Food Rubbish

In our area the council provide starch based bags for our food waste to go into, ready to be put out on recycling days. We had a big roll of them when I moved into the house in September and we are just getting to the end of it now. 

Each week the bag looks pretty small and, unless we've used lots of veg up, I'm quite surprised how little food we throw away. But thinking about all of the bags added up, that's quite a lot of waste that's been composted rather than sent to landfill. If I estimate that each week we thrown away a kilogram of food waste then that's almost 40kg's we've taken out of the rubbish pile. 

It's amazing how it all adds up. I couldn't estimate our recycling in weight but both big boxes are normally full every fortnight when we put them out. In contract we probably only fill one bin bag every fortnight, maybe every week if we're cooking lots. 

But really we should be trying to reduce all our waste, not just change from throwing away to recycling and composting. Now that most of us are recycling as a habit, the nest step is to avoid packaging and waste as a habit too. But it is hard. I'm not sure where you can buy meat without plastic packaging, and you have to try hard to avoid plastic on most other foods too. 

But that's the aim for the future. To keep recycling more and composting more (at least if we compost more, more nutrients can go back into the soil) and wherever possible not use any packaging at all. Just think how little waste was created during WWII, and people were probably healthier and fitter than they are now then too. Definitely food for thought.