26 Zero Waste Projects for Your Street, Community & Workplace
There are streets, communities, and businesses doing it - they’re going zero waste and implementing workable sustainable solutions that work and can be easily replicated. We found 26 of these inspiring environmental projects and heaps of examples of them in action. Which one will you make it your mission to replicate in your community, workplace, or street?
We’re so excited to start the new decade by suggesting ways to take your refusing, reusing, and general zero wasting further by getting out into your local community, inciting change in your and others’ workplaces, and working with your neighbours to reduce your street’s environmental impact.
This is our goal for 2020 and hope it will be many others’ too!
We're going beyond what the individual can do and looking at replicable workable sustainability solutions that can be (and should be!) implemented on a larger scale. You know those eco-initiatives that you stumble across and you think "omg what a great idea, what a difference it'd make if every market/festival/business implemented this!".
Don't be afraid to reach out to people who have implemented a sustainable solution and ask them how you could do the same. The sustainability space is a collaborative one, not a competitive one. The only way we're going to get through this is together!
So share share share these ideas and work together to implement them! Share them with people in the industry or with the boss if you're in the industry or if you're able to, implement it yourself.
Have you come across an idea like this? We share quite a few below but would love to hear about more! Let us know in the comments. But first, read our list of replicable, workable zero waste solutions for streets, communities, and businesses.
Hopefully there is one that you can act on and replicate. If we all got one going in our community or workplace imagine the difference it would make!
1. Removing single-use reusable coffee cups from businesses & communities
First up, the brave move of no longer offering takeaway coffee cups. We’ve come across a few cafes doing this. People have to bring their own cup to take it away or they have to sit down and enjoy it there.
It's simple and effective and our own personal rule when it comes to not creating waste. We applaud the cafes taking this risk and their effort to change the culture around takeaway coffee and think they should be supported in this.
And there are other options instead of throwaway takeaway cups that cafes can offer so customers can still get their coffee to go.
What can be offered instead of single-use takeaway coffee cups? Our favourite solution is a cup library of donated second hand coffee mugs. This can be done individually or together with other cafes in the area, where you can return that same cup or any other unwanted cup to a participating cafe or coffee shop. Cup Exchange is a great example of this.
Another favourite solution is Moon Rabbit's system of offering reused glass jars for takeaway coffees instead.
Another option is offering reusable takeaway cups that can be returned for a deposit. Examples are:
Returnr - we love that they use stainless steel cups
Green Caffeen - to encourage returning the cups, borrowers are fined if the cup is not returned within 30 days
There are a few different methods used and ways to make it easier to use and to incentivise the use of a reusable coffee cup and bringing it back. Whichever one is used, they all result in no single use and saving waste.
Ask your regular cafe if they have heard of or are looking into implementing a reusable takeaway coffee cup scheme.
2. Providing reusable takeaway containers instead of disposable
Not only for cups, a deposit system can also be used for takeaway bowls and containers!
Returnr also has stainless steel bowls customers can borrow at cafes and restaurants so you can take a meal away without creating waste. You get your deposit back when you return it to a participating vendor. The reusable bowls are even available for online food delivery via Deliveroo.
This can also be implemented on an individual basis. Moroccan Soup Bar for instance has a swap n go system - you get a meal and a container on your first purchase and then can bring it back to be refilled (and you get a discount if you bring your own container to incentivise reusables).
Another example of a reusable container system that can be put in place is Retub, which is a takeaway food container that has a built-in container exchange program called Reswap.
You take in your Retub container to a participating vendor and simply swap the used inner container for a clean one. If you forget your Retub container, the inner container can can be borrowed for a deposit.
No need for disposable plastic or styrofoam takeaway containers! Why not suggest it to your local go-to for takeaway meals?
3. Hosting events & markets without waste, only reusable plates & cutlery
Waste at events and markets can be drastically reduced by offering non-disposable plates and cutlery and having a wash-up station where they can be washed for reuse.
They can be washed by people themselves or by a team of volunteers or paid staff.
