Rubbish

Zero waste.  If YouTube is anything to go by, the trophy of all zero-wasters (zero-wastites? zero wastrels?) is a medium sized jar, about half full, with a collection of little clothing tags and other plastic bits and bobs that they couldn't avoid accumulating and can't recycle or reuse. The "all the waste I've produced" jar, talisman of the zero waste lifestyle.

We haven't started one yet.  If we had got one when we decided to try this, it would have to be a pretty big jar by now. Maybe one of those huge bottles manufacturers used to store perfume in.

Which is not to say we haven't made good progress.  The whole "no plastic supermarket bags" thing is actually a huge leap towards reducing what we take out to the dumpster. Apart from not throwing out supermarket bags being good for the whale stomachs, it actually means we have no bags to put other rubbish in!

The first immediate effect of this was to start buying black plastic rubbish bags, which we didn't really do in a big way before. What? Now I'm paying for the plastic I'm throwing away? No, that is silly and didn't last too long.

There is still a small amount of influx of non-supermarket plastic bags, mostly packaging from other things.  We use that for rubbish bags sometimes - that's reusing right? It's no longer a single-use plastic bag.  Right??

But actually, we've been using paper and cardboard bags for daily rubbish recently - the kind of thing your hip coffee store will give you to take your freshly ground coffee home in, or that a clothing store might foist upon you so you can show their branding as visibly as possible on the way home.  Surprisingly, so far, we haven't really needed anything else.

Sure, we're still throwing out stuff, but much less of it (which I'll get to in a minute, and which is lucky because paper bags are usually smallish!) and in a not-everlasting, probably-won't-kill-whales bag.

Why is there much less rubbish? Two main things:

• we now aim for products that have recyclable or preferably re-usable packaging, or no packaging at all! And 
• we don't put most of our food waste into the rubbish.

So we buy stuff in glass or metal if we can.  I now religiously buy Quilmes beers in the retornable bottle, which means I can take the empty bottle to the supermarket, stick it in a machine which gives me a ticket that I can used for a discount on the next beer.  At least in terms of beer, this zero waste thing is cheaper.  I now spend $100ARS (that's about $10NZD!) per week on beer instead of the previous $250ARS (about $25NZD). A 60% saving ain't bad!  We also buy Dahi brand yogurt (when we don't make our own), which comes in nice little glass jars instead of crappy plastic ones that you can't get the last dregs of yogurt out of. The glass is, of course, pretty recyclable, but the jars are so nice and so handy that we generally keep them for putting other stuff in.

And actually we buy fresh produce that we* cook from scratch, instead of buying pre-prepared, pre-packaged food.

(* in the interests of full disclosure, I should clarify that "we" in this case really means "my excellent wife", who takes care of pretty much all non-breakfast food preparation, and to ensure full credit where it's due, I point out to my Anglo Saxon readers that in this country, lunch is invariably a Cooked Meal. My lame excuses involve working full time, but they should not be tolerated in the 21st century.)

So some of this has added a little traipsing around and planning to the shopping. For example the yogurt isn't available everywhere, and the retornable bottles can be scarce in some supermarkets, and in the local chino they sell them but don't bother with the whole return-with-discount thing.

To be clear, we still buy a fair amount of food in plastic packaging. Rice is impossible to buy in anything other than a sealed plastic bag.  Sugar is also difficult - there's one brand of organic sugar that comes in a cardboard box with a cleverly-designed 'beak' for easy pouring, but it's expensive, so whether we buy it or not depends on how the budget is looking that week.  My amazing wife now makes muesli, but the girls won't always eat it, so there is some buying of other breakfast cereal in plastic packaging.  Milk in Buenos Aires comes either in a recyclable plastic bag, or in a tetra-brick carton. I'm currently suspicious of the recylability of tetra-brick, so we're buying the plastic instead.

So we haven't eliminated plastic packaging, we've reduced it.  Supposedly the solution is to buy such things 'in bulk' from places where the product is in a bin, and you put it in your own container.  The problem for us is that there aren't any places like that here.  So it's rice in a plastic bag, or no rice.  The nearest thing we've found are dieteticas, health-food shops, which sell things like prunes, flour, etc. They don't have everything they need, and so far, basically refuse to let us use our own containers - they insist on weighing the food in a plastic bag. We could insist that they then put it in our own container, but they would then throw away the plastic bag themselves...

However, in general Buenos Aires is surprisingly much better at the "local-shopkeeper" phenomenon than New Zealand is.  There's lots of pretty good produce around, seldom further away than a couple of blocks from home, and once they get to know you (dieteticas notwithstanding), they humour your foibles about plastic bags, know which cheeses you always want, etc.  It's actually nicer making a few short walks to shops owned by your neighbours, dragging along to small girls each with her reusable shopping bag, than it is getting in your car and buying a whole week's worth of stuff at some plasticky mega-super-duper market.

Less packaging, right.  What about food waste?

Come to think of it, what's the problem with food waste?  It's biodegradable, right?  Totally ok to throw it away, bury it, send it to the dump.  I had thought that the more organic matter in the rubbish the better - more 'good' waste to dilute the 'bad' (plastic, harmful chemicals, etc.), and it doesn't last hundreds of years like disposable nappies.

It turns out, though, that actually organic rubbish is bad in refuse tips, because it doesn't immediately rot away.  It's buried under other waste, so there's no oxygen, and the resulting 'anaerobic' decomposition take much longer, and produces worse greenhouse gasses than carbon dioxide, and also liquids that sink down through the dump, mixing with more synthetic rubbish, producing a collection of toxic sludge that collects at the bottom.  Until it inevitably leaks out into the surrounding terrain, contaminating the the water table, etc.

So what's the answer?

Composting! Of course, easy!  Just tip it in a pile in your back yard, with the lawn clippings!

Unless you live in a city apartment, in which case it's a bit more tricky...