20 pledges for 2020: Can we go from zero waste to zero recycling?

By now, I had hoped to be knee-deep in tomatoes, merrily bottling up the guaranteed glut to see us through the winter like a proper old school Italian nonna. It hasn’t quite worked out like that. At least not so far.

We started this year having got into a decent groove with zero waste, but the stuff that ended up in the green box on the curb had been niggling at us.

Reusing everything as much as possible before recycling it is an obvious and fundamental part of being more sustainable, and while we were there with the glass (there’s a heap of random sized jars in the corner of our kitchen whose disappointment at not being on the outside of some fragrant concoction by now is palpable), the cans were another matter.

We certainly have a lot less recycling than we used to but when I looked at what was still ending up on the pavement on a Thursday morning, we needed to come up with a different solution for the tins chopped tomatoes, sweetcorn, emergency cans of fruit ‘in a light syrup’, or gloopy fruit as my youngest puts it, and beans in various - if not quite 57 - varieties.

It felt like the right next step to make a bid to up the ante from zero-to-landfill to zero-to-recycling too. If we could.

Recycling is a strangely emotive and tricky matter to navigate. At least it is for us.

You can, of course, recycle most plastics these days, as long as they’re the right plastic resin code (those numbers in the triangular recycling sign) and that your local council takes it, which is a confusing and infuriatingly inconsistent lottery for absolutely no reason I can see.

We also have to assume that whatever we send away to be transformed actually gets recycled after all those documentaries about British plastic bags ending up destroying the environment in say, Malaysia where they understandably had enough and started sending it back last year.

If our items are successfully recycled, there’s the carbon cost of carting from our front door to the right facility (another reason not to chuck out or even recycle perfectly reusable glass – it is damned heavy to transport). Then there’s the energy demands of the process itself to consider.

Meanwhile, the act of saving these materials from landfill at the end of the story will do nothing to curb the corporate polluters churning these items out new.

And what about the studies that suggest we interpret recycling as a bit of an environmental get-out-of-jail-free card? That recycling can actually make us more wasteful in our consuming behaviour?

There’s no whisper of a doubt that recycling is an infinitely better solution than tipping absolutely everything into landfill. Recycling those aluminium cans will only create around 3 per cent of the greenhouse gas emissions of producing one from mining, shipping and forming virgin materials, for example. But it’s clearly not the panacea we believe it to be.

So our little household decided that this would be the year to tackle it head on. Covid did us a weird favour in that we suddenly had time to set up some raised beds thanks to some planks going free from an old agricultural shed. We even had a go at making a propagator from an old bathroom drawer unit.

We sowed the maize and ambitious array of fiddly tomato seeds and waited. And waited a bit more.

To date, the whole zero waste malarkey has been a pretty immediate affair. Want to stop using plastic? Just don’t buy that next thing that comes wrapped in the stuff and you’re well on the way. Reducing water use? Turn off the shower while you lather up. Tick. Want to reduce your vehicle emissions? Wipe the dust from that old bike and you’re off.

Keen to reduce your recycling? That will involve several months (at least) of setting up a plan that looks unnervingly akin to self-sufficiency. I’m not sure I’m ready for that.

So far we’ve managed to harvest a kilo of tomatoes, and seeing as everything is growing outside this year that was only last week – well into August with the autumn closing in fast.

Even with the extensive planning and months of watering with growing anticipation, I hadn’t got around to Youtubing what bottling or canning actually involved. So the bucolic image of a shelf full of bejewelled Kilner jars, a fully developed homemade baked beans recipe and a bulging sack full of sweetcorn is, so far, a few frozen blocks of pasta sauce. Or maybe I can pass it off as soup at a push.

Either way, half a freezer drawer full of random red stuff will, at best, replace about four tins.

And now the maize has been felled by a great British summertime of high wind and battering rain.

I think I may have woefully underestimated all this.