Melbourne Farmers Markets' wash-up station has a bucket for any food waste and three buckets for dunking, washing and rinsing. Once you’ve eaten, you simply scrap any leftover food into the bucket (if you are unable to take it home to eat later, which would be better) and wash the plate and cutlery you used and put it in the drying rack at the end. There is someone to help anyone who needs it and to check and dry dishes before they make the rounds again.
In addition, there are businesses that offer reusable plates and bowls and washing up services at events like Wash Against Waste, Mullum Cares’s Waste Free Catering, and Green My Plate that are the perfect solution for zero waste catering of events and festivals.
It provides events with reusable cups, plates and cutlery, which are used by vendors and then returned by visitors to be washed by a team of volunteers and used again. Its service is available for hire across Victoria. So far, it has been successfully used at over 200 events!
Zero Waste Victoria used them for last year’s Zero Waste Festival and they were used at last year’s Sustainable Living Festival. It worked seamlessly!
Imagine all the single use waste this would save if it was implemented at all events and markets! Why not suggest it for the next school market, fundraising event or any event you're involved in?
4. Community party kits for all to share
Want to host a plastic-free party, sustainable soiree, or eco-friendly event? Did you know you can book and hire a community party kit that contains everything you need to cater one without creating bins full of disposable, single-use plastic.
Bendigo Zero Waste has party crates for hire and The Rogue Ginger shares the cups and plates she bought from charity stores for her son’s first birthday with her local community.
And Treading My Own Path has an initiative called Community Dishes - a set of 50 reusable crockery, cutlery and glassware that can be borrowed and brought back free of charge. So far it has replaced 4 077 single-use items with reusables!
If you can’t find one in your area, why not start one!
Check out 8 other ways to cater without the waste in our Zero Waste Catering: Plastic Free Parties, Sustainable Soirees & Eco-friendly Events article, in which we share 9 ways to swap single use for reusable when catering an event or party to make it more sustainable.
5. Coming together to compost - community & commercial composting
All individuals and businesses can and should find a way to compost food waste! If you don't already, please make finding a way to compost your kitchen scraps and any workplace food scraps a priority in 2020.
Food waste in landfill releases methane, a potent greenhouse gas, while composted food waste results in healthy soil so food should always be composted and all businesses and homes should find a way to compost the food waste it creates, whether this be an on-site system, getting it collected, or taking it to be composted.
Curbside compost bins for everyone on the street to use, composters and worm farms in community gardens for everyone in the community to use, sharing compost bins via ShareWaste, and businesses having an on-site worm farm or compost bin or getting food scraps and biodegradable waste collected by a company like Compost Collectors are all great ways of ensuring food doesn’t end up in landfill.
Clever space-saving composting systems like Subpod make it easy and attractive for places like cafes, parks, and schools to compost. It is not just a composter but also a seat and a garden bed. We've seen cafes using it as outdoor seating at outdoor tables and at farmer’s markets, where they are its bench seating.
Imagine if every bench was a place to compost and grow food!
A great example of commercial businesses reducing food to landfill is Melbourne's Degraves Street, which has reduced its waste by 90% by composting its food waste.
Two-and-a-half tonnes of food scraps from 90 businesses in the Degraves Street area is dehydrated and turned into fertiliser each week, which is then spread on parks and gardens throughout the city!
Does your workplace or community compost? Could it?
6. Seed sharing & seed libraries
Seed sharing and seed libraries are other brilliant community initiatives that will make a difference to the state of our planet that can be easily replicated. They encourage people to start growing their own food or different types of food, they increase seed diversity and food security, and can help overcome food deserts.
And growing your own food saves waste and food miles!
We've started creating a map of sharing economy initiatives and there are actually heaps of seed libraries in Australia, with many being run by local libraries or community gardens.
Yarraville Community Garden has a seedling swap and Tweed Shire Council has a brilliant seed library setup. Does your community have a seed library or seed swap events? If not why not start one or host one.
7. Keeping postage packaging circulating
Reuse or use used postage packaging and boxes to keep them circulating! If you're a business that posts out products why not see if you can find a source of packaging to reuse instead of buying new? A number of eco-businesses do this when posting out products.
If you, as a person or business, get something delivered by the same company over and over again, why not ask if they can take the packaging it is delivered in back when they drop off the next delivery and then reuse it? The company that delivers products to my workplace takes the boxes and protective packing materials back each week for reuse.
