The Rubbish Trip offers:
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Presentations, workshops and resources to help individuals and businesses to reduce their rubbish.
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Grassroots zero waste advocacy.
Get in touch if you’d like us to deliver a talk for your community or workplace, or to collaborate on a project that will help Aotearoa move towards zero waste!
Our presentations, resources and research are informative (we don’t pull any punches!), but hopeful. All our mahi is grounded in our own personal experience of walking the talk. We started living without a rubbish bin at the beginning of 2015. We have a can-do attitude to reducing rubbish and want to show people how easy, fun and fulfilling waste reduction can be!
The two Helping Humans behind The Rubbish Trip are us – Hannah Blumhardt and Liam Prince.
Our origin story:
At the beginning of 2015 we made the life-changing decision to start living without a rubbish bin. We were spurred by concern about ocean plastics, the staggering waste of energy and resources associated with producing and managing disposable products, and how throwaway, high-consumption culture is shaping community mindsets and living spaces.
In Plastic Free July 2016, we began talking to community groups, schools, businesses and households about how to reduce rubbish, and why it is important. A year later we decided to step things up a notch and start The Rubbish Trip.
Between July 2017 and March 2020, we lived on the road full time, taking our FREE flagship zero waste presentation to every corner of the country! In less than 3 years we delivered over 400 presentations to over 20,000 people.
Along the way, we met so many extraordinary people and organisations who work, day-in and day-out to make Aotearoa the best place it can be, for people and planet. We share a snapshot of some of these people through our podcast, and through our Regional Zero Waste Guides, both of which you can find right here on our website!
While we no longer live on the road full-time, we continue to work on zero waste projects non-stop! We still deliver our FREE flagship presentation for the public (check our upcoming events or get in touch if you’d like us to speak where you live). We also offer workplace presentations too, and can be booked for one-off speaking engagements.
If you’d like to work with us on zero waste policy, advocacy and research, we do this too – just get in touch!
Hello, loved your story. We are a family of 5 who are committed to reducing our waste – we minimise packaging, reuse recycle compost etc but would love to learn more and also get more people on board. Are you coming to hawkes bay? Would love to help you organise a talk or what ever- thanks also for the links – will look them up. Thx Heidi
Kia ora Heidi, Thanks so much for your message! And ka pai hoki koe for your waste reduction efforts – particularly as a family of 5! We are so inspired by families who reduce waste – whole heap of different challenges there and so much we can learn from you about your experiences 🙂 We would love to come to the Hawkes Bay, for sure, and it’d be fantastic to have help getting a talk organised. I’ve just realised we haven’t got our contact details on the site (whoops!!) – I’ll upload that now, but if you could either send us a private message on our FB page (www.facebook.com/therubbishtrip) or email us at blumhardt.hannah@gmail.com, then we can go from there. How exciting!
Hi guys! We have been a zero waste household for about a year now. We would love you to come to Christchurch! Is that going to be part of your trip?
Hi Angela – awesome to here about your zero waste efforts! We are super heartened whenever we meet people who are doing this too! We are definitely keen to come to Chch, and have had a few people in Chch asking if we are coming – sounds like there’s already heaps of people doing great things in Chch, which is fantastic 😀 We are going to be in the NI first (just because that’s where we are now and also the very pragmatic reality that we are starting in winter and cycling a lot, ha!) – doing a bit of a loop up from Wellington and then down again. So it may be a few months yet – but we definitely will not be neglecting the SI – promise! We should keep in touch. I’m going to upload our FB and contact details on to the website shortly, so if you get in touch with us there then we can maintain contact. Thanks so much for your message!
Having been to Hannah and Liam’s talk last night on Waiheke I have successfully cleaned some of my windows and paintwork with, firstly just a DRY recycled cloth (made from an old nightie) and when needed 1 or 2 drops of lemon juice. at a time. Just held the slice of lemon and squeezed onto cloth as necessary!
