The results from Digital Eskimo’s first (personal) waste audit were quite encouraging.

Digital Eskimo’s staff were to keep all the waste they generated in a week inside a bag on their desktop (except compostable waste). We compared the contents of everyone’s bags at the end of the week and made some interesting findings, the most interesting being that you can in fact generate no waste at all.

No-one had excessive amounts of rubbish or recyclable materials, but our Executive Producer, Penny Hagen, collected only a single bent paper clip. Had she not been so distracted during a conversation she might not have absent-mindedly bent it out of shape and she could have been scott-free for the whole week.

Most of the waste (about 70%) was able to be recycled, which was pleasing to see. But Penny showed us that, with some planning, some tupperware, eating in and remembering to refuse what you don’t need at the till, you can drastically reduce your resource consumption and waste to landfill.