Ecovillage Waste Reduction Initiative launching in 2025

As the year was coming to an end, a group of keen Ecovillage residents with an interest in all things waste and recycling held a preliminary meeting to explore creating a hub at the  Ecovillage Community Centre for waste-reduction education and activities in 2025. 

Waste accounts for a huge part of our carbon footprint in Australia. We know that our Witchcliffe Ecovillage residents are already doing an excellent job of reducing waste, through growing their own veggies, separating waste diligently, recycling the usual yellow bin items, “Feeding it Forward” and directing their household green waste towards home and cluster-scale compost, worm farms and Bokashi bin systems. There’s also lots of swap/shuffle/sharing going on, with great examples every week in our community forums of spontaneous recycling and sharing of resources—

• cans for cash fundraising, 
• endlessly recycled packing boxes, 
• travelling weed mat for killing Kikuyu grass
• preserving jars swapped for pickles, 
• sharing of excess veggies, plants, spare furniture, excess building and gardening materials, 
• borrowing of tools
• car sharing, and so on. 

But there’s more we could do if we get organised and tackle our consumption and waste as a whole community. 

For example, what about:

• working together to avoid waste in the first place, especially targeting those items packaged in soft plastic (bread, convenience food, takeaway food, cleaning products, etc), by making our own, making for others, shopping locally and carefully, buying in bulk as a community, supporting and adding to Feed it Forward, etc?
• tackling the thorny problem of building site waste directly with builders?
• making it easier to recycle those tricky things that don’t go into the yellow bin, like batteries, digital waste, plastic milk lids?
• on-sharing items as a community through “libraries” and regular swap meets—items such as toys, jars, books, tools, etc?

We decided that our focus in 2025 would start with education and raising awareness, through workshops, fact sheets, and demonstrations, and to find out through these initial activities what our community would like to prioritise. In the future, we would like to explore how to best monitor and report on our progress, to see what initiatives have the greatest impact and could be replicated in the wider community.