If you're a person or business that gets a lot of packaging from different businesses infrequently why not see if you can find someone who will reuse it instead of recycling it when it is still usable? Ask around in local Facebook community groups and Good Karma Networks, put it up for free on Facebook marketplace, and/or email a local eco-business (or any local business) you think might be interested.
You can also keep it for personal use. Use nothing new. Reuse. Keep it circulating!
8. Saving & sharing excess produce & food
If you have excess produce or food to share because your food garden has had a bumper crop, you’ve foraged fruit from neglected fruit trees that would otherwise have gone to waste, you have excess fruit and vegetables in your community garden, you have leftovers after a community event, business meeting or event, BBQ, your business has edible products that haven’t sold at the end of the day, or you have bin dived edible food that has been thrown out, don’t let it go to waste.
Rather share it with your local community by:
sharing it with work colleagues,
sharing it with friends and family,
finding somewhere to put it in a bag or basket with a "free - help yourself!" sign,
giving it to an organisation that distributes food to people in need,
posting it on a Freegan group on Facebook,
using apps like Olio to give it away, or
placing it on a food is free sharing table or in a little free pantry (more on this below).
You could even start an initiative like Harvest/Store, which is a program that connects with local residents who have fruit trees or veggie gardens and are growing more produce than they know to do with, harvests or collects the excess produce, and bottles, pickles, conserves, dries, and ferments it. The preserves are split between the grower, the volunteers, donated to a local food bank and sold to ensure the program can continue long term.
In 2019, Harvest/Store preserved over 420 kg of fresh produce, saving it from ending up in landfill or as waste.
Or open a store like The Inconvenience Store, which saves food and sells it on a donations/pay as you feel basis to cover costs.
Or hold free community lunches made from saved excess food like Open Table, which takes surplus food that would otherwise be thrown away and turns it into nutritious meals to share with the community in order to reduce food insecurity and food waste.
Businesses can avoid throwing out unsold food at the end of the day and people can save this food via apps like Bring Me Home and businesses can redistribute or purchase excess stock via surplus food online marketplaces like Yume Food Australia.
So far, Yume’s online marketplace for surplus food has prevented over 1 300 000 kgs of food from going to waste, returning over $4.5 million to Aussie farmers and manufacturers, saved 88 million litres of water, and prevented 2,557 tonnes of C02 from being released.
Every piece of food saved from being discarded also saves all the resources put in to grow or create that piece of food as well as all the greenhouse gas that would be released if it ended up in the bin and some people rely on this food to eat so try to find a way to get extra edible food to people who can use it rather than disposing of it if at all possible.
9. Sharing food freely via Food Is Free tables & Little Free Pantries
A great way to continuously share and give away excess food is via a Food Is Free table or a Little Free Pantry, also called a Blessing Box. These can be set up in front of your house, in front of a store that is willing to participate, in a park if council consents, or at your local neighbourhood or community house.
They can be as simple as a basket, box, or table with a “Food Is Free - Help Yourself!” sign or just a repurposed old cupboard or set of drawers or more work can be put it to create a beautiful carpentered box on a pole.
As well as a note saying that food can be given and taken for free, it is best to have a sign with a set of rules for those donating, for instance food that requires refrigeration cannot be accepted, and some have blackboards on which needed items can be recorded.
A good example of what to write that explains the spirit of these shared pantries well is:
“GIVE AND TAKE FOOD - Take what you need and leave what you can. You’re welcome to donate, swap, or take food. Encourage the spirit of sharing in our community by exercising kindness and paying it forward.”
The Food is Free Project is a worldwide movement of people growing and sharing food freely by planting a front yard garden or sharing their harvest on a #foodisfree table. It provides a platform for community interaction, thereby promoting community cohesion and inclusion, opening the door to further collaboration, such as neighbours coming together for potlucks, establishing tool-sharing and community composting programs, while assisting and promoting food security.
Keen to get a Food Is Free Project going? Download the How to Start a Food is Free Project Guide!
