I am a middle aged mother of a young son who has decided to do something about reducing waste. I am by no means anyone to look up to in this kind of thing but have set out to do what I can and to try and do more. I was brought up in the UK in the seventies and so might harp back to days when there didn’t seem to be so much packaging and waste!
I live in a semi-detached house with a garden and tend to do a lot of home cooking. I think I have a pretty average lifestyle in terms of my general consumption of food items and my production of waste, although obviously I am trying to minimize that.
In our area black bins (for general waste) are collected every 2 weeks and in alternate weeks blue bins (recyclable waste) and brown bins (garden waste) are collected. As there are only 2 of us in the house it is quite often the case that my bins are not full even when they are collected every 2 weeks.
I’m going to try and encompass all aspects of waste including general home items. I often currently shop for items at local charity shops and second hand stores and often buy and sell items on eBay. When you have young children it can be expensive to always buy everything new and often it is not necessary for a few reasons, one being that they aren’t too bothered about second hand stuff and the other being that they go through things so quickly and grow out of stuff before it ceases to be useful so not only can you sell your stuff with plenty of wear/use left in it, you can also buy stuff that still has plenty of life left.
As I live in the UK the things I will be talking about will likely be geared somewhat towards that but I will also share links to products that you can also buy in the US and ideas that are global, so hopefully they will help anyone else.
As I am reasonably new to this I also welcome any suggestions from anyone else who is more of an expert than I am on what else can be done in reducing waste in our everyday lives. So feel free to leave comments etc.