My Carbon Footprint: I have a dirty little secret

I’m a life-long bin diver and proud, writes Kate Hughes

(Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Right then, I feel we’ve reached a watershed moment, you and I.

We’ve been here, doing this a while now and I think we’ve got to the stage in our relationship that I can reveal a dirty little secret. Sometimes it’s quite a lot dirtier than even I had expected. Especially if I get the whole gravity versus balance thing wrong and fall in.

I bin dive, you see. I drag stuff other people have chucked away back out of the bin or, if I’m lucky, a skip.

It started as a way to find free stuff that would pass as furniture in my student days. Then, earning less than minimum wage in my first couple of journalism jobs while trying to surviving in the big, bad, expensive smoke, the furtive hunt continued into my 20s.

Sometimes I asked permission, sometimes I didn’t manage to get that far, or, more often just chickened out. The smart M&S sofa set spotted in Battersea, teetering on top of a whole load of other awesome stuff I had no hope of carting away without a truck I couldn’t afford, is still my favourite and still very much in pride of place in our house 20 years after the event.

It’s a pretty good sorting hat for visitors actually - their face when I tell them they’re sitting on the ‘rubbish’ sofa. So far only my parents have jumped up and brushed themselves down.

Now though, we appear to have reached a new high since we started looking after the in-laws AirBnB -including sorting out whatever recycling and clearing up their weekend guests leave behind.

Or should that be a society low.

Last weekend a group arrived to celebrate a 30th birthday. They were the same age I was at the height of my skip diving treasure hunt. They had come out to the countryside from the same borough.

They had a laugh, drank a ton of booze, left a very pleasant review, packed their stuff up and disappeared again, leaving their rubbish behind them. We wondered if we’d get lucky during the shake down and come back with a crate of beer they’d abandoned under a table. It happens more often than you might imagine.

Not this weekend.

Some people - and all power to them as far as I’m concerned - go through the huge industrial bins behind the nation’s poshest restaurants and supermarkets, pulling out criminal amounts of perfect food chucked in there at the same time that millions of people are relying on food banks.

The astonishing hauls they carefully document on social media came to mind when the other half came through the back door on Monday evening staggering under one of those food delivery crates crammed with more unopened, in-date packets of meat than I’ve ever seen in one place. We counted up three plastic packs of bacon, four packs of four beef burgers and 24 sausages with ever widening eyes.

Then he went back to the car for the 6 loaves of bread, the milk, the limes and mangoes shipped in from the other side of the world.

They had all been thrown in the bin less than an hour earlier, some clearly still in the plastic carrier bags they were hauled from the supermarket in.

Meals are going to be decadent affairs this week I can tell you, not to mention free.

Though because those lazy idiots with money, sub tropical and greenhouse gases to burn dumped all that food in the bin, rather than at least leaving it in the fridge, we couldn’t offer any of it to the local food bank or community fridge.

The whole thing has rocked me a bit to be honest. Mostly because of all that dumped meat - produced, in all likelihood by cattle and pigs and chicken fed on soya beans produced by clearing more rainforest than ever.

The UK imports 500,000 tonnes of the stuff from Brazil alone to feed our livestock. Those little Union Jacks on the labels absolve us of nothing.

We know about the UK’s mad food waste stats. Even when economic times are tough, we still throw away as much as a third of the food we buy as individual households.

Maybe it’s because we’ve been terrified into abandoning more than edible food because it’s within a week of the sell by, use by or best before date. The supermarkets must love that legislation.

Maybe we’re all so manic busy that food gets forgotten at the back of the shelf. I can kind of understand that. Crucially, there’s somewhere we can go with those reasons, especially as the cost of living continues to rise.

Love food hate waste is a great source of best before myth-busting info, tips on reducing food waste and leftovers recipes, for starters.

But maybe a crowd of the generation I really had hoped - no, assumed - were a bit more environmentally aware than the rest of our sorry excuse for a species just couldn’t be arsed.

In which case, we really might be screwed.

In which case, I’m definitely going back through the bins again next week.

‘Going Zero: One Family’s Journey to Zero Waste and a Greener Life’, by Kate Hughes, is out now.