Who are we? Challenge details Why focus on rubbish? Rubbish stats

February 1st 2008 to February 1st 2009

Welcome to the official rubbish free year website. During 2008 we challenged ouselves to create no more than one rubbish bag of rubbish.  We completed the challenge successfully with less than a kilogram of rubbish each.  That’s us with all of our 2008 rubbish to the right.  To see what’s in the bag click through to the final blog.

We celebrated the end of Rubbish Free Year with a 100% rubbish free event at our house on February the 1st.  No rubbish was created during preparations apart from one piece of gladwrap (I thought the cheese monger at the local farmers market sold their rounds with out plastic around them but unfortunatly they don’t).  At the party there was  a rubbish ‘incident’ when someone attempted to bring a packet of chips.  Apart from that though we hosted well over 100 people without a drop of rubbish.
We hope you enjoy looking around the site.  We continue to compile a database of rubbish free solutions, useful links and to blog all our rubbish free adventures. Please contribute your own ideas and suggestions as this will help make this website an even more comprehensive resource for everyone. We would also love to hear from anyone who is already doing similar things or who has decided to commit to their own rubbish-based challenge. This site is useful for rubbish free lovers all over the world, but place-specific information concerns Aotearoa, New Zealand.

Who Are We?

We are Matthew and Waveney, we live with our dog and two chickens in Christchurch, New Zealand. Matthew works 30 hours a week, and I work part time hours and study.  We have no kids. We have a car but bike a lot. We eat meat, but not every day. Within 5kms we have a bulk foods store, butcher, baker and organic store. We have a section large enough to garden and deal with our own organic waste. Although you may not call people with chickens in urban areas ‘normal’, that’s what we are calling ourselves, i.e. up until the start date of our rubbish free challenge we were still buying food in plastic, take-a-ways in Styrofoam, and toothpaste in throw away plastic tubes. We don’t know a great deal about what we are doing! We are hoping this can be an encouragement to others who, like us, would like to know and do more.

Challenge Details

The challenge is for our household to create no rubbish for the landfill from 1st February 2008 to 1st February 2009. However it is very likely that, despite our best efforts, some rubbish will be unavoidable. We challenge ourselves to keep this in no more than one official council rubbish bag.

We are …

• Exercising our consumer power! During 2008 we will choose not to buy anything that is has non recyclable packaging or is in itself junky, plasticy, disposable etc

• Asking friends and family not to bring (or send) any rubbish to our home, so beware the humble packet of biscuits!

• Making things ourselves to avoid packaging, eg baking muesli bars (granola bars).

Reduce… Reuse… Rehome… Recycle… the four Rs are a big part of the plan to eliminate rubbish

• Composting: We have two systems on the go, a standard one for food scraps and lawn clippings, and a longer term one for things that take a bit longer to break down, like nail clippings, hair and cotton.

• Reusing: waste not, want not. That container, string etc just might come in handy.
(But we won’t be keeping any more than we can use).

• Rehoming: Just because it is junk for us doesn’t mean that someone wouldn’t want it.

• Gardening and maybe even preserving etc (ugh! sounds like hard work).

• Buying second hand: This is the only way to buy some things that usually come with packaging when new.

• Recycling: paper, cans, numbers 1 & 2 plastics, etc.

Why Focus on Rubbish?

With all the issues out there, how is it that we became specifically interested in reducing our rubbish? The thought process definitely started with the big picture in mind.

When we looked at the big picture our lifestyle seemed unsustainable

Like many Westerners, we lived with the guilt of being part of an ethical (enter Bono) and ecological (enter Al Gore, Greenpeace) disaster. While we found we could make good choices when presented with simple solutions, e.g. kerbside recycling or giving to charities, we felt guilty anyway because we knew our lifestyles sucked a disproportional amount of resources, which screws up people lower down in the consumption food chain and, of course, the planet.

My attention has been recently drawn to an online 20 min movie called The Story of Stuff (mostly in simple line drawings which helps for those of us with slower connections). The movie succinctly sums up the issue better than I ever could and even though it’s American (with a perky American presenter) it translates well to the NZ context. A more interactive way of looking at the issue is to take this online quiz: www.earthday.net/footprint. I highly recommend checking both these sites out.

We felt unsure of the way forward… how could we possibly make a difference?

The thing that I find fascinating is how people like Matthew and myself could be both informed and concerned yet do relatively little. Why did we prefer guilt to radical behaviour changes? Here are some things that I realised get in the way: firstly, we fail to understand (and solve) world scale problems, and were consequently left with a foggy idea of the way forward. Secondly, the power doesn’t seem to be in our hands anyway. Thirdly information is hidden, complex and time consuming to gather. Finally, while we may acknowledge on a theoretical level that the pattern of western production and consumption is unsustainable, the last thing we actually want is to see it all crash.

A small, measurable goal was the key - one year without sending rubbish to the landfill

With a slowly growing awareness Matthew and I have pondered what to do when the solution is difficult, complicated and scary. Being ‘ethical’ was way too huge (and vague) for types as uninformed as ourselves, and narrowing it down to consuming ethically was still overwhelming: is this can of beans/ pair of jeans / dog toy etc produced in harmony with the planet and all humankind? Who owns the parent company and do they invest in the arms trade/ fell rain forests etc? We definitely lacked the time and resources to figure all that out. But the alternative - apathy - annoyed us. In response to the stalemate we somehow came up with the “The Rubbish Free Challenge”. It was smaller and finite, and gave us a simple, tangible question that we could answer ourselves: Will this item (packaging included) contribute to the Landfill?

The rubbish free year challenge lets us make a positive change that is also achievable

It is true that the challenge ignores the complexity of whether a product is ultimately a good thing for our world and doesn’t address aspects of lifestyle (e.g. burning fossil fuels in my car as I drive to the supermarket), but it puts the power back into our hands, and we have been amazed at how often avoiding packaging and plastic products channels us into buying local, fair trade and ecologically friendly alternatives. It is holistic in that it has required that we consider every consumer choice yet it has not overwhelmed us.

We hope that after the challenge we would be able to focus more widely, using our new-found habits as a starting point. But for now, embarking on something with a start and end date has provided us with a motivational pull we previously lacked. We are now doing things we always meant to do (like getting around to buying a battery recharger) and we will enjoy a sense of accomplishment when the challenge ends. And, call me strange, but so far I have been enjoying the creativity and interest the challenge has generated.

Rubbish Stats

New Zealanders use over 22 million plastic bags each week. Each one of these that ends up in a landfill is estimated to take 500 years to break down. Carbon emissions from the breakdown of paper, cardboard and organic matter in the landfill amounts to the emissions generated from 33,000 cars each year. (source: www.ccc.govt.nz)

Christchurch Case Study:

• 764kg of rubbish is generated by every person living in Christchurch each year. More than 50% of this could have been recycled or composted. (Imagine if you actually had to contain your own rubbish!)

• A couple of years ago the council dropped the number of rate-funded rubbish bags from 52 to 26 per year. This was to encourage people to recycle, compost and generally reduce the amount of rubbish that they throw out.

• Currently 85% of Christchurch households recycle at the kerbside each week, and 55% compost at home to some extent.

• Despite this, organic matter still makes up to 46% of an average rubbish bag and paper makes up 28%.

For more information, heaps of interesting graphs and pictures click here to download a .pdf from the council’s website.

Who are we? Challenge details Why focus on rubbish? Rubbish stats