bemoreeco

Just over a week ago I heard about a lady who goes by the name of Mrs Green. Mrs Green is based here in rural Gloucestershire and is doing something really remarkable, she’s aiming to reduce the amount of rubbish she throws away to zero. Ala her website’s name My Zero Waste.

So far her success has been incredible, and her advice about how to recycle some of the more difficult objects is brilliant. In short, Mrs Green and her family (Mr. Green, Miss Green and their cat, Cactus Green) are an absolutely inspiration to anyone wanting to make a really difference. So we’ve been lucky enough to bagsy and interview with the great Mrs Green herself, who talks openly about her efforts and where she sees this all heading.

So thanks for joining us today Mrs Green, could you begin with a brief introduction of yourself?

We’re a family of four (2 adults, 1 child and a cat) living in the Forest of Dean Gloucestershire.

Why did the idea of recycling all your rubbish become so appealing to you?

Reducing, reusing and recycling have really come into our awareness since we were personally involved in the Boscastle floods, whilst on holiday, in 2004.

Watching people’s homes and livelihoods being washed out to sea had a massive impact on us. If this kind of freak weather is part of the global warming problem, it made us realise that every action we take has the ability to affect other people across the country and across the world. Waste contributes to global warming and we felt it was time to take responsibility for our actions.

The first thing I did when I got home was to set up the Gloucestershire Freecycle site. This grew from just me as a member to over 4500 members within a couple of years. At this point, I split the group into district council areas and handed it all over to new group moderators. There are now over 15,000 people taking part in Freecycle throughout the county.

I’d played with the idea of recycling more and reducing our waste for some time but my husband wasn’t quite ready to embrace it. A few months ago, I read a story about plastic and how it was killing marine life. When I showed it to my husband, it provided a dramatic turning point for him. From the moment he declared ‘no more plastic carrier bags’ and from there things have escalated to where they are today!

Before you began your efforts, how much waste did you imagine you would recycle?

I thought 50% would be a challenge and then we wouldn’t be able to do any more. When we began, an ‘average’ week’s waste was about 100 litres - 1 metal dustbin plus 2 swing bin liners. My ‘dream’ was to get it down to 1 swing bin liner!

How successful have you been?

I’m really pleased with our progress. I never thought for one moment that we would be producing less than half a carrier bag of waste per week. If someone had told me this three months ago I would have laughed in their face. Last week we put out 141 grams of non-recyclable mixed plastics waste.

Has it saved you money?

In some ways, but not in others. For example, using our local butcher means we can buy meat without packaging. He puts it straight into our own reusable containers. Buying a chicken (that’s what we feed the cat) from a butcher is more expensive than from a supermarket. Yet, there are many more factors to ‘cost’ other than how much money we, as consumers, have to part with.

It’s ‘cheaper’ because my local butcher is closer than my nearest supermarket, so my fuel costs are reduced. It’s ‘cheaper’ for the environment because I don’t have any packaging to get rid of. It’s better from the point of animal welfare and you can’t put a price on that in my opinion.

Another thing about the chickens for the cat - they are delivered fresh and I cook one and it lasts her 10 days kept in the fridge. When I was buying a ‘cheaper’ one from the supermarket it would last 5 days if I was lucky before going off and needing to be thrown out.

Making things at home such as bread, cakes and biscuits can work out much cheaper. As does making yogurt.

Buying fruit and vegetables lose means you can buy exactly the quantity you want. They may not work out as cheap as a supermarket ‘Value’ pack, but if you have too much in the pack and it goes off before you’ve used it, then the overall cost can be more.

So you have really had to change your shopping habits?

This has been the biggest change to our lifestyle and in a sense it’s essential if you are to attain near zero waste. Now it’s all habit though and I don’t think I would go back. Yes there are days when it would be much easier to grab everything from a supermarket shelf, but there are ways around most products.

Our butcher sells loose bread and cakes if I’m having a ‘can’t be bothered to bake’ day. We are fortunate enough to have a wonderful local organic farm shop which we used anyway, even before we were reducing our waste. But now I reuse my paper bags instead of throwing them away when I get home and we make sure we take back our egg boxes to be reused. We are also lucky to have local fruit orchards which I was using anyway, but again I make an effort to wash out the plastic fruit punnets and return them, instead of binning them.

We now buy cheese from our local, independent shop. The lady who owns it is happy to cut a slice off her huge blocks of cheese and put it into our own reusable boxes. Usually it comes pre-cut in a metre of clingfilm. It feels good to support our local businesses, so has a positive ‘feel good’ factor to it too.

What have been the biggest challenges to your recycling efforts so far? Are some items more difficult to recycle than others?

Our daughter is seven and a lot of marketing is aimed at children. So she wants crisps or a bar of chocolate or something else just because of the packaging. It makes it hard for me to achieve a balance between not making her the ‘odd one out’ amongst her peers, but also doing the things that support my own values and beliefs.

