My waste weight

Defra (the department for environment, farming and rural affairs) figures that every person throws about 511kg of waste per year.

Of this 511kg we throw away 375kg and recycle 135kg.

So, assuming I live to the national average of 76 years (from the Office of National Statistics) I will have thrown away about 29 tonnes and recycled about 10 tonnes.

But is this right?

How much am I actually throwing away per week.

I try to shop as sensibly as possible, avoiding packaging where I can, I've been (mostly) plastic carrier bag free for about a year and I try to recycle as much as I can.

But, the only way to find out for sure was to start weighing my waste and my recycling.

Armed with the bathroom scales and making sure that no one emptied the bin except me I decided to investigate. I started to weigh the bin bags coming out of our kitchen bin, into which all the smaller bins in the house are eventually poured. This represents the material we as a family are putting into our black bin - and that will eventually end up in landfill.

It turned out that my average bin bag from the kitchen bin weighed 1.8kg.

We end up with two to four bin bags per week. So lets go with the worst case scenario - four bin bags per week means the family was generating 7.2kg of waste per week.

Assuming this was mainly from the two adults in the house each adult was generating 436kg per year.

Then I realised I had not included garden waste. A quick bit of gardening later I estimate we generate 43kg of garden waste per year from our small plot. That makes my total waste arisings about 457kg per year.

I would encourage reader to weigh their rubbish - only then can you grasp how your own actions are contributing to the amount of rubbish going into landfill.

Next week I'll examine how much material I am recycling.