I heard the term zero waste for the first time few years ago while watching a Youtube video. A family living what I now know is an extreme (and quite literal) zero waste lifestyle was showcasing how they had accumulated only a small jar of waste in over 3 years. I don’t know who branded this lifestyle “zero waste” but I feel it was a silly choice. The term itself makes it sound completely unfeasible. The name and that video years ago made me mark the whole idea as an extreme choice that would never fit me and our family.

Turns out, zero waste is not about eliminating trash from our lives, but about striving to reduce the waste we produce. Is this even a problem we should look at? Let’s look at the numbers in Finland.

Waste in Finland

I started worrying about my household trash a couple of years back. Our plastic bin fills very quickly and it is not straightforward to find (easy) ways to avoid plastic packaging. We cook most of our food from scratch, yet most fruit and vegetable come wrapped in plastic. My personal impressions were confirmed by my research.

Waste in Finland: every household in Finland generates 565 kg of trash per person annually (2019). This figure is slightly over the European average and it has been increasing in recent years.

Food waste: in Finland, households waste around 25kg of food per person a year. This amounts to 100kg of food waste every year in a family of four. While food is wasted at all stages of the production chain, households contribute the biggest amount.

Plastic waste: plastic waste has been increasing in Finland and only 28% of plastic packaging are recycled (European average: 42%).

I recycle, isn’t it enough?

Recycling gives us the false impression that trash magically disappears. We need to remind ourselves that disposing of waste has by itself an environmental impact, for example from municipal waste collection processes and recycling plants.

Moreover, different materials have completely different lifecycles. For example, several plastic materials have a limited lifespan and can be recycled 2-3 times max before being sent to the landfill. Glass can be infinitely recycled without loss of quality, instead. I am not familiar with the specific recycling processes of different materials, but I am sure they would have different impact.

This is why reducing waste is the best strategy to limit your household’s environmental impact.

(If you need help recycling your household waste in Finland, click here.)

The first step: a waste audit

Every zero waste book or blog say the same thing: the very first thing is doing a waste audit. This is a good idea even if you don’t have a clear intention to reduce your waste. You will find several methods online to carry out a waste audit. We simply did the following: we kept a notepad near the bio- and general waste bin. Every time we threw something away, we would take a note. We kept track for a full week. I didn’t note down our plastic, glass, metal, paper, cardboard waste because I checked the bins at the end of the week and noted down everything. It wasn’t straightforward to come up with categories, but a week isn’t a very long time and it was fairly simple to make sense of the data we collected.

Our plastic waste was through the roof: we threw away over 50 food plastic packaging in a week! We acquired invaluable insights from our waste audit. The waste audit also forced us to pay more attention to how we were sorting our waste. We realised, for instance, that we were too quick to throw dirty plastic packaging to the general waste (as opposed to wash and recycle) and that we were disposing of few items incorrectly!

What comes next

Our family has started a journey to reduce our environmental impact and I want to take you along. There’s plenty of books on zero waste (my suggestions: this and this, both available at the Helsinki library network), but I will share also information relevant to people living in Finland specifically. I will share my research and observations, my challenges, and tips. I hope this will help others to build their own journey without having to do tons of research ;).

In the next post, I will share the first steps we took to cut on some of our regular waste. In the meantime, I recommend you check out these tips I have shared.

Have you ever thought of reducing your household waste? Let me know in the comments.

Featured Image by Jasmin Sessler from Pixabay