Going low waste at home - part 2

The second significant change in our home is that we’ve more or less stopped using supermarkets. We get our fruit, vegetable and pantry basics delivered once a week by Abel & Cole, the organic box distributor. The produce is local and seasonal. Nothing is air-freighted. The only packaging is a cardboard box which we send back and is reused.

We top up the organic box from our local shop, Pomona. And that’s it. We really don’t use supermarkets. Is it more expensive? – well yes carrot for carrot it is probably a bit dearer than Tesco, but because we’re much more careful than we used to be about not wasting anything there’s much less difference than you’d think. We used to throw out loads of food. Most people do. Recent studies have suggested that about half of the food we throw out is perfectly edible. Now we make sure we use every last potato. Anything left over goes into the weekly soup.

Going low waste at home

When I decided to make my life more eco friendly one of the first issues to resolve was waste. In our household of two we produced at least two black bin bags of rubbish a week. Now we recycle about 80% and produce about a bag of general waste every 3-4 weeks. So how did we do it? And can everyone do it?

About a third of all waste is food so this seemed like the obvious place to start. We share a garden with the other seven flats in our house so we installed a compost bin where we mix garden waste with vegetable and fruit peelings. But we also have a wormery on our back porch where we put all kinds of food waste including dairy and cooked foods.

Of course not everyone has access to a garden or an outside space which can accommodate a wormery. And not everyone wants to compost or harvest worm pee, the most fantastic liquid plant food ever. It’s something my other half absolutely refuses to do because of the yeuk factor. And actually that’s why Camden’s officers have resisted collecting food waste for so long. But it’s my belief that we can and should find a way to turn food waste into compost at the very least, or better, into a gas and then electricity or vehicle fuel. Food waste is in fact an incredibly valuable resource. It’s crazy to send it to landfill or incinerate it, which is what we do at present. (More tomorrow)