[…] They created an A-Z relevant to NZ waste reduction. Another couple, who are on a nationwide “Rubbish Free trip” at the moment, were in Thames in August and have produced a Coromandel specific guide to zero […]
I am about to embark on my goal of reducing my waste and am excited for your talk in Dunedin come April this year! Any tips for beginnings, keeping in mind I’m a student with very little money? 🙂
Kia ora Greer – so cool to hear that you are on a mission to reduce your waste 🙂 We look forward to meeting you in Dunedin! Everyone’s life is different so we can give you tips but what is easiest for your context may differ a bit to ours. We would recommend carrying around reusables with you so you can avoid disposables (spare bags, cups, cutlery, container for takeaways/food – you don’t have to run out and spend heaps on things, just look around your house for things you already have – for ages we just used an old ice cream container to get takeaways and old reusable plastic bags we had from before ditching our rubbish bin, for bulk shopping), and trying to buy items that are unpackaged where possible instead of the packed ones (so loose fruit and veges/basic ingredients – when we get to Dunedin we’ll do a full summary of all the low-waste stores we find, but you may be aware of some already). Some other great waste-reducing and money saving things to do are to make your own toiletries and basic foods – store bought premade things cost heaps, come in crazy packaging and often have all kinds of chemicals/preservatives in them (our Bare Essentials recipe e-booklet covers basic recipes for toiletries which we find both cheap and quick to make – you can find it on our website). For other resources, you might be interested in the instagram account Plastic Free and Pinot Gris – run by a couple of Dunedin students who share their plastic-free living discoveries and showing it’s possible to reduce waste on a student budget in Dunedin. In relation to very little money, our experience has been that we have saved a lot of money by reducing our waste – the bigger issue is really the perception of time poverty (people often feel they don’t have time to make some of the changes that low-waste living involves, even though it is more affordable) – we found the lifestyle isn’t more time consuming once you get used to it, but it takes a bit of getting used to, so probably a good idea to start over the summer holidays before uni starts again! Looking forward to meeting you in April – by then you’ll probably be a total pro 😀
Hi Liam and Hannah… so enjoyed your presentation today at the Nelson Library having embarked on my zero waste journey your ideas and experiences have inspired me even more.
Took it to another level last Xmas with the family who all received home made gifts(the best I think) including a scrub using old coffee grounds! Got them thinking too about how we
can reuse,reduce etc. My strong committment to these principles has extended into my work as an Artist(Facebook Suburban Artist NZ) and I reuse,upcycle any resources I can lay my
hands on. Your roadshow was brilliant so thanks once again. Also loved the fact that choosing this way of life has resulted in you both discovering hidden creative talents.
Kia ora Sue – thanks for the kind words, and so cool to hear about your home made gifts! We totally agree that homemade are the best 🙂 I hope your family loved them. The discovery of creative and tactile worlds is such a bonus for us in this lifestyle. Really cool to hear about your approach to art. Such a gift to be able to see the potential in resources that others might dismiss or discard. You might be interested in the upcycling stations that some recycling centres are developing. We’ve seen a couple already – one at Xtreme Zero Waste in Raglan, and one in development at the Seagull Centre in Thames. Thanks for sharing your FB page, we will look it up, and hope others do too. Arohanui – H & L
Hi Hannah and Liam
I really liked your presentation at the Rai Valley Library. – Very inspiring! The idea always to take your own cup with you, very easy and brilliant! I will do that …
I wish you all the very best for your trip! – You will give heaps of people something to think and ponder on.
Thank you very much for your commitment!
Rose Marie
Thanks Rose Marie! It was so great to meet you – thanks heaps for coming. It was our pleasure to do a talk in Rai Valley 🙂 Hope to meet again in the future!
H & L
I loved your talk at James Hargest last Friday. It was cool.
Thanks for sending us this message, Liam! We had such a great time coming to talk at James Hargest, it was awesome. Hope that you’ll be able to do some cool waste-reducing stuff at the school. You’ll have to keep us updated – if you do anything that works well then we can pass it on to other schools to try also 😀
Good luck with the waste reduction!
H and L
We went to your event at the wonderful Beetroot, in Motueka last Sunday, and we found your talk very inspiring and inspirational. You mentioned a lot of local stockists of various products and talked about your Regional Stockists on your website. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find a section for the Tasman District. Am I looking in the wrong place? In particular I would like to know the stockists in Nelson that have loose leaf tea and the shop that has essential oils where you can have refills?
Kia ora Carol, thanks for your message. Our regional shopping guides are in the Resources section of our website (click the Resources and Media tab), but for ease of reference, here is the landing page: http://therubbishtrip.co.nz/regional-shopping-guide/regional-zero-waste-shopping-guides/
All the best!
