Ditching The Dreadful Bin Liner
By: Brett Christensen
Tags: Environment, Recycling, Kitchen, Plastic, Garbage

Bin liners!

Brightly coloured rolls of the things lurk in our kitchen drawers and barely register on our consciousness. When our kitchen bin gets full, we tie the liner top and take it to our outside bin. Then, we grab a new bag from the roll and line our kitchen tidy bin with it, while no doubt thinking of things less mundane.

And the cycle continues. Every day or so, depending on how much kitchen waste you generate.

Using something as seemingly innocuous as a kitchen bin liner may seem unimportant. Until you start to think about it.

We buy this product only to throw it away. It has no other use. Its entire purpose is to hold rubbish for a short time before it and its contents end up in landfill.

Do some quick calculations and you start to realize how appalling bin liners are from an environmental perspective. Hundreds per year from every household that uses them. Around the world, millions upon millions of them end up in garbage dumps.

All that extra, environmentally destructive plastic waste. All those precious resources wasted to produce and transport them. All for no good reason.

It’s not as though bin liners are an essential item. For your average household kitchen, they are completely unnecessary and we can easily do without them.

Go Naked in the Kitchen!

Well, you can keep your clothes on if you like, but your little kitchen tidy bin can and should go stark naked.

Here’s how to eliminate bin liners and achieve kitchen bin nakedness with little effort.

Recycle

First, recycle everything you can!

This is probably already happening at your house, but it's worth reviewing what you can and can't recycle from time to time. Information about recycling will likely be on your local council website or perhaps inside the lid of your council recycle bin.

Your kitchen recycle bin should ALREADY be naked. Recyclable items should not be placed into bags because it makes sorting and processing much harder.

Compost

Even if you don’t do much gardening, you can help reduce kitchen waste by composting. I keep a small bin on the kitchen bench for food scraps and other compostable material. Every day, I transfer the bin’s contents to a larger compost bin in the garden.

Once your food scraps are in the main compost bin, you don't really need to do much else. There are ways to enhance and speed up the composting process if you want, but otherwise, just leave it be.

Every few months, you can remove the bottom contents of the bin and spread it over a garden bed. This enhances the health of the soil and keeps a lot of rubbish out of landfill.

Keep a Little Bag Box

Most household rubbish can go directly into your unlined kitchen bin. But, occasionally you might need to wrap some items such as messy food scraps that can’t be composted before binning them.

To deal with that, I collect and keep food and produce bags that cannot be recycled. Bread bags, soft plastic bags from frozen vegetables, bags from packaged items and plenty more. I keep these bags handy in a box in the kitchen so that I can grab one if an item needs to be wrapped before binning.

Clean Your Naked Bin at The End of Wash Ups

One of the main reasons that people use bin liners is to keep the kitchen tidy bin clean. And, it's true that your naked kitchen bin might get a bit grubby without a liner.

I empty the bin just before I wash up each day. That way I can give it a clean during the wash-up without wasting any extra water or detergent.

If you use a dishwasher, and the bin won’t fit, giving the bin a quick rinse or wipe once a day should do the trick.

Compromising

If you’re not ready to completely ditch your bin liners, an alternative approach is to simply reuse the bags.

Rather than dump the entire bag, just empty its contents into your outside bin and then put the bag back into your kitchen bin for a second round. One liner should do several days before it needs to be replaced.

If you use the small unrecyclable bags you’ve collected to wrap messy rubbish, the bags should not get too dirty.

While you’ll still be using liner bags, the amount you use over time should be greatly reduced.

Aside: Plastic Shopping Bags

Major stores and supermarkets here in Australia have now eliminated single-use plastic shopping bags. Shoppers need to either bring their reusable green bags with them or purchase multiple-use plastic bags at checkout.

This is a very welcome and positive move that should be applauded.

However, a small consequence of the move is that our households no longer have collections of used plastic shopping bags at hand. One of the primary uses for such bags was as bin liners.

And, with the shopping bags no longer available, many people have reverted to actually buying bin liners.

So, it’s even more important that we ditch the bin liner. We don’t want to compromise the environmental benefits of eliminating single-use shopping bags by purchasing a gazillion more plastic bags that are manufactured solely to be thrown away.