Waste Free Travel

How I found Niagra Falls when I visited on the Canadian side in 2014. This post was originally published at Inspired By Maps and has been edited for this blog. One of the first things I noticed when traveling, especially in urban areas, is that traveling results in so much ‘stuff’. Traveling often accumulates a lot of waste; single use plastics, stickers, tickets, receipts, individual use products and so on. Here we are trying to carry everything we own on our backs or in our suitcases and yet we are constantly amassing items we don’t necessarily want or need. Most of these items are used once and then tossed ‘away.’ But there is no away. Away usually means being buried in a landfill where it will last forever, contaminating the environment around it. Or it ends up in the ocean, where it will (again) last forever or eventually over hundreds […]

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2016 Rubbish Update: 6 Months of Trash

Our rubbish bin contents from January to mid June I mentioned at the beginning of the year that we (the BF & I) were now keeping track of our rubbish in a small bin we kept in our room. Looking back at that blog post, which was our December 2015 rubbish update it is really interesting for me to see how far we have come. I figured it was time I give an update on our rubbish progress for the year. I actually sorted and took photos of our trash back in mid June, so this update is for the first 6 months of the year only. There was a bit of a delay in writing this post, mainly cause I took a few holidays and then procrastinated this post while I wrote the others. My apologies! Firstly, what is NOT in the bin? Recycling and compost, or anything reused […]

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Waihaha Track Tramping Review

Last month I organised a weekend tramping (hiking for you non-kiwi’s) trip with my friends. The weekend that suited us all happened to end up being the coldest weekends of the year, there was a weather bomb and a snow dump that closed many main roads. Fortunately for us, we were still able to get away and ended up having a wonderful winter walk in Pureora Forest Park.    We walked the Waihaha track to the Waihaha hut. This was a very easy flat tramp, about 3 hours from the road end to the hut. There were river views along the way, with waterfalls and wetlands and the track was lightly dusted with ice. We could tell the track hadn’t been walked in weeks, due to spiderwebs and a few downed trees, which is a shame as it was a magical walk.            Upon reaching the […]

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The Great Citrus Rescue

Citrus season is well and truly upon us. As an advocate for reducing food waste I have made it my personal mission to ensure that no fruit from our three trees goes to waste. If you follow me on Instagram you may have seen me posting about the copious amounts of manadrins I have been trying to use. We are fortunate to rent a property with 2 large mandarin trees and a grapefruit tree. Unfortunately no-one in our house seems to eat grapefruit, and the mandarins are very fiddly to peel. Additionally, as soon as the fruit hits the ground the slugs are all over it. As such we have a fair bit of excess fruit! Despite this I am making sure I am on top of the excess citrus situation. Here’s all the ways I have attempted to rescue our citrus so far:  A day well spent; jaffa cakes, […]

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Waste Free in Wellington

You may have noticed I have been absent from my blog this last month. I decided to have a bit of down time and have spent my evenings going to yoga classes, swimming and reading. June was a busy month for me, it was my birthday, I got a nasty cold and I spent most weekends catching up with my friends, the best kind of ‘busy.’ I also took a short trip down to Wellington with the BF and our friends and have finally gotten around to sharing my time and learnings with you all.  Firstly, we chose to fly… View of the Marlborough Sounds While this is one of the least environmentally friendly options it happened to be the most practical. I weighed up other modes of transport (my ancient car, an expensive train, a long bus ride) and decided flying was the cheapest and quickest. Earlier in the […]

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Guest Post: The Wonderful World of Edible Weeds

I have mentioned a few times previously that we often pick weeds from our garden to cook with, using Julia’s Edible Weeds as a guide. As it’s suddenly winter, I found my garden inundated with more weeds than planted vegetables. My friend Robert was over a few weekends ago helping out with the cider making day when he spotted my garden. I blushed and told him not to look at it as I hadn’t had time to tend to it properly and it had gotten away from me. He told me that was no issue as he could already see half of my garden was edible, so we went down for a quick forage. Robert found plenty of oxalis (wood sorrel), and I later found more around our citrus trees, which made a nice garnish on my dinner. Robert is an experienced forager, whenever we go tramping or day hiking […]

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Make Food Not Waste (How To Use Up Leftovers)

 A couple of weeks ago I saw an interesting (German) documentary about food waste and how to cook food that would otherwise be wasted. I realised just how much food people throw away, that I would have happily cooked up still. Next week is the Love Food Hate Waste website launch and I am invited to the launch party, so I figured it was time to get this post out of draft mode! The Love Food Hate Waste website launches June 1st, you can sign up in the meantime to get lots of handy tips to reduce your food waste. Watch the trailer for Wastecooking, a great food waste documentary: Why does food waste matter? Food waste is a HUGE issue, one that extends beyond your fridge and includes supermarkets, the delivery process and even the growers find themselves with wasted food in the form of rejected produce. I’ve touched […]

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Auckland Bulk Stores

A typical Bin Inn shop At the beginning of the year I started writing a list of the bulk stores I’ve found so far, and then this post sat as a draft among many other draft blog posts… So I figured I’d finally share my bulk store finds, but on another forum. As Zero Waste Home‘s donation drive for the Bulk App was a success I have now added all of the locations there. For those of you not in the know, Zero Waste Home (Bea Johnson) created this great app where you can add & rate bulk food locations to a map. However the app needed a serious update, so there was big donation drive to update the app and also create a website. The website and app are now functional, and donations are still being accepted. Click here to go to the Bulk App I was pleasantly surprised […]

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Waste Free Cheese

Package free cheese bought from The Dairy in Ponsonby Central Upon making the switch to plastic free/ zero waste I quickly learned that cheese can be rather difficult to source without the pesky packaging. We started making our own cheese initially, soft cheese is very easy to make, however one gets sick of soft cheeses after a while and we only had the option of supermarket homogenised milk in plastic bottles. If we lived closer to a farm then we would probably continue on with the cheese making, but at the moment it’s a once in a while thing. We used to have a flatmate that worked with a cheese maker, so we would get our cheese direct and in paper or foil packaging, again it was mainly soft cheese though. Since starting this journey my partner and I have majorly reduced our cheese consumption, so cheese has become a […]

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The Latest Waste Free Adventures: WWOOFing, Eco Day & Go Green Expo

Our accommodation during our WWOOF stay Yet again I have been busy up to all sorts of sustainable adventures, so I thought I’d share a bit of a photo journal of the more interesting things I have done in the past few weekends. The weekend following WOMAD was a long weekend (Easter) so the BF and I seized the opportunity to get out of Auckland and went on our first WWOOFing experience. WWOOF is a volunteer exchange programme, it stands for Willing Workers on Organic Farms, and is often used by foreign travelers looking for a cultural experience as well as being accommodated and fed. Although we didn’t stay on a farm and we were only a few hours away we still had a really interesting experience. We stayed with a lovely family in Whangamata and helped out in their ice cream van. We had some great conversations, I helped […]

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