Creating a world without waste

Karen Cannard's inspiring a green revolution

Karen Cannard, a writer based in Bury St Edmunds, has turned her life and bin upside down for a zero waste challenge.

Her blog, The Rubbish Diet, began by following Karen's personal progress in a mission to reduce household waste.

"It started because I was turning 40 last year and I had all of these new year's resolutions," said Karen, who is a professional writer.

"I never usually make resolutions, but I felt as I was turning 40 I needed to do a bit of catching up."

Karen's inspiration was ignited by St Edmundsbury Borough Council's 2008 Zero Waste Week.

She decided to re-address the amount of waste she and her family produced, and work towards slimming her 50 litre bin.

"One of my resolutions was to reduce waste because we had so much that we threw away even though we recycled quite a lot.

"I knew we had to do something to cut down on these three great big bags of rubbish that we were throwing away every two weeks, so I found out about St Edmundsbury's Zero Waste Week and set up a blog."

Karen had already been writing a column called 21st Century Mummy in the Suffolk based blog, the Moreton Hall Directory, and her January column listed all of her 20 new resolutions.

Karen says everyday people can make a difference

"That was really what prompted interest from a friend who said 'take on the challenge and see where you go'.

"The blog started off as a diary charting the challenges we had as a family.

"We had the challenge of not throwing away food waste and I would diarise the challenges and people would come up with ideas.

"The more people that got to hear about it the more ideas began to come in and we found that the best way to tackle our waste was to look at our bin, make a list of the things that we throw away and gradually knock them off the list."

Knowledge from Beansprouts

Karen felt that every diet needed a toolkit and developed a waste sorting system for her kitchen which included a main bin and three others - one for glass and a large one for recyclable materials.

Through the use of her blog Karen began to seek advice on how to address her household waste and was grateful for any tips.

"The first thing I did involved being contacted by another blogger called Beansprouts who is very green and very knowledgeable, and I offered to post some tips from Beansprouts on my blog.

"That was a really good step because she actually sent through some great tips that I had never heard of before, even controversial things like re-useable sanitary towels which you can wash.

Will reusable sanitary towels catch on?

"When you think about the amount of sanitary products that go to landfill each year that was quite a major step for me and it took me quite a while to overcome my feelings about using such products but now I would never go back."

Environmental forum Big Green Issues estimates that the average woman uses around 17,000 items of disposable sanitary protection in her lifetime, creating thousands of tons of waste going to landfill or into the sewerage system.

Karen doesn't consider herself to be an activist and she is the first person to admit that some of the changes made during the course of her initial challenge were difficult.

"As I've been writing I've actually woken up and realised where people that you would traditionally think of as being green have almost been custodians of the planet so far but there is a big role for everyday people who can make small changes.

"Starting with the bin, I found, is a really good way of moving into the environmentally friendly camp."

In 2007 the government's waste body WRAP (Waste & Resources Action Programme), reported that homes across Britain are wasting a total of 3.3m tonnes of food a year.

The problems surrounding the disposal of household waste affect many of us, and Karen and her fellow bloggers were no exception.

"The challenge did give me a real opportunity to rethink the responsibility for things that we do throw away and take it to as many levels as we could.

"Food waste used to make up around 50% of our waste and I was so guilty because I never used to see any value in food.

"I would walk around the supermarket and buy things like pineapples and melons and yes they'd be great at the time and then something else would come up and gradually I would see those pieces of fruit decay and rot and then end up in the compost bin.

"It woke me up to how much we were wasting as a family and that was the hardest part to tackle."

In April 2009, just over a year after the launch, the blog has a band of regular visitors contributing to Karen's continued quest to be greener.

Karen has featured on several radio stations, including Radio 4's Woman's Hour show

The success has given Karen a new perspective on a range of green issues and introduced her to a number of ideas from all over the world.

"The beauty of the blog and the way it's being charted is that I've kept a record that shows every step of the challenge that I went through initially and when I look at the stats it's really quite lovely to see people looking through those links."

Karen hopes to build on the success of her first year on the rubbish diet and inspire others to not only become more green, but to try out blogging as a possible source of ideas.

"I do have a book which is 80% written so I just need to spend another couple of months working on that and then I'll be looking to publishers.

"The site isn't accessible to everybody and people do spend time in the bookstores, so wouldn't it be great if someone is looking to reduce their rubbish and looks at it and says I could do that too?"