Rubbish Free Year Challenge

You may think its crazy, but my wife and I have challenged ourselves to live for one year without creating any household rubbish and we start officially today! 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 and therefore we challenge ourselves to keep this in no more than one official Christchurch City Council rubbish bag.

We are blogging all our relevant rubbish free adventures and compiling a database of rubbish free solutions and useful links on our website

www.rubbishfreeyear.co.nz

Please feel free to contribute your own ideas and suggestions as this will help make our year easier and will hugely help make this website more comprehensive. We would also love to hear from anyone who is already doing similar things or who has decided to commit to their own rubbish-based challenge.

We are Matthew and Waveney, we live with our dog and two chickens in Christchurch, New Zealand. Matthew works 30 hours a week, and Wave works part time hours. We have no kids. We have a car but bike a lot. We eat meat, but not every day. Within 5kms we have a bulk foods store, butcher, baker and organic store. We have a section large enough to garden and deal with our own organic waste. Although you may not call people with chickens in urban areas ‘normal’, that’s what we are calling ourselves, i.e. up until the start date of our rubbish free challenge we were still buying food in plastic, take-a-ways in Styrofoam, and toothpaste in throw away plastic tubes. We don’t know a great deal about what we are doing! We are hoping this can be an encouragement to others who, like us, would like to know and do more.