1 Year of Rubbish

1 year of rubbish fills about half of this bin & 6 months worth of soft plastic recycling on top. Yours truly for scale. Happy new year! Just a quick update while I am between adventures to let you know how my waste free journey is tracking along. To see my waste reduction progress please check out my previous rubbish posts:  1 month of rubbish, December 2015  6 months of rubbish January to June 2016 In 2016 I managed to keep track of all our rubbish, and still have majority of the trash I created over the year. There are a couple of things which did not make it in the bin; a small broken lightbulb, a plastic access card from the gym which the staff member threw away, medical waste created during doctors visits and packaging from a meat pack my partner was given as a gift for Christmas. […]

Community Fridge Update

Following on from the launch of my Love Food Hate Waste project last week, (original blog post here) here is a recap of the first week of the community fridge. Follow the hashtags #whatsinthefridge & #communityfridgeakl to keep up to date on social media, or contribute your snaps. Launch Day Wednesday 30th November: There was a lot of interest in the fridge before it even launched due to NZ Herald posting an article on their Facebook page in the morning. The fridge quickly started to go viral from there and I was receiving messages from the media, friends and members of the public at such a rate that my phone decided it was too much and called it quits at 10.30am (i.e. half an hour after launch). Fortunately the Griffiths Gardens site has cubby holes with phone chargers! Love Food Hate Waste had done a fantastic job and making sure […]

Love Food Hate Waste Project: The Community Fridge

You may have noticed I have been quiet on the blogging front over the past month or so. I have been quietly working on a project which is due to launch tomorrow.    In September I applied for funding from Auckland Council as part of the Love Food Hate Waste Fund. I planned on setting up NZ’s first community fridge. The concept of a solidarity fridge started in Spain, and has been adopted by other countries and cities such as Germany, Argentina, Belgium, Frome‘s community fridge, and Dubai’s sharing fridge. I chose the name ‘Community Fridge’ as the fridge would be located in a new community space, the Griffith’s Gardens, also launching at the same time. After a lot of planning, health and safety documents, friends to recruit and cafes to approach, the fridge is finally launching, on Wednesday 30th November.   I have known about the food waste issues our […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]