The Little Free Pantry movement started with a pilot project in 2016 with the aim of “piquing local interest in and acting against local food insecurity”, as well as offering “a place around which neighbours might coalesce to meet neighbourhood needs, whether for food or for fun”.
You’ll find a worldwide map of Little Free Pantries (mostly US) here and examples and how to make one here.
The Inconvenience Store has taken this to the next level, creating an entire grocery store of food waste saved from landfill. It is run by volunteers and follows a pay-as-you-feel model to cover costs while enabling those who need food to be able to feed themselves.
10. Cooking up a waste-saving storm at kitchen libraries
Kitchen libraries not only save waste, money and space by not forcing people to buy kitchen implements they will only use one or twice, they also make kitchen gadgets available to people who can't afford to buy them.
From big expensive appliances to small implements, you can borrow what you need then bring it back for someone else to use next. We've also seen libraries that are just of cake tins!
They also save unused implements from ending up in landfill. Everything at the Carlton Kitchen Library, which recently opened (just in time for me to borrow a cake carrier to transport David's birthday cake home in), has been donated by the community so it is all second hand.
The only other food equipment library we can find in Australia is one at the Nimbin Neighbourhood and Information Centre. Have you ever heard of a kitchen library? Is there one near you? Do you think your community could use one?
11. Swapping clothes for new clothes with no waste
Whether it's just amongst your friends or a huge organised event, clothes swaps are a great way to refresh your wardrobe and redistribute clothing you no longer wear.
Call up some friends to come around, find a clothes swap near you, or organise one for your local community and get swapping!
How to host a clothes swap:
Find a location such as a local church hall, school, cafe, art space, community hall, or outdoor market
Figure out who it is for and how big you want it to be, for example will it be for kids, teenagers, adults, or a mix and will it be for women only
Decide on a date and time
Will attendees have to pay and buy a ticket to participate or will it be donations based?
How many items of clothing will each person be expected to bring? It is usually at least three per person, with people being able to take the same amount of clothes that they bring and add to the swapping pile
Will you use tokens to give to each person per piece of clothing they bring or just go on honesty
Get racks or suitcases or tables to display the clothes in or on
Get people to bring the clothing they are swapping a bit before the start time if you want to divide the clothing into size etc before the event starts
Check if you need public liability insurance
Create and share the event via Eventbrite and/or Facebook
Lastly, have a plan for any leftover clothing, such as offering them for free to others like non-event attendees after the event or donating them to a second hand shop
I’ve made some amazing additions to my closet thanks to swaps - a gorgeous dress I wore to a wedding and a go-to summer skirt I got at a swap at a sustainability festival and a mohair sweater a friend shrunk that fits me perfectly.
12. Edible landscaping and shared community food planter boxes
Edible landscaping and shared community food planter boxes are an incredible way to bring a community together and promote growing your own food and sharing. Eltham has these planter boxes on the platform at its train station as well as outside a childcare co-op and cafe thanks to the suburb’s Incredible Edible Eltham community project. Any commuters or locals can help themselves and harvest produce whenever it is ready.
The Incredible Edible concept has been proven to increase the interest in and purchase of local food! Many towns have implemented it with great results. It can also bring food security to food deserts and increases people's confidence in growing their own food, as well as being a visible example of what to grow when. They sure are incredible!
Is this something your community could use? Could you start this locally? You’ll find everything you need to start an Incredible Edible group in your community here.
Let's make an incredible edible earth!
13. Transform your street using Transitions Streets
Transition Streets is “a tried-and-tested, award-winning behaviour-change project to cut energy use, reduce carbon emissions, save money, and strengthen your neighbourhood”. It involves “working together to do what we can about the climate emergency, one street at a time”.
You can find out how to start up your own Transition Streets group here.
Bring together a group of friends or neighbours and organise a place and time to meet every few weeks. In these meetings, start going through the practical workbook, which shows how to make easy changes in how energy, water, food, packaging, and transport is used.
