making the most of the school holidays .  My cousin and her family live in Auckland and her eldest daughter goes to a eco-friendly primary school.  Its amazing what schools are getting up to these days. They have a worm farm […]

Week 35- A Green Company

Here’s a tale with a happy ending.
A few days ago we received a rubbish problem in the mail: A flyer from our power provider Meridian wrapped in clear plastic.  Amazingly it was the first piece of (solicited) plastic ensconced mail we have received since starting 8 months ago.  We have had other things come through […]

Week 34 - Home delivery

One of the negative aspects of living rubbish free has been the amount of time it takes to do the weekly shop as we visit the Bin Inn, the butcher, green grocer and fish monger.  Although we often bike, we more regularly drive, and so in addition to time there is also the issue of […]

Week 33 - Toasters

A few years ago we were visiting a market with about four other friends when we decided to institute a $5 challenge.  We all scoured the market for items costing $5 or less, the winner being the individual who had secured the ‘coolest’ item.  To be fair it was quite a subjective contest, but nonetheless […]

Week 32 - where for art thou honey?

One thing I’ve learnt this year: a trick to frustration free bulk buying is to have two containers and to fill up one when the other one is getting empty. It took me a while to work that one out but it means you can fill up on bulk things all at once, not when […]

Week 31- lemon trees and soap nut trees

Thanks to all the old schoolers out there who descended on the  blog Matthew wrote a few weeks ago to suggest that I use a colouring-in pencil instead of a highlighter. Its just as good and so simple! Why didn’t I think of it?  It’s a classic example of how we somehow get weened of […]

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