There is only 5 days left until our November "Supermarket free" challenge is over. Am I going to go back to mindlessly shopping at the supermarket once it is over? Certainly not! Now that I have seen how easy it is to avoid the hectic, spend-more, consume-more, waste-more, want-more supermarket I am going to keep on keeping away from it.
I have found it so helpful to have this challenge that I have decided to set myself another one for December. I have a few ideas in mind but I can say pretty certainly that I am not ready to take on the challenge that Matthew and Waveney of Christchurch NZ set for themselves:
"The challenge is for our household to create no rubbish for the landfill from 1st February 2008 to 1st February 2009. However it is very likely that, despite our best efforts, some rubbish will be unavoidable. We challenge ourselves to keep this in no more than one official council rubbish bag."
Wow, now that is a MUCH bigger challenge! You can check it out including Waveney's blog at
http://www.rubbishfreeyear.co.nz/index.php
On the home page Waveney writes:
"The thing that I find fascinating is how people like Matthew and myself could be both informed and concerned yet do relatively little. Why did we prefer guilt to radical behaviour changes?"
I can identify with her question and know that David and I have in too many ways accustomed ourselves to the guilt rather than making the radical behaviour changes that we know are needed to live ethically and sustainably.
Although I don't feel ready to set a similar challenge for myself I have been making a big effort to reduce our landfill rubbish this month with some success. Shopping at Bin Inn has made it pretty simple (although just a little more time consuming) because taking in my own containers to fill means no packaging. But there is much more that I could be doing/changing. So why don't I?
2 comments:
An interesting challenge! It must be quite helpful to have a shop nearby that allows you to use your own packaging, buying ingredients from bulk bins. I haven't seen that anywhere here in Ireland, and only occasionally in Perth.
We look forward to heading back home to Australia as we will be able to compost once again. We find that if you don't eat meat, and put all your vegie scraps into the compost, the kitchen bin fills up very slowly. It also doesn't tend to smell as all the stuff that rots and stinks is out in the compost bin.
We have noticed a huge reduction in out rubbish in the last month between the composting (which I am ashamed to say is the first time we have composted) and not buying things in packets.
So nice that the kitchen bin rarely needs emptying. Particularly as we were in the bad habit of just trying to stuff more in rather than empty it, until the bin was practically overflowing :)
Post a Comment