Started in Totnes, Devon, in 2006 there are now more than 1,000 Transition initiatives in over 40 countries. Examples of the practical steps Local Transition groups focus on to make communities stronger and more resilient are:
growing food on allotments, community gardens, or garden share schemes, which lead on to new food-related enterprises such as farmers markets and cooperatively owned businesses such as bakeries, breweries and food box schemes,
starting renewable energy co-operatives, which offer huge potential for communities to create cleaner electricity for homes, schools and businesses, generating income and providing a safer place for investments, as well as encouraging more efficient and sustainable use of energy, and
creating new local jobs and livelihoods by building vibrant, viable new enterprises that keep money local and boost resilience.
14. Incentivise the use of reusables
This one’s for the cafes and other businesses wanting to incentivise the use of reusables instead of single-use - give customers a loyalty card for reusables! This is a simple way for anywhere to encourage using reusables.
The card can get stamped or punched each time a reusable is used and after using a reusable a certain number of times, a reward can be given like a free cup of coffee.
So far, we’ve only seen this at Northcote Bakeshop, which punches a hole in your card every time you reuse such as using a bread bag for your bread, a reusable coffee cup for your coffee, or refilling your egg carton and after using a reusable 12 times, you get a free loaf of bread.
Would this help you remember your reusables? Why not suggest the idea to your local?
15. Market stalls and mobile bulk food and cleaning and bathroom products
Bulk food stores are excellent additions to communities that can help citizens reduce their waste by buying goods in bulk in jars and cotton bags instead of in plastic. But, renting out a retail space to open a physical bulk food store is an expensive and risky enterprise.
A cheaper and less risky way to offer bulk goods to your community is via a market stall or a mobile van like Roving Refills’ utes. All you need is a table or vehicle with space in the back and stock (and somewhere to store the stock when not selling it).
We love seeing Roving Refills’ mobile eco-friendly cleaning and personal care refill setup around Melbourne! It's a bulk cleaning supplies store on wheels. They supply the cleaners and you supply the container!
Being on wheels means they can service areas that don't have access to bulk buying, popping up to refill people’s containers at markets, outside offices, and wherever they are needed and welcome. At the moment, you'll find them in the inner north and west of Melbourne, Frankston, Otways, and Goulburn Valley.
Could your suburb use a pop-up bulk food, cleaning supplies or beauty supplies store?
16. Urban agriculture in unused spaces and farming on front lawns
467.8 kgs of produce in 12 months - that's how much Cirrus Fine Coffee harvested this year from two car spaces it turned into an urban farm.
Biofilta Urban Farms, which was part of the project, wants to "kick-start an urban farming revolution that sees any underutilised space in a city as a potential mecca for food production, composting, urban cooling, urban biodiversity and community building".
Sounds good to us! Who else wants to see an urban farming revolution!? Is there an unused space near you where this could be done?
How about front lawns? And back! Urban farms like Spoke and Spade and Strettle Street Market Garden are growing vegetables in the front and back yards of homes to create veggie boxes to sell to locals.
Urban agriculture hugely reduces food miles, improves soil condition, and builds a community’s resilience. The future is hyper local food grown in unused urban spaces, suburbs, schools, and cities!
17. Reuse or refill product packaging
Could the packaging of whatever you sell or offer be returned and reused?
As a society our culture needs to change from a throwaway one to one where we reuse everything until it can’t be reused any more. Often, not only does this not waste the earth’s resources, it also saves a business money as they need to buy less of an item if it is being reused.
It also encourages repeat business as customers will come back to return the item and will often purchase it again while they are there or if a refill is available, they will come back to refill the same product.
Some examples of businesses reusing or refilling packaging are:
Jam by Fiona - we buy this homemade jam from our local farmer’s market and Fiona collects the empty jam jars and reuses them for more jam
Cirrus Coffee - when they drop off a new delivery of coffee beans, they take back the boxes they delivered the last delivery in and reuse them for more deliveries
ASÚVI deodorant stick - ASÚVI’s deodorant stick comes in a reusable tube, so when your deodorant stick is finished, you can buy a refill in a compostable cardboard tube and refill it
Happi Earth laundry powder - the pouches Happi Earth laundry powder comes in are designed to be sent back to Happi, sterilised, and refilled to eliminate packaging
Could you reuse anything in your business or where you work? Or offer refills? You can find more examples of business that allow packaging to be returned or refill products in our Return and Refill Revolution: Small Businesses Are Creating Local Circular Economies For These 5 Industries blog post.