We each have our favourites that are hard to give up - for our daughter it’s crisps, for me it’s shop bought yogurt and for my husband he likes a curry - the brand he favours comes in a plastic tray!

It’s also frustrating when you get to a recycling bank and all the receptacles are full…………

Without a doubt the most difficult item to recycle is mixed plastics. All of our weekly household waste now is non-recyclable plastics or mixed packaging. For example; yogurt pots, foil backed plastic used to package things like rice and cellophane bags used for packaging lentils (another of my weaknesses!). The pillow packs that prepared salad leaves come in are also impossible to recycle.

Do you spend a lot of time learning to recycle

We’re learning all the time, but it doesn’t have to be time consuming. Now we have habits in place that might take an extra 30 seconds. It takes about that long to rinse a tin can, crush it and put it in the right place rather than throw it in the bin. It takes about 10 seconds to crush a tetrapak and store it. Crushing and storing a plastic milk bottle takes about the same amount of time.

But every week we come across something new to help us. For example, we’ve now found a company who will recycle polythene - that’s plastic bread wrap, magazine wrapping, most produce bags etc. So they need to be stored and this week I’m going to go through it all and package it for sending.

That might take me quite a while because I’ve never done it before, but it’s all a learning curve that I am happy to take part in if it has a benefit to the environment.

We don’t make a special journey to our recycling banks, we pass them and incorporate them into weekly (or less often) errands.

How difficult was it to get your family involved? Did they take to it quite quickly?

The whole family are on board now. At the beginning of this year I decided to try reducing our rubbish myself and it was impossible. I would recycle things and then find that other members of the family had put things in the bin. I was even known to fish through the bin after they were in bed taking things out. But once items had been covered in sloppy food waste that became less attractive and I gave up!

Later in the year I voiced my concerns about landfill waste and we all had a half hearted attempt. And then, reading the marine life article was the one that convinced my husband and I that we really needed to do something.

We each have our ‘jobs’ to do so that the whole family is involved and it doesn’t fall to one person to deal with it all.

Is it fun? I’m not sure about that, but our daughter’s face lights up when she is allowed to smash the bottles into the bank - it’s great for anger management! The greatest satisfaction is knowing that in a small way, we are minimising the load on landfill  and demonstrating that minimal to zero waste is possible for the ordinary household.

I noticed you’re also planning your own Zero Waste week for this September, could you tell us a little more about this?

Our zero waste week is taking place during the first week in September. This is our personal goal of achieving zero waste i.e. putting nothing out for the rubbish collection that week and we’ve been working towards this since June. Our zero waste week is a beginning, not an end! It would be easy to hold onto our rubbish for a week and then just put it out the following week. Or produce zero waste for a week and then lapse back into old ways, but we are genuinely going to try for zero waste and then see how easy it is to maintain this in the future.

This will mean another change in shopping habits and perhaps replacing some of our staple foods with others. I’ll probably be replacing rice with potatoes that week and Little Miss Green knows that crisps are off the menu (but she’s happy to find that some chocolate bars come in recyclable wrapping!)

We all know how important moral support is at these times, so we’ve set the public a challenge too! They can join us by making pledges on our site, putting them into place during zero waste week and commenting back on our site to tell us how they got on.

In exchange for this, we have a fantastic range of prizes up for grabs. All of the prizes are either made from recycled materials, fully recyclable or will help entrants to recycle more in their day to day life. We have some wonderful companies such as Neals Yard, Ethical Superstore, Ecover,  Gossypium and MoreEco, donating prizes and supporting us. Most can be shipped worldwide, so people from all across the globe can join in!

We hope that by doing this we can encourage people to have a go at recycling and reducing their waste - no matter how big or small and that some of these changes become lasting once they realise how easy it is.

I also believe you’ve convinced the local council to hold a county-wide My Zero Waste?

It seems that this was in the pipeline anyway and once the council heard about what we were doing they asked for us to work together. We are really honoured to be a part of this and zero waste week for Gloucestershire is planned for January of next year.

We can view our September zero waste week as a ‘trial run’ for the county :)

Finally, what advice would you give to others hoping to achieve ‘Zero Waste’ ?

I would say it’s to start small. If you try to go zero waste overnight it can be incredibly overwhelming. It’s like learning to walk - you don’t expect your toddler to go from crawling one day to running a marathon the next. You’ll take strong steps and then you’ll fall flat on your face, just as we have done.

We’ve made mistakes, aimed too high too soon, but we’ve retained a sense of humour about it all and most of all, we’ve learned from our mistakes.

The important thing is to stay inside your comfort zone. So if you feel you can only recycle one can this week, then do that and celebrate your achievement. It might not feel like much, but imagine if every person in the country recycled one can this week - that would be 60 million cans saved from the landfill.

The collective impact of what we can do is what matters and small successes lead to bigger ones.

You can follow Mrs Green’s quest on her Zero Waste blog, and be sure to sign up for her Zero Waste Week Pledge and Win competition.