A month without a rubbish bin

The Unwin family try to live an environmentally conscious life; they recycle, compost, grow their own veges, keep chickens and only eat a little meat. So far so good. But mum Sarah Unwin was looking to make a big change. It had to be something that worked long-term and would make a real impact, yet it also had to be achievable for a busy family.

Sarah 30, husband Chris 31, and their three boys, Luca 12, Eli 8, and Oscar 6, live in Anakiwa, Marlborough Sounds – so cutting down on their car use wasn’t really an option. Instead they decided to try to live waste-free for one month.

Every year, New Zealanders send around 2.5 million tonnes of waste to landfills. That’s over a tonne of rubbish per household – yet about three-quarters of this could actually be kept out of landfill by being recovered, reused or recycled. Landfills affect the environment by releasing powerful greenhouse gases, and can leach waste into the soil and water, which can pose a serious threat to humans and animals.

How did they do it?

Before they started the Unwin family spent a week planning and preparing. Says Sarah: “Our objective was to have zero per cent going into landfill. It was important to get our goal straight first so that we knew what we were trying to do.” Anything they bought, used, or consumed in that month needed to fit into one of three categories (in order of preference):

• it had to be compostable and biodegradable
• or fully recyclable material, such as glass that could be melted down and made into the same product again
• or, if it was plastic it had to be 100 per cent recyclable.

Sarah began by emptying the cupboards and pantry and putting back only those things that fell into the three categories. “Things like pasta and dried lentils that I had bought in plastic but knew that I could buy from our local bulk food store, anything like that I put into glass jars and put back into the cupboard for refilling.” She did the same for the laundry and the bathroom. The plastic toothbrushes had to go, as did the toothpaste. Deodorant, too. The laundry powder was removed due to its plastic scoop.

Armed with a shopping list, Rethink’s reusable produce bags (Rethink won the 2013 Unpackit Awards for their ability to reduce packaging), and PotatoPak’s compostable bags made from potato starch, Sarah did the fortnightly family shop. The supermarket visit was brief – “because being waste-free cuts out about 90 per cent of things from supermarkets” – and the rest of the shopping was done at the local fruit and vege store, the butchers, where she took the potato starch bags for the meat to be wrapped in, and the fishmongers, where she asked for the fish to be wrapped in paper.

Sarah bought bamboo toothbrushes for the whole family, and ‘Toothy Tabs’ – solid toothpaste in tablet form – from the company Lush, which makes all its products using fresh ingredients. “That’s how I discovered Lush. Looking for [replacement] toothpaste was such a hard thing to find and Lush was the only place that we could find something that was package free.” She bought a Lush deodorant bar, too. “We’ve now converted most of our bathroom stuff to Lush products because they are happy to do minimum waste, they just wrap everything in paper which is awesome.” Laundry powder was replaced with products by Next Generation and Eco Planet for their cardboard packaging and scoop.

Instead of store-bought, plastic-wrapped bread, the Unwins made fresh bread. Instead of buying plastic milk bottles, Sarah found a local place that sold fresh goat’s milk. One of her sons is dairy intolerant, so he’d normally have rice or soy milk but since that comes in TetraPaks which aren’t recyclable, that was off limits. To get around it, they started making almond milk at home. They also made paneer instead of buying cheese. In short, Sarah says there was nothing essential that they could not find – or create – an alternative for.

They also replaced their rubbish bins with recycling stations and created a ‘waste tree’ – a piece of wood that they would fix any waste to so they could monitor their output.

Finally, Sarah wrote to companies that made her favourite products that she could no longer buy and asked: “Have you thought about having 100 per cent recyclable packaging?” She says she got responses from everyone she contacted.

The result

Six bottle freshness seals and one soup packet was all the rubbish that was pinned to the waste tree at the end of the family’s zero waste month. That surprised Sarah as she thought they’d end up with at least a plastic bag full of rubbish, “and I thought that would have been pretty good”. Also surprising was that they managed to stay within their shopping budget of $300 per fortnight. She says some easy savings came from replacing snack foods for the kids with fruit and nuts bought in bulk.

And while it took effort and time, Sarah says the end result was worth it. “I felt really good at the end of the month and I didn’t have any of that guilt associated with piling up rubbish and using things that I should probably seek an alternative too but for convenience I’d been using anyway.”

Where to from here?

The Unwins intend to continue working towards living a waste-free existence (except Sarah is buying cheese again – homemade paneer wasn’t quite hitting the spot). She says their zero waste month has served as “an eye-opener about how much crap there is on offer, how unnecessary it is and how we just bought into it because it was so normal in our society.”

“It was surprising to see it all in a different light. It is such an important thing to talk about to the next generation, to move away from a consumer society that buys something and throws it away, that one-use mindset. It has to be a really conscious change.”

Sarah’s tips for a zero waste month

• Set clear goals for what you want to achieve.
• Plan for the month ahead; contact your local council to find out what can and can’t be recycled, make detailed shopping lists, research alternatives for those products that you know you won’t be able to use.
• Consolidate the number of shopping trips you make to avoid ‘accidental’ purchases.
• Spread the word. Talk about what and why you are doing it and encourage others to get on board.
• Do it. “It’s not as hard as it sounds.”