If something seems reusable or refillable ask businesses if you could bring it back for them to reuse or if they could consider reuse. It often only takes a small system change to start collecting and using something again.
18. Petition your council to implement a plastic free campaign
Ask your council to implement initiatives like City of Yarra's Proudly Plastic Free Yarra Campaign. This campaign was implemented after being suggested to the council by climate action group YCAN, which presented the idea to the council via a petition.
The Proudly Plastic Free Yarra Campaign encourages food outlets in Yarra to stop distributing disposable plastic items, such as bags, bottles, cutlery, straws and packaging.
Businesses in the area pledge to go Proudly Plastic Free and council helps them switch their packaging away from single use to reusable products by encouraging their customers to bring their own takeaway containers and coffee cups.
After assessing what they are already doing to reduce single use plastic, council helps each business come up with and implement further actions that make the most sense for that business.
Businesses benefit through:
free promotion by the council,
decreased packaging costs over time as more customers bring their own containers,
attracting new customers who want to support a business making a difference,
reducing their carbon footprint and contribution to landfill, and
helping to keep local spaces clean from litter.
There are so many ways businesses can replace, implement, and encourage reusables! Often it just takes education about other options and showing them how to do it.
19. Repair cafes and mending meet-ups
To get more people in your neighbourhood to repair not replace, either organise an occasional pop-op repair cafe, where local experts share their mending expertise for free and fix or help fix broken items, or mending meet-ups, where each person brings their own mending project and works on it themselves.
Repair cafes provide more access to fixing broken items for those who don’t have the ability or knowledge to repair it themselves and mending meet-ups make mending more fun and more likely to get done. An example is Mullum Cares’s Salvage Culture Project, which diverts textiles from landfill by offering Make & Mend workshops and educating people how to repair instead of repurchase. These meet-ups also bring the community together, tightening its bonds and friendships within it.
20. Toy libraries, tool libraries, and all other little libraries for sharable objects
Toy libraries and tool libraries are exactly what they sound like - libraries of toys and tools, respectively, instead of books. They allow the sharing of toys and tools instead of people buying them and barely using them, causing them to go to waste. They result in less toy waste in landfill and less wasted resources on unused tools in sheds.
They also have other benefits for communities. According to Toy Libraries Australia, the peak body for over 280 toy libraries in Australia, toy libraries promote play, educate children, and support families. They share how to start a toy library here.
Tool libraries aren’t just for hand and power tools. They can also contain seldom used items like camping gear and sports equipment.
The library model can be used for anything that can be shared. We discussed kitchen libraries earlier. I’ve seen a stick library in a dog park. You can make little libraries for all kinds of things! What could your neighbourhood or local park use a little library of?
21. Get stuck into some guerrilla gardening or chuck some seed bombs
Who says gardening has to be done in the confines of your garden? Guerrilla gardening is “the act of gardening on land that the gardeners do not have the legal rights to cultivate, such as abandoned sites, areas that are not being cared for, or private property” (Wikipedia).
According to Sustainable Gardening Australia, it is “war on ugliness, on neglected public and private spaces, and an attempt to beautify and restore pride in the urban landscape”.
It is also a war against dumped waste as these neglected areas often become dumping grounds for waste people can’t be bothered to discard of properly. Once beautified, people are less likely to discard rubbish in these areas and planting food crops and fruit trees provides free food for the public while planting plants favoured by pollinators can promote the proliferation of these vital insects.
The law does say that you should only garden within the confines of your property, so be aware that guerrilla gardening is illegal as it involves trespassing and gardening on land without permission. An option that doesn’t involve trespassing is seed bombing.
Seed bombs or balls can be thrown into vacant lots, onto abandoned land, or anywhere with sufficient soil, moisture and sunlight for seeds to grow. Learn how to make seed bombs here.
22. Swap food & gardening tips at food swaps
Organise or go to local food swaps to swap excess food, meet more local people, and get or share gardening tips and other ideas for making your neighbourhood more sustainable.
You can find a local food swap in Australia here and in the US and Europe via the Food Swap Network. They are often organised by a local Transition Streets group – you can find Australian ones here and ones in the US here.
