I filled just one bag of rubbish in a whole year
IF you gave the dustmen a hefty tip this Christmas because you feel guilty about the amount of rubbish you put out, you might want to take a leaf out of John Newson’s book. Yesterday he celebrated achieving his goal of producing only one bag of refuse in an entire year.
Mr Newson has picked through his leftovers every day since last New Year’s Day, putting all his uneaten food on a compost heap in his garden.
He does not eat meat or fish, and he grows his own salad and fruit to cut down on supermarket packaging.
The 60-year- old also separates out his cardboard, paper, plastic bottles, glass and cans for weekly kerbside collections by the council – and because those items can then be recycled, they don’t count towards his annual rubbish tally. He even travels from his home in Balsall Heath, Birmingham, to Bristol and London to recycle margarine tubs and Tetra Pak juice cartons because he believes those cities have better recycling facilities.
The single bin bag he has been left with after 365 days of living as possibly the greenest householder in Britain is full of plastic film packaging which he cannot recycle and has been unable to find a use for in his home.
Mr Newson, who works as a selfemployed environmental researcher, said yesterday: ‘People ask, “Why on earth are you doing this?”
‘I just wondered, if you compost absolutely everything that will rot and recycle everything you can, what will you be left with?
‘I wanted to push myself to an extreme to see how far I could go. If you had six children and lots of disposable nappies it would be different.
‘But I’m not doing this to score points off any other household in Birmingham, I’m just asking what could we feasibly get our recycling
‘Collected and burned’
rate up to. I’d say that 80 to 90 per cent of all waste can be composted or recycled. At the moment in Britain it’s about 30 per cent.
‘There are 52 weeks in the year and 400,000 households across Birmingham, so that’s 20million plastic bin bags that are being produced, distributed, collected and burned each year.’
He added: ‘Recycling some things is not that easy in Birmingham. I’ve taken some things, like drink cartons, to the recycling centre but there’s a difference between what’s possible and what’s convenient.’
Birmingham’s recycling rate of 31.5 per cent puts it in the bottom quarter of councils nationwide in terms of recycling and waste management. Bristol is one of the leading cities in the country, with a rate of around 50 per cent between April and June this year.
According to figures released by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, nearly 23million tons of household waste was generated over 2011/12.