Radio Interview- #1bin1year

Radio interview to promote #ZeroWasteWeek campaign and explain our own personal #1bin1year challenge. Click here for the interview (Spanish)

(English) We spoke to Ander Zabala about the "Zero Waste Week" campaign in the UK. He works as a recycling manager for the London Borough of Hackney. Ambassador of the Zero Waste Week tells us how he works to raise awareness in the community in which he lives for the need to reduce the consumption of packaging, increase awareness of zero waste shops to buy food without packaging and to look out for creative alternatives to minimise waste.

Becoming a Zero Waste Week 2020 Ambassador

This year I am one of the #ZeroWasteWeek ambassadors, it runs from 7-11 September. What it used to be an English campaign has spread to all parts of the world to become an international campaign to raise awareness on preserving resources, reducing consumption, minimising waste/recycling and empowering people and organisations to shift to a circular economy. I can't yet announce the theme of this year, but I know you will all love it...

How did I become an ambassador?

It all started in 1990, when I was 10 years old, I lived in Bilbao, Basque Country, and my brother came from university one weekend to tell me he could take our paper waste to be recycled in his university. I was a little nerdy, member of local green youth clubs and Greenpeace Spain, so his 'announcement' made me so happy. From that day, I hoarded and rescued all the paper from our family flat under my bed, not the best fire safety measure, but you get to learn.

2020 me to the left, and 1985 me to the right!

Fast forward to 2018, where I had been working in the recycling sector for two decades, and an email or tweet or Instagram post about Zero Waste Week showed up in my phone. I went through our rubbish at home (2 adults, 2 dogs and 1 cat) and decided to challenge myself to reduce it to ZERO. We were already good at recycling, but I had ignored the zero waste mindset, as "it just got recycled, so it is fine". I opened our waste bin for two weeks, I found a lot of plastic and multi fused materials packaging in there, with the odd tea bag . I spent a week going hardcore in changing our shopping habits, and went down to hardly any waste left, it could fit on the palm of my hand.

One weeks worth of waste in August 2018

I didn't stop after a week, I was a bit hooked to generating little to no waste, so I carried on and challenged myself and my partner to fill our waste wheelie bin (120 litre capacity) only once in 2019, this is where the #1bin1year started. Remember I told you I was a young nerd, well I carried on being an adult nerd and I weighed all our waste and recycling at the end of the month for the entire year and uploaded it onto a spreadsheet. Who doesn't love graphs of their waste?

I will be posting tips, but I know between us , we can get #ZeroWasteWeek 2020 to be the biggest year, please share your tips and use the hashtag! Visit the Zero Waste Week official page for more.

Documenting our waste for 2019