Bin Day and my Inner Sloth

I’m hoping none of my neighbours noticed my stealthy nighttime bin photography, I may have looked a bit mad.

So here we are, two and a bit bags of landfill rubbish in two weeks. It actually looks better than I thought.

I’ve also had a radical bin related thought. I have more recycling than landfill waste so why don’t I swap round the bins I use in the house?! I’m not really sure why I didn’t think of this before, bit slow on the uptake. The bin I’m using for recycling at the mo is in a cupboard, so I’m hoping that the extra hassle of opening this up and taking the lid off will make me and my other half think a bit more about whether something can be recycled.

I’m a big fan of using laziness to make better choices. So far this is working really well for me with hankies and the old mooncup (less bins to empty). I wonder what other things I can do to channel my inner sloth. All thoughts welcome.

The Rubbish Diet

Have you come across the rubbish diet yet? I saw Karen Canard give a talk a year or so ago, and ever since I’ve been thinking about signing up to her challenge. Yep I’m a bit slow, but slowly slowly catchy monkey and other such platitudes.

So I finally signed up last week and have been getting the emailed pep talks to send me on the straight and narrow waste wise.

This week all the emails have focused on recycling; making sure that no recyclables are heading into the landfill bin.

If you saw my last post you’d be forgiven for thinking that I’m definitely getting everything into the right bin, but I think there are still a few fixes to do.

At the behest of the rubbish diet team, I’ve been taking a really good look at what my council says it can recycle and I’ve found some good discoveries and things I hadn’t thought about.

• Greaseproof paper can go into the compost bin.
• I can empty my vacuum into the compost (sorry maybe obvious to everyone else, but hadn’t thought of it).
• There’s a recycling centre where I can take light bulbs just down the road (I’ve been hoarding these for very occasional tip visits up till now and driving the other half crazy).
• Kitchen roll can go in the compost.
• My local tip recycles hard plastics.
• I can’t recycle pumps from soap dispensers (I wonder if this could go in hard plastics?).

Living in Cambridge, queries about rubbish are slightly complicated by having a county and a city council with slightly different systems. But I did find quite a bit of useful info out there. The posters and leaflets on the council website were rather oversimplified though. I guess they don’t want to scare people off.

Here’s an interesting (but mildly patronising (I’m not really down with the cartoon rubbish)) video about how my mixed recycling is sorted in Cambridge.