The Weight of our Waste and a Cute Way to Reuse It

In England, Premier Waste Management employee Tony Hitchens was concerned — surrounded by waste every day, it was only a matter of time before thoughts would turn to how much of it might he his own. So he did what anyone with a bit of logic and ingenuity might do: he armed himself with some trash bags and a bathroom scale, and got down to the business of finding out.

Defra (the department for environment, farming and rural affairs) figures that every person throws about 511kg of waste per year. Of this 511kg we throw away 375kg and recycle 135kg. So, assuming I live to the national average of 76 years (from the Office of National Statistics) I will have thrown away about 29 tonnes and recycled about 10 tonnes.

But is this right? How much am I actually throwing away per week. I try to shop as sensibly as possible, avoiding packaging where I can, I’ve been (mostly) plastic carrier bag free for about a year and I try to recycle as much as I can. But, the only way to find out for sure was to start weighing my waste and my recycling.

Armed with the bathroom scales and making sure that no one emptied the bin except me I decided to investigate. I started to weigh the bin bags coming out of our kitchen bin, into which all the smaller bins in the house are eventually poured. This represents the material we as a family are putting into our black bin – and that will eventually end up in landfill.

The outcome of his research may surprise you. It certainly seems to have surprised him, despite the odds and for all of his frugal living:

It turned out that my average bin bag from the kitchen bin weighed 1.8kg. We end up with two to four bin bags per week. So lets go with the worst case scenario - four bin bags per week means the family was generating 7.2kg of waste per week. […]Then I realised I had not included garden waste. A quick bit of gardening later I estimate we generate 43kg of garden waste per year from our small plot. That makes my total waste arisings about 457kg per year.

That, my friends, is a lot of trash. Hitchens promises a follow-up next week, regarding how much of his waste ends up being recycled, and I look forward to reading it.

In the meantime, just across the pond, a Brooklyn girl is seeing fit to recycle — “upcycle,” if you will, to use her terminology — some of her more nonbiodegradable goods into something chic and usable, and the outcome is actually highly cute if I do say so myself.

Recycled newspaper bags get a new life on your eco-happy wrist…keeping waste out of the landfill and your outfit coordinated.

By using many newspaper delivery bags, she manages to come up with some unexpected color combinations and I’ve got to say I dig them quite a bit. Definitely a great way to keep some plastic in one’s jewelry box and out of the landfills. Keep up the good work!

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 at 10:49 am and is filed under Blog Bites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.