Engaging your community and a simple place to start

The #zerowaste movement relies heavily on community.  We have been inspired by so many different people who are a lot further into the journey than we are.  We’ve never felt guilted into change or overwhelmed, but rather inspired and motivated to just start!

Since starting this little blog, I’ve already had so many amazing conversations with people who are interested in what we are doing and have already been inspired to make little changes around their home.  I’ve had friends and family tell me about switching to reusable produce bags, switching to soap nuts, eating less meat, buying KeepCups, consider cloth nappies for their babies, start a compost heap, start a vegie patch and just start thinking more about what they use and how they use it.  This has been so encouraging for me!

Whilst we understand that recycling is not the solution to our waste problems, it’s definitely an easy way to start and encourages people to make simple changes that have a massive impact on our landfill.  This week I’ve been thinking of ways I can engage my community in change and stumbled across the Free Terracycle Recycling Programs.  These programs allow you to recycle items that would often be discarded into the landfill like tooth brushes, toothpaste, beauty items, postage bags and coffee pods.  Terracycle then reuse, up-cycle, recycle and compost these products – you can read more about this here.   In addition to this, through many of the free programs you can also earn rewards points which convert into dollars for your chosen charity!

A large part of my community, is my local church and Tom and I have decided to set up collection boxes at our church so our community can bring in their products and together we can raise money for our chosen charity, Compassion Australia who release children from poverty through child sponsorship and many other amazing programs.  Tom and I sponsor three little kiddos who have been a part of our family long before we ever thought of having our own!  Together our church sponsors 107 little ones in Thailand – we’re so grateful to be part of such a generous community!

So for us, this is a win win idea.  We get to encourage people in their journey to reduce waste and we get to give back to a charity who does so much to improve the lives of families living in poverty.  So far I have signed up to recycle beauty products, oral health items and mailing satchels and I’m on the waitlist for the coffee pods program.  Tom and I really want this journey to be about valuing people and the environment and I think this is a cool little place to start!

At church, we also run a coffee cart called Arana Coffee.  Recently we have made the switch to encouraging people to use mugs and glasses or bring their KeepCups rather than using take-a-way cups and we have been so encouraged by the response (plus it’s fun to see everyone’s personalities displayed in their cups)!  We use ethical beans sourced by a local roaster and we have been giving away our coffee grounds at the end of the day in compostable paper bags so people can compost them at home.

People lining up their bags for coffee grounds

Coffee grounds have a multitude of uses!

If you live around the Arana Hills area and want to collect items to add to our boxes, please let me know!  And you’re always more than welcome to join us for a coffee on the deck on a Sunday morning – you might see me and my giant bump squished behind the machine!

#wasteswap 4. Paper Seedling Pots

It’s time to plant our seedlings for this season’s vegie patch!

We’ve never planted from seed before but we’re excited to give it ago.  Have a read of my previous post to find out where we purchased our seeds from this year.

To reduce my need for plastic pots this year, we’ve decided to swap out buying  seedling containers for making our own paper pots!  They great thing about making paper pots with newspaper is that the are fully compostable, so once the seed is strong enough to plant into the vegie patch, we can just plant the whole pot and it will compost into the soil as the plant grows.  Making paper pots also makes the most of the Courier Mail (which I’ve been collecting at the end of the day from the work staff-room).  I think it’s the best use I’ve come across really 😉 We also have a few left over plastic pots from last season in good nick which we will re-use.

We purchased our little pot maker from Biome (you’re probably sick of me mentioning this store – I should buy shares in it…).  I love it!  It’s beautiful crafted and will last us decades of vegie growing!  It’s made from sustainable beech wood and comes in recycled packaging.  It only took me about an hour to make all of the pots we needed for our seedlings this year.  It was actually very therapeutic.

To make the pots, I cut a newspaper page in half vertically.

I made them sitting on the couch watching the football…

I then folded over the top edge to about half way (strengthens the pot and gives you a nice folded edge around the rim of the pot).

Roll the newspaper around the top half of the tool – not too tightly otherwise it won’t slide off.

You then squish the newspaper ends together, place the tool in the base and twist to seal the newspaper.

Slide the pot off the tool and you’re done!

Add seedling mix, seeds and mist with water (the paper will hold it’s shape despite the water misting).  Aren’t they cute!  This is a super sustainable option for us for years to come!

This was Alfie’s contribution…

 

 

Super helpful.

