Hi greenlotus
What are your top tips for the cash and time poor?
I would say the first thing is to be honest about the amount of food you waste. It's interesting that whenever I talk about it people say "I don't really waste much food" but the reality is different! Not because people lie but because we are so used to throwing stuff away without thinking that we don't even realise. So maybe spend a week putting food waste in one particular place and spend a moment taking an honest look at what is going in there.
Here we don't have 'leftovers', we have 'ingredients' :D So getting creative in the kitchen is a great way to save cash and it doesn't mean you have to be standing in your piny for 4 hours a night; you can chuck leftover veggies in a slow cooker and leave it to take care of itself for a few hours or whizz things up in a blender and voila - soup!
The other area where you can create waste and waste money at the same time is falling for the BOGOF offers. It's great on things that keep, but on fresh foods people usually end up throwing things out, so my advice, as boring as it may sound is to write a shopping list, planning it around the foods you already have in your 'fridge, fruit bowl and veg rack and stick to the list...
And then there are the 'best before' dates; do we really need them? It's a bit of a contenscious issue and I'm not about to advocate eating gone off meat, but don't just throw things out because they have reached their best before date, use your eyes, nose and tentative sense of taste to see if that food can be used.
I know all of these ideas focus on food waste, but that is the biggest area of waste in most households.
Another idea is with household cleaning products - do we really need one product to clean our floor, another for our work surfaces and yet another to shine the sink? If you look at the ingredients you'll find that most products are the same, just with different ratios of ingredients. Stick to one multi purpose product which does the job and ditch the rest (or make your own if you're really green; I'm a big fan of baking soda and white vinegar for cleaning and for using micro fiber cloths which you only need water with).
Another suggestion is to swap disposable options for reusable - kitchen towel is a classic example; use cloths instead and save yourself some money.
How do you train yourself to avoid waste/disposable things coming into the house in the first place?
It's all about baby steps. We've been doing this for 2 1/2 years and our success has come from focusing on one thing at a time. And I always point out that this is not about a deprivation lifestyle or being a martyr it's just about making conscious decisions about what you buy. We all have things we feel we can't live without and it's good not to get too hung up on things like that or to beat yourself up, but to focus on the things you feel you CAN do and to celebrate those instead.
We made heaps of mistakes in the first few months, and we still make them, (myzerowaste.com/2009/10/mrs-greens-confession/ and myzerowaste.com/2008/06/its-been-a-funny-kind-of-day/) but like anything in life you learn from them, have a laugh at yourself and try and do better next time ;) I found it terribly hard to give up kitchen roll and I still have an emergency roll hidden in the cupboard !! but like most things, it's a new habit to put in place to reach for the cloth instead of a shiny piece of white paper ...
HTH