An ordinary photo of a kerbside bin has elicited a huge reaction from hundreds of Australians for one striking reason.
The red-lidded rubbish bin, photographed out front of an Adelaide home, had not seen the side of the street in almost a year and a half.
Not because its owner, Trudy Conroy, had been away or started using someone else’s household waste bin, but because she dedicated herself to finding ways to avoid using it.
Ms Conroy, proudly boasted on Sunday she had not put her red bin out for collection in 78 weeks, the equivalent of almost a full 18 months.
Instead, she has committed herself to recycling, composting, buying in bulk, donating and finding places that will accept used goods like spray pumps and toothbrushes.
Speaking with news.com.au, Ms Conroy shared how she managed to avoid using her landfill bin for so long by considering it as a “last resort”.
“Before throwing something out, I always think, ‘what can I do with this before it goes into the red bin?’ The red bin is always my last resort,” Ms Conroy said.
She bought a composter which can take on organics including food scraps and paper, providing it’s been made “soggy”. She also collects a host of household items, like toothbrushes and spray pumps, to hand over to Ecolateral – a South Australian recycling company.
The mixed material goods get sent to TerraCycle and broken down to be processed into other products.
Ms Conroy had also utilised businesses including Officeworks and Mitre 10, which accepted printer ink, batteries and old CDs to be recycled.
For her groceries, she always made sure to have reusable shopping bags on hand, which she said were “really good and weigh nothing”.
“They’re really nice. You pull them out and you feel really good about yourself,” she said.
As part of her research, Ms Conroy was shocked to learn that hard plastic biscuit trays along with plastic containers often used with takeaway sushi, could actually be recycled in the yellow-top household bin.
Even the tiny plastic fish that contain soy sauce could be recycled if they were washed out then put in a larger clear recyclable container like a milk bottle.
“It takes a while to fill them up but then it feels really good when you fill one up then put it in the recycling,” Ms Conroy said.
With two cats for housemates, she found a supplier of kitty litter made from newspaper that would be recycled through the green lid FOGO bin.
“I’m thinking about things more now. So instead of buying lots of bottles, I’ll buy in bulk and, with places like Ecolateral, you can just refill bottles you already have,” she said.
Ms Conroy had also discovered a bottomless pit of people willing to snap up items she no longer wanted on Facebook Marketplace.
For about a year, she has also been collecting spray pumps, toothbrushes and old toothpastes from her colleagues to recycle on their behalf.
In the last three months alone, she had collected at least 60 pump sprays just between her household and her office floor of colleagues.
She had also found programs that recycled medication blister packs, both with mixed material and just foil.
While the RedCycle soft plastic recycling program had been halted following a processing controversy, Ms Conroy was holding onto the soft packaging in preparation for a similar program to be established.
She added it was important the public consider there was no such thing as “away” when they were throwing something in the bin.