How to cut down on your household waste

Household waste is becoming more of an issue for homeowners across the nation. As budgets get tighter and the country becomes more conscious of limiting the amount of waste we send to landfill, many people are looking for practical ways to cut down on our weekly rubbish pile. A professional skip hire service combats the tendency of local authority waste disposal to simply add the waste to landfill rather than recycle it — and cheap skip hire are certainly budget friendly nowadays.

So, let’s change our household waste habits, get started in your day-to-day with these simple changes.

Smart buys

Many people need to tackle the habits they’ve developed on a weekly basis, making the food shop a good place to start. Some of the most common grocery store habits are serious contributors to the declining quality of our environment. While single use plastic is hard to avoid especially in supermarkets, the UK government has pledged to enforce a ban on the sale and distribution of single use items such as straws, stirrers, and cotton-buds, coming into effect between October 2019 and October 2020. An estimated 4.7 billion plastic straws are used in the UK each year, and a staggering amount is likely to end up in our rivers and oceans. By omitting these products and finding alternatives that are now widely available — such as metal straws and stirrers, helping people to stop relying on single use versions.

Another idea is to make sure that you are buying products that will last longer, to simply reduce the frequency of purchasing them. Products such as diluting juice and washing up detergents are sold in double concentrate form, meaning that you will get more uses out of them than the ordinary, single concentrate alternatives. Bulk buying essentials is also a helpful way to cut down on single use plastic, as similarly these products need replacing less often. Something as simple as making a shopping list can also prove invaluable if you are committed to reducing your household waste, rather than taking straight to the aisles, check your cupboards before you go and decide what it is that you need. Buying surplus will simply lead to more waste, so a list provides a reminder to yourself of the things that you need — try to view anything else as impulse buys and try to limit how many of these purchases you make.

Meal plans

Meal plans aren’t only for the uber health conscious amongst us! In a similar way to making a shopping list, a meal plan helps you to buy enough food to get you through the week. Many of us are susceptible to doing one or two small shops as the week goes on, but this amounts to a greater consumption of plastic products. By thinking ahead, you can ensure that you are only buying what is necessary. Often, lunchtime can mean a trip to the nearest café or fast food outlet where Styrofoam is rife — a widely used food container that is not yet recycled on a widespread scale. With the takeaway industry set to grow to a value of £80 billion by 2020, a new approach is needed to scale back on this rate. A meal plan can remove that midweek visit to the café downstairs from the equation, and it is also a more budget friendly approach. Make your lunches for the week on a Sunday night and enjoy less waste, as well as skipping that early morning panic of ‘what am I going to buy for lunch today?’.

The 2 important R’s

Reuse and recycle. This is perhaps one of the most important actions that we can do in helping the reduction of household waste. Throwaway culture has become all too common in the UK, and it applies to everything from kitchen waste to clothing. Reusing materials across your entire household is a proactive step towards reducing the amount of waste you produce, whether it’s by keeping food containers or upcycling clothes that you would’ve otherwise thrown in the bin. By doing so, less products will go to landfill sites, and you will also find yourself buying replacements far less often. Repurposing used items is an increasingly popular trend, why not have your children get crafty with some empty cereal boxes and cartons? In fact, with a bit of creativity, reusing plastic and other products can create entirely new items, so it’s worth giving it a go. In 2017, the UK achieved a recycling rate of 45.7 per cent, help to improve this figure by making some small changes to your normal waste routine.