23. Buy Nothing Groups, Good Karma Networks, the Olio app & Really Really Free Markets
Instead of taking belongings you no longer want or need to a second-hand store where someone who wants them may or may not stumble across them, you can offer them up online in a Buy Nothing Facebook group, Freegan Facebook group, or your local Good Karma Network’s Facebook group or on the Olio app.
This ensures that they end up with someone who needs or wants them and guarantees that they will go to a new home and not a landfill heap. You can also offer things that traditionally wouldn’t sell in a thrift store like food items and beauty items even if they have been opened and slightly used.
Everything offered in these groups and on the app is free and is generally given out on a first come first served basis. There are few limitations on what can be offered, spanning from things of very little value like plant cuttings, cardboard boxes, and glass jars to higher value items like bicycles, kitchen appliances, couches, and TVs.
You can also ask for things you are looking for second-hand in the groups. If someone has a spare or isn’t using it, they may be prompted to offer to give it to you.
Buy Nothing Groups are part of the Buy Nothing Project, which “is about setting the scarcity model of our cash economy aside in favour of creatively and collaboratively sharing the abundance around us”.
In addition to sharing goods around local neighbourhoods, Good Karma Networks also creates a network for lending items from people in your neighbourhood as well as asking them to lend a hand or for advice.
Like Freegan groups, Olio mainly focuses on reducing food waste by sharing food that would otherwise go to waste – from over-catered business meeting or party food to excess homegrown produce to rescued bin dived food – but you can also give away non-food items via the app.
Or to take this offline, you participate in or start a Really Really Free Market in your local area, where people can bring goods they want to swap or give away or spend time sharing skills with people in their community. These markets are based on the “take what you want, bring what you can’ principal” and their goal is to “build a community based on sharing resources, caring for one another, and improving the collective lives of all”.
24. Set up a reusables station at work
Get your work colleagues reusing by making it easy for them to grab a reusable to use for their coffee and lunch by creating a reusables station.
Collect a couple of reusable coffee cups and reusable containers by asking around if anyone has any extras they are not using and seeking them out in second hand shops and put them on a shelf with a sign reminding everyone to take them for coffee and to lunch.
These can then be washed and returned to the shelf for reuse, reducing your office’s use of single-use.
25. Composting dog poo in dog parks
In two beachside towns in South Africa - Scarborough and Noordhoek - environmental groups have placed compost bins on the beach and around the town for dog poo in order to compost it instead of sending it to landfill. This reduces both waste and methane emissions.
100% compostable bags that are easily digested by the worms placed in the bins are provided, as well as poop scoops made out of two litre milk bottles and paddles to simply scoop the poop straight into the bins, which were designed and built by the Scarborough Environmental Group . The bins are maintained by the environmental groups and volunteers. Photos of the setup and more info here.
In the US, City of Lafayette and Battery Park City have also implemented dog poo composting initiatives. They have simply provided separate bins and compostable dog poo bags and now use a dog waste contractor that takes it for composting at a commercial composting facility.
We have discovered that our council provides degradable dog poo bags (the worst kind of plastic bags) in all its parks! So we are talking to our council to change that and providing it with information on alternatives. Hopefully we can convince it to start composting it!
26. Find a use for whatever wasted resource
See a resource that’s being wasted? Could it be rescued and turned into something useful?
Reground rescues coffee grounds from landfill, composting it to turn it into rich soil for community and school gardens, Zero Impact recycles used coffee grounds into coffee logs for BBQs and pizza ovens, Rubber Cuppy recycles old glass jars and bike tubes into reusable coffee cups, Recycling Zychal makes dog raincoats out of broken umbrellas, and inflatable pool toys become bags in I Used To Be’s workshop.
There are so many opportunities out there for turning the current linear economy into a circular one!
Pick a solution and implement it in your street, workplace or community!
Find a local climate community organisation and get involved or start one and get others in your local neighbourhood involved!
In Melbourne there is no shortage of environmental organisations and initiatives to join or volunteer with or events to go to. Find one that resonates with you and get working towards the future you want and creating the community you want to live in.
We're stronger together and the community needs to come together now more than ever!
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