The low-waste week that actually holds up when you're busy

We started this experiment for a dull reason: the recycling was overflowing every Tuesday and nobody could say why. So before changing anything, we spent a week writing down what left the house — by weight, by category, by which room it came from.

What follows is the result of that count, and of the eight weeks after it. It is not a manifesto. It is a set of adjustments, most of them small, one of them genuinely annoying, that together reduced what we sent to landfill by a little over half.

What the first week showed

Food, not packaging, was the largest single category by weight. That surprised us and it surprises most people who count: the visible waste is plastic, but the heavy waste is dinner nobody got round to eating.

Once we knew that, the priorities re-ordered themselves. Buying a set of beeswax wraps would have felt productive; planning Thursday's meal around Tuesday's leftovers was what actually moved the number.

The three changes that stuck

• A ten-minute fridge audit every Wednesday evening, before shopping
• One shelf reserved for food that must be eaten within two days
• A refill run once a month rather than a heroic weekly attempt

What we abandoned

Making our own cleaning paste took forty minutes and cleaned less well than a concentrate we could refill locally. Composting on a third-floor balcony worked until August, then it very much did not. Both are in the count as failures, because the failures are the useful part.