Day 4 & 5

Sorry bloggers for a lack of blog on day 4 and 5...a combination of sleep deprivation, extreme exhaustion and a stomach upset didn't help!!

Back in the land of the living now!!

BBC Radio Cornwall came yesterday morning for another look, I think they were quite surprised. We reckon that we've reduced from 10kg last week down to 1kg or less as t stands...

As the Mrs Average points out, to really make Zero Waste Week work, you need to have prepared a bit longer than 1 week in advance...one of the things we've found is that many of the good things we are doing this week, wont make a difference until after Zero Waste Week...we're still finishing off things that were bought before Zero Waste Week when we weren't necessarily being as careful as we should have! Oh well, its a learning curve.

One thing we need to get to grips with is buying in bulk to reduce packaging. In particular, where can we get flour in bulk? cereal loose? and things like that.

This weekend will be interesting, you always produce more when all the family is home consuming!

Finally, the real hit this week has been our conquering of night time nappies, whilst we've had the odd blip, we have managed to use them every night and its made a real difference...the home made wet wipes has also been easier than we thought....really pleased with that.

We're off!!

What a start to the day...BBC Spotlight were with us for 2 hours filming what's going on...they loooked at a range of things from our Green Joanna, to our wormery and the wahable wet wipes we've made at home! The boys were filmed lugging all their recycling up the drive and it finished off with a visit to the local butcher who has said that if our meat keeps well enough in the fridge in paper bags, that they'll consider offering it to all customers. This is what Zero Waste is all about, community spirit...we'll try and get some Green Joanna leaflets for the butcher so it goes hand in hand with the paper bags.

Watch out for BBC spotlight at 1.30pm today and 6-6.30pm this evening...you can watch online or on freeview from anywhere in the country! http://www.bbc.co.uk/cornwall/

Oh, and do have a look at the County Council website, their supporting Zero Waste Week in a big way through their campaign, Recycle for Cornwall. See: http://www.recycleforcornwall.org.uk/

Tesco's arrives...

The man from Tesco came...he was intrigued and a bit baffled when I asked him to take his plastic bags back to the depot...bit I was relieved to hear that they do get bulked up and go back on a lorry for recycling....just a shame they used it to wrap the dishwasher salt that was already wrapped in plastic that we cannot recycle!!

Apart from that, most things were either recyclable or compostable...apart from the notorious tetra pack smoothies and orange juice....plus some organic courgettes from Spain (food miles, now there's another debate, see: http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/food_matters/foodmiles.shtml#what_are_food_miles) wrapped in plastic film on a polystyrene tray! That's something to improve on next week.

So with our big shop for the week out of the way, we are set up to monitor normal Rolls activity prior to Zero Waste Week....already we can see ways to minimise our impact and we've still got 7 days to go!

10 minutes later:

Hold the post!! Hats off to Tesco, my wife has just realised the courgette packaging is in fact compostable...yes, the whole lot, including plastic film, which is presumably starch based and not an oil based plastic, I fancy this is because its the organic range, maybe some peer pressure on Tesco will make them do it to all vegetable packaging?? why not write to their Greener Living Editor and ask them: editor.greenerliving@ehsbrann.com ...so all in all, hurrah...although it will be interesting to see the compost it creates in 9 months time!