Keeping Tom caffeinated (whilst valuing farmers and the Earth)

The business of caffeine in our household is very serious business indeed.  We spend quality time making coffees together and drinking them together and it’s become part of our family’s tradition.  We also love being able to bless visitors with a good cup of coffee when they arrive in our home.

Tom is a total coffee snob and I’m not too far behind him.  Thankfully a love language we both share is coffee – Tom loves making them for me and I feel loved when he makes them for me.  In the mornings, Tom usually rolls out of bed early to let the dogs out before they wake the neighbourhood.  On the way past the kitchen, he hits the coffee machine power button on and I hear one of my favourite sounds for the day – the rumble of the coffee machine warming up.  Knowing some awake juice is coming my way is a great incentive to wake up – although sometimes Tom has to stick it right under my nose…

Side note: I’m under no illusion that this kind of wake up will ever happen again once the baby is here…so I’m going to enjoy it while I can! And for the concerned midwives reading at home – no I do not exceed the recommended daily intake of caffeine for pregnant women 😉

For a daily ritual such as this, we think it’s important to think about whether we are valuing people and the environment by doing this?  Here’s a few tips to make your daily coffee an even more positive experience!

1. Make coffees at home.  This forms the basis of all the other tips really.  Making coffees at home saves waste but it also saves money – plus you don’t have to risk getting the dodgy barista at the work café! We make approximately 14 coffees a week at #thelittlegreycottage.  We purchased a Breville Infuser and a Smart Grinder Pro 3 years ago in an end of financial year sale.  I can’t remember what we bought it for, but they currently retail for about $900 together. $900.00 / 156 weeks = $5.77 a week or $0.41 per coffee to enjoy a reasonable quality home espresso machine and grinder.  This cost will obviously decrease the longer we have the machine.
2. Buy fair-trade coffee beans. Our favourite local roaster has just shut down so we have been looking for an alternative place to purchase our weekly coffee beans.  We buy weekly as ‘fresh’ beans are best – that is 4-7 days post-roasting and they are really at there peak for only a week or two after that).  We have just started looking into a coffee subscription with Toby’s Estate where we can purchase their Fair Trade and Organic beans for $13 a week including delivery to our home.  Ethical beans are important to us, because people are important to us. A Fair Trade certification guarantees that farmers receive fair prices and that working and living conditions are safe for employees (plus many other benefits for the whole community). World Vision Australia have a list of Fair Trade coffee brands here and Fair Trade Australia have a list here.

 $13.00 / 14 coffees = $0.92 per coffee to enjoy ‘happy’ coffee beans from valued farmers.

3. Buy local milk. We are hardcore Maleny Dairies fans and only drink the fattiest, tastiest milk you can buy (sorry Mum!).  We value the incredible work of local farmers and we want to make sure they get the right price for their amazing product.  We purchase 2L of Farmers Choice direct from the family business at our local farmers’ market every week (and often some delicious yoghurt too!). You have to give this milk a good shake up before use to disperse the golden cream throughout. We then recycle the milk bottle and cap after rinsing them out.

Approx $5.00 / 14 coffees = $0.36 per coffee to enjoy premium milk and support a local family business (low food miles too!).

4. Use reusable cups. Usually we drink our coffees at home so just use ceramic or glass cups, however we also have 8 oz glass Keep Cups for when we drink out (in our opinion the glass ones make the coffee taste so much better!).  I dropped mine on the driveway the other day and it smashed into a billion pieces (and irritatingly you cannot recycle broken glass in Brisbane City Council – although this is probably for safety reasons).  Then I ‘stupidly’ recycled the lid, only to find out a few days ago you can buy replacement parts!  So now I’m in the market for a whole new one. I still need to get much better at remembering to actually take my Keep Cup places! I blame pregnancy…

5. Compost your grounds. Now that our compost bin is up and going for the second time (read about the fate of our first one here), we dump our used coffee grounds in our compost heap at the end of each week.  Used coffee grounds add nitrogen to your compost, improve drainage, attract worms and stops them from ending up in landfill where they would take a lot longer to breakdown. Following these 5 steps means that we not only prioritise people and the Earth in our daily habits, but we also save money.

Each coffee costs approx. $1.70, saving us approximately $2.30 a coffee, $32.20 a week and $1674.00 a year!!

And here’s a freebie…

6. Drink mindfully and spend time with your loved ones. The simple act of sharing a coffee with someone can be a truly meaningful experience for both parties.  Don’t underestimate the power of a simple hot drink and a listening ear.

