'We Slimmed Our Bins'

The WW team took on our latest Waste Not Want Not challenge – and here are the results

- Natasha Wynarczyk

We’ve been running our Waste Not Want Not campaign for over a year now, so we felt it was time once again for members of the Woman’s Weekly team to try a challenge of their own.

Three weeks ago we featured the story of ‘rubbish mentor’ Karen Cannard, who managed to reduce the amount she threw away to only a single plaster. We were so inspired by her that we invited her to WW HQ, where she advised us on how to ‘put our bins on a diet’. We spent a week ‘slimming our bins’, learning more about recycling and composting and changing our own mindsets when it came to waste.

Here’s how we got on.

Craft & Home Editor Esme says:

‘While I love the idea of recycling, washing empty containers seems like such a faff that it inevitably ends up in the waste bin. Although with my crafty job I always mend old clothes, everything else is binned, so I need to break my bad habits. Like Karen suggested, I started with a bin audit (see top right), then I visited my local council website to find out what I could recycle at home. It turns out they take almost everything, and, what’s more, it all goes in one blue top bin, so there’s no need to separate the waste.

But what about my food waste? Unfortunately, we don’t have a food and garden waste service, so I had to cut it off at the source. First stop was the supermarket with a meal plan for the week and a very specific list of what I needed. That brought it down dramatically.

We have two caddies in our bin, so I labelled one as mine and one as my boyfriend’s. A bit of healthy competition goes a long way! Every time I was about to throw something away, I’d compare our bin levels and then think about how I might reuse or recycle the item. From now on, I will absolutely continue to recycle, and question everything I’m about to throw away.’