New Year's Resolution

 Hello and I hope you all had a lovely Christmas. I took some time out of blog land to relax and spend some much needed time with my family. It has been lovely. Almost time to come back to the real world now. 

The past few days I have been thinking, reviewing my status in the world I guess. Taking a look at my aims in life and re-assesing them as most people do at the end of the year. I have decided to go 100% rubbish free by the end of the year to help my sustainability. 

This means I will only purchase things that come in recycliable, reusable or compostable containers. And try and buy in a bulk where possible. Not only does buying in bulk save money, it also has less pacakging. 

Inspired by this blog here No Trash Project, Colleen lives in NYC and has given me some excellent ideas, I thought were impossible in a city, so I must try these out.

I have started this a bit early as I was running out of castille soap. I bought the smaller bottle at the end of April last year and only finished using it yesterday. I paid £5 for it and got almost a year's use out of it, so not bad value for money. But to save even more money I bought the next size up which was £8 something so who knows how long it is gonig to last me.

The next thing I was running short of was washing powder. I have been using Daz washing powder since I moved out from my parents' house nearly 6 years ago now. I must give it that most UK washing powders still come in a carboard box which is recyclable/compostable but all the health warnings on the side give me the heebie jeebies. All the grease lifters and optical brightners and heavy synthetic perfumes etc, are they really needed? I looked around online and came across BioD, it is 100% natural with no perfume and it comes in a paper bag which uses less material than a box so it should break down easier and faster on the compost heap. I bought a small 1KG bag to see how it fairs but you can purchase much, much bigger bags.

The next thing is packaged snacks, sometimes I like to make myself something to take to work for lunch, sometimes this isn't possible and I need something to grab and stuff in my bag quickly before I leave. I found these from InSpiral, quite expensive at £1.45 a pack, but they look tasty (haven't gotten round to trying them yet) and the package is compostable which is excellent. Snacks is something I need to work on, but I think it is more a self-discipline issue, as I make snacks for a week, but then end up eating them the day I make them!

 

The next thing I thought about was increasing the amount I compost, most councils in England provide you with a food collection bin which you either empty into your garden waste bin or a sepeate larger bin you keep outside. Which you can put most food waste in and they collect it, compost it down and sell it back to you as compost. 

I wanted to cut out the middle man, and was looking at ways to compost the things you can't easily do on your heap, i.e. dairy products, cooked food and bones. 

The simplist way seems to be a Bokashi bin, where "bokashi" is a japanese term for fermented. Basically you put all your food waste into the special bin, spinkle some bran which contains a bacteria in it and leave it to break down for a few weeks. Most websites suggest you need two, one to fill, one to ferment. I am thinking I might need more, so this is a trial run to see how long it takes me to fill and then I can work out how many bokashi bins I need.

You get two products from the bokashi bin, liquid which you syphon off with a special tap which you can use as liquid plant feed and the fermented waste which you need to dig into the compost heap to finish breaking it down before you can use it. 

 The basic kit gives you one bin and two months' supply of bran. but the actual bin is a behemoth. In the picture you can see it next to a standard issue council food waste bin. It's easily twice the size so not practical for everyone.