Tom pouring this morning

Alfie likes to ‘help’ Tom make coffee…

Our set up featuring another cute print from @paperhands_

5 things you can do to kick start your own war on waste

Whilst we’ve have always been quite conscious about the amount of waste our household produces, it hasn’t been until recently that we’ve started to make a dedicated effort to reduce our waste at home.  We’ve been greatly inspired by our gorgeous cousin Sarah, who has been on this journey with her husband for quite some time and are getting very close to living in a zero waste household.  The impending birth of our first child has pushed us in the right direction as we desire to create a home and life for him that is nutritious, chemical free, positive, values people and protects the Earth for him to enjoy in the years to come.

We are just beginning this journey and know we have a long way to go!  But we can’t all start at the end (although my personality greatly wishes we could!) and I have to keep reminding myself that little things add up and sustainable change takes time.

Here are 5 easy things that we’ve been able to quickly change over the last six months to drastically reduce our household waste.

1. Buy reusable shopping bags.  This one is cheap and easy! The hardest part for me is remembering to pack the bags back in the car before I go to the shops/market! We prefer our heavy duty calico totes that our local farmers’ market sells as they are a lot better quality than those you can buy at the supermarket – but the supermarket ones are convenient at the checkout! Build up your supply over the next few months and soon you won’t be needing plastic bags again. We also have smaller calico draw string bags I picked up at a health food store one day that we use to package up smaller fruit and veg like cherry tomatoes, garlic, ginger, chilli etc.
2. Ditch the supermarket! We started this about a year ago – mostly out of my complete hatred for shopping and shopping centres.  I’m extremely short and can never reach anything off the shelves and can’t reach into the bottom of the trolley! Plus everyone is always in a rush and I was spending so much money on food covered in unnecessary packaging!  We exclusively shop at our local farmers’ market now for all of our fruit, veg, seafood, spices and dairy. We have a local bulk butcher for our meat down the road.  About once a month I’ll send Tom to a supermarket to stock up on canned goods or I’ll do an online order (however they package everything in plastic bags so I’m not going to do this anymore). Ditching the supermarket means you are forced to buy food that doesn’t come in plastic packaging! It makes the war on waste so much easier! Plus it makes for a lovely Saturday morning! We are friends with all of the producers who supply our food, we love walking around in the sun and we have found veggies and fruit are definitely much cheaper and better quality that what you can find at the supermarket.  If we’re in a hurry we can smash out our shop in 20 minutes or we can do it leisurely and enjoy breakfast together with the dogs (as pictured above!).
3. Know what you can recycle. Whilst recycling is not the answer to our extreme waste problems, it certainly is better than throwing things straight into landfill.  I didn’t realise that I was so uneducated about what can be recycled! I’ve found this guide really useful if you live in Brisbane City Council and they also have an iPhone app you can refer to if you’re not sure.  Basically ask yourself what the item is made of? If the answer is paper, cardboard, hard plastic, metal (aluminium and steel) or glass it’s more than likely recyclable.  Soft plastics (anything you can scrunch in your hand) can be collected and disposed of in a RedCycle bin. Ours is at our local supermarket so we can drop soft plastics there when we do our monthly canned good stock up.  We are working towards reducing all plastics in our home though so hopefully we won’t have to do this for too long (but that’s for another post!).
4. Start a compost bin. We had an awesome worm farm/compost heap going…until a contractor up-ended it whilst building our perimter fence.  I was probably more upset about that than I should have been…but it had been months of collecting fruit and vege scraps! Our current one is a bit lacklustre so we’re trying to amp that one up before we need to turn our veggie patches for the Spring crop.  I was looking at‘urban compost systems’ today – has anyone used them before?  My Mum and Dad have one and get great ‘compost juice’ out of it! Any recommendations?
5. Grow your own food. This one can be a little tricky if you live in an apartment but we managed to grow herbs and a few little shrubs on our tiny verandah before buying our house.  We even grew a blueberry tree! Which fruited just before it (and our cars) got completely trashed by a Brisbane hail storm…  I’ll post more about our veggie patches another day, but currently we have 3 raised beds we purchased from Bunnings. Raised beds allow us to bring in far better quality soil than we could ever have got out of our clay block of land.  Last season we were almost able to live off the veggies we grew and we required minimal top-ups from the markets, but this season has been a shocker.  We’re eagerly looking forward to our Spring crop which will be planted shortly.

Although these are only simple ideas, we’ve found these 5 things to be key in quickly reducing our household waste.  I also love that whilst we are reducing waste, we are so much healthier because we are eating, fresh seasonal food without using multiple artificial food additives and flavourings!

What would you add to the list?

Katie