Simple Ways to Reduce Waste

Recycling and reusing are all well and good, but the very best approach to reducing waste is to generate less in the first place. There are, of course, myriad ways to do this, most of which require little more than a bit of thought. Following are a few good ways to get started.

Food and food packaging

An astonishing third of the food that we buy is fed to the trash, either as scraps or because it's no longer fresh. This waste costs an average house­hold hundreds of dollars per year and results in a considerable amount of methane. The solutions are simple, though they may require a bit of getting used to: planning more carefully when shopping and cooking; using the freezer to prolong the life of things that are likely to go stale; and making use of leftovers rather than letting them sit in the fridge decaying. Finally, try to compost whatever waste food you do create. This avoids the creation of methane because the food gets to break down aerobically, in the presence of oxygen. The result is CO2, a much less powerful greenhouse gas than methane.

Of course, it's not just the food itself that fills up our trash: it's the packaging that it comes in. No one knows exactly how much food packaging we throw out each year, but it clearly accounts for a significant proportion of our domestic waste. Perhaps the best strategy here - aside from favoring minimally packaged brands and products - is to follow the advice of the German government and make a point of leaving excess packaging in the supermarket after you've been through the checkout.

In most people's minds, the environmental problem with paper is the cutting down of trees. In truth, the vast majority of our paper products are sourced from well-managed forests in countries such as Scandinavia, where the demand for paper, if anything, is actually increasing the total area of forest. A much bigger problem than the harvesting of the trees is the energy it takes to produce the paper. This energy causes greenhouse emissions - roughly three kilograms of CO2 for each kilo of high-quality paper made from virgin materials. Recycled and low-grade paper can be produced with less energy, but it still adds up. The average citizen gets through around 200kg of paper products per year if you include eve­rything from notepads and maga­zines to cereal boxes. The result, according to one breakdown of the typical UK carbon footprint, is slightly more than a fifth of a tonne of CO2, equivalent to driving a typical car about 600 miles.

Besides cutting back on food packaging, we can reduce our paper use, and the associated emis­sions, in various ways.

It's easy to halve your consumption of printer paper by getting into the habit of printing on both sides. This can be automated on some high-end printers though in most cases it just means keeping a stack of paper that has been printed on one side and refeeding it into the printer the other way up.

You can also avoid some paper waste by making sure all your docu­ments come out exactly as you intend. This is easily done by hitting the Preview button that appears in the options box after you select Print from the File menu of whichever application you're using.

Finally, bear in mind that you can often substantially reduce the paper needed when printing a document just by reducing the font size, line spacing and margins - or by printing two pages to each sheet of paper, which again can be easily done in the print options box.

If you're fed up with picking junk mail off the doormat and putting it straight into the recycling bin, register with the Mail Preference Service to have your name removed from the lists of direct mail companies. To also stop junk mail sent to "The Occupant", write to Door to Door Opt Outs.

A final way to save paper is to read news, product information and other written material online rather than buying newspapers, requesting brochures and so on. Browsing websites isn't a carbon neutral activity, but according to most estimates it's still far greener to read online than on paper.

As well as simply reducing your paper use, it makes sense to favor recycled paper products when possible - not just for kitchen and toilet roll but also printer paper and (for the truly committed) stationery. Recycled paper is considerably greener than paper made from virgin materials.