Friday, November 20, 2009

MyZeroWaste: One decision can reduce your waste by 10%

Read this while twittering around:

This week I had three different types of cheese in the fridge and being bored one grey afternoon I thought I’d do a little experiment by weighing their plastic packaging.

*The ‘darkest green’ pack (not the one sporting the most mould you understand) comes from Budgens. All their own label deli cheeses are wrapped in clingfilm. The total packaging weight was, well, it didn’t register on my scales, so we’ll call it 1 gm for sake of argument.

*The ‘light green’ pack was from Lidls. Wrapped in ‘traditional’ (funny what becomes traditional as times change) waxed plastic, the total packaging weight was 3 gms.

*The ‘lighter shade of pale’ was from the Co-Op. This posh ‘cracked black pepper’ cheese, comes in rigid posh packaging and weighs a hefty 10 gms.


You can see from this example how simple it is to reduce your landfill waste further even when you’re standing in the shop. Even if you’ve forgotten your reusable container for the deli, you can still do your bit for the environment by making a wise choice. By choosing the Budgens pre wrapped deli cheese over the Co-Op posh cheese, we’ve reduced cheese packaging by ten per cent. When you’re counting the grammes you put into landfill and the amount of space it takes up in your dustbin each week, it makes a difference!

Full story here


Technorati Tags: waste minimisation

3 comments:

rae-ann said...

Hi There,

I just came across your blog and resource today - you have so much fabulous information here!

Thanks for linking to our story; I hope it helps to illustrate how you can make a tiny decision with a big impact. So many people are put off about reducing their waste because they think it is going to be complicated or time consuming. We aim to show householders how easy it can be at times :)

Warm wishes
Mrs Green from myzerowaste.com

waster said...

Hi!
no problem, the more stories like this the more chances people will read it and perhaps act on it!

keep up your good work too.

Mr Z

Tyler Weaver said...

I'm glad I'm not the only one who shops like this! One correlation I find interesting is when I shop for food that is minimally packaged, or easily recycled, it more often than not from companies that get a good sustainability score from sources such as Better World Shopper. Most of my food comes from the dumpster, but when I need to go in the supermarket I'm always evaluating packaging...super important!

Keep up the good work here, looks like we have similar interests!

-Tyler

Tyler Talks Trash
http://www.weaverwastesolutions.com/blog