For some time I have been admiring this minimalist home – it’s sleek, completely uncluttered and uncomplicated. It just looks relaxing. Relaxed people must live in it. And of course it has become my dream to live in such a house. Until I tried it. Let me tell you about our zero waste journey.

Bea Johnson is an environment activist, first tackling her own domestic waste, and then inspiring domestic waste reduction around the world. It started with her own journey, then a blog and ultimately a book, which I purchased a few months ago.

The key principles are this:

• Refuse what you do not need
• Reduce what you do need
• Reuse what you do use
• Recycle what you cannot reuse
• Rot what you do use

The Johnson family produce a small jar of rubbish that goes to landfill every year. It’s astonishing, isn’t it. A family of four living in the US. THEY DON’T HAVE A BIN. Digest that for a bit.

The crazy thing is that I thought we were doing awfully well as our family of seven to have two recycling bins and a small bin that goes to landfill. Every week. Every week, our family produces such a considerable amount of waste that goes to landfill and masses of recycling.

And I thought we were doing so well, because our recycling bins were double the size of our landfill bin, until I saw this other YouTube clip produced by a really fun and smart environmental scientist that tells me how much oil and carbon that my recycling produces. Sigh. Recycling has become good, but not quite good enough.

So, about eight weeks ago, I embarked on getting our house to a zero waste stage. What I learned I this journey, is that it is actually incredibly admirable to aspire to a zero waste lifestyle….. and the journey to get there can be quite stressful. Over the next few posts I will write about our experience, and how (spoiler alert) we have opted to strive for a low waste household, rather than a zero waste one. I’m quite happy with this realistic compromise.

One thing I found about Bea’s incredible bible on how to get to a Zero Waste home, is that it skips over the getting to zero part quite quickly. I thought I would share with you how we got to our alternative proposition.

And because it is that time of the year, I hope you all have a wonderful break and spend quality, slow time with your loved ones. Take care and see you in 2016.