Good health an added benefit for rubbish-free couple

A couple who spent a year living virtually rubbish-free found an added benefit to their new lifestyle -  better health.

Matthew Luxon and Waveney Warth challenged themselves with producing no more than one bag’s worth of rubbish from February 2008 to 2009 and kept a record of their experiences in a blog.

Their new way of life dictated some changes in diet - such as cooking from scratch and avoiding processed food - which Luxon says may have also improved their health.

“Neither of us got sick last year, but we generally get colds especially down in Christchurch,” he says.

The couple avoided their local supermarket and opted for buying in bulk at butchers, fruit and vegetable shops and general foods store Bin Inn.

Luxon says reducing waste is about looking at the bigger picture.

“There are great reasons to reduce waste. All the stuff we throw out has to be produced.”

He says for every bag of rubbish we throw out, another 70 bags were created during production of the items in that load.

“It doesn’t seem like good guardianship of resources.”

According to Luxon, packaging is the biggest issue when it comes to rubbish. The couple found electronics to be the worst offenders, although this varied between brands, and food packaging also posed a constant struggle.

The hardest part, he says, was trying to break lifelong habits.

“We were used to running out to the 24-hour supermarket or having friends over for a barbecue, but we couldn’t just do that anymore.

“It took a while to get used to but we got the hang of it quite fast.”

Now that their rubbish-free year is over, maintaining their habits is “a piece of cake” and they still haven’t put out a full bag of rubbish yet.

Luxon says the couple don’t have a bin inside, but they might fall back into old habits if they did.

“It’s right down the end of the section - you have to think twice about throwing anything away.”

He says the key is anticipating waste, and thinking about the end results before buying anything.

His best tip for people wanting to cut down their waste is to compost, compost, compost.

He says even apartment dwellers can do their part by using a Bokashi compact composting system, which processes organic waste in just one month and can even be kept inside as it has little odour.

“Most of what goes into landfills is compostable,” Luxon says.

Most of us know how to compost our food scraps, but Luxon and Warth went one step further and composted items like cotton, hair and nail clippings.

Luxon says anything can be composted as long as it was once part of a living organism.