H and L
Kia ora,
Inspiring to read about your initiatives. Rangi Ruru Girls’ School in Christchurch is committed to reducing waste. We have reduced waste to landfill by 58% in the last three years. We have an extensive reuse programme and support teracycle, donating money from this programme directly to Cool Earth, a proven effective charity who help communities stay living in rainforests. We have a strong social conscience and are a Fairtrade School, have Meatless Mondays and our kitchen buys only free range eggs. We have a worm farm, a large, lush herb garden for the kitchen and nutrition classes to use, grow some vegetables and fruit onsite and are currently looking to get a beehive. Our milk bottles and egg cartons are reused by our local suppliers. Our kitchen cooks beautiful healthy meals onsite using fresh ingredients and we are a water only school, encouraging students to bring their own reusable bottle. In getting rid of drinks and packaged food from our cafe and boarding house and committing to compostable cutlery and plates and cups for soup in our cafe, we have dramatically reduced waste. To separate waste at the source, we use the easirecycling system with compostable coloured bags or collection bins indicating – blue for reuse, green for compost, yellow for recycling and red for landfill. We are hoping to put in a system in the next three years to use our compost and some recycling to produce and meet our energy needs onsite and allow us to become self sufficient. Last year we became carbon neutral. We are proud of our progress, but would love to have you come and talk to the school about ways to further reduce waste. Our Environment Group and Sustainability Council are very proactive and attend local sustainability hui and community events and run events at school, including workshops on making your own cosmetic and cleaning products.. Our boarding house has recently got rid of all harsh cleaners and are exploring more environmentally friendly options, also reducing waste. Students produce a magazine called Shelter. This has a national audience. It would be great to interview you both for a feature article on your zero waste life style and how you achieve this. Please let me know if you would be interested in coming to Rangi Ruru. Our school has 640 students Year7-13. We have assembly on Monday and Friday afternoons. Ngā mihi,
Kind regards,
Kate Rivers (Director of Sustainability and Leader of Visual Arts Faculty)
what do you do with all the rubbish you save
Kia ora Omar, thanks for your message! We try really hard not to have any rubbish in the first place – so the idea behind ‘zero waste’ is that we don’t have any rubbish to put anywhere (just like all the other creatures on the planet who don’t have rubbish bins!). In almost four years, the two of us have made about 5.5kg of household rubbish, which is about one shopping bag of rubbish (to put this in perspective, most couples in nz, in the same amount of time, would produce a tonne or a tonne and a half of household/kerbside waste). This rubbish we produce we keep for about a year or so in a box or similar, then we weigh it before we send it to landfill – we keep it and weigh it so that we can keep track of the waste we produce, and also so we can reflect on what is in there at the end of the year, to understand how we can improve. Hope that answers your question!
[…] learnt a lot of this from The Rubbish Trip (https://therubbishtrip.co.nz/about/). They’re a young couple who have been Zero Waste for almost 2 years and presenting talks […]
[…] years ago this month I attend a talk by The Rubbish Trip on zero waste, which gave me the practical insight to be able to start my Zero plastic year a few […]
Dear Liam & Hannah
My daughter attended your talk in Dunedin recently and was impressed enough to pass on your website details to me here in the UK. There’s a growing interest here in reducing our impact upon the Earth and reducing waste especially plastic. I had a look at your website and took up the idea of the citrus cleaning spray which is ‘cooking’ in my pantry at the moment. I have posted your website details onto our village and surrounding area Neighbourhood Nextdoor website (a local website where neighbours only share information) and it is one of the few things I have posted to receive positive comments. I am hoping to spread your word here in Worlingworth, Suffolk, England!
Kia ora Diana!
Wow, thanks for this lovely comment from the other side of the world – what a wonderful thing to read! How’s the citrus cleaning spray going? We’ve got one on the windowsill at the moment too. We read somewhere recently too that you can keep the discarded peels and then blend them up with a bit of water to make a paste and this makes a great Jif alternative and degreaser for washing dishes… (!) So we’re going to try that this time and see how it goes 😀
So great to hear that your sharing our post on the Neighbourhood Nextdoor website attracted positive comments. We’d love to help out with spreading the word and also learning more about what’s happening in this space in Suffolk! We’ve been hearing that there is a slow uptake of zero waste stores in the UK, but perhaps not quite as fast as continental Europe. But no reason why that couldn’t change! We’ve also seen that there’s been some interesting legislative activity coming out of England in terms of phasing out single-use plastics. So that’s also encouraging and we’re certainly watching that from afar.
Thanks again for leaving us a comment – we love to get messages like this 🙂
All the best – H and L
Hi guys this is the group from Borough. We are just letting you know you gave us heaps of information and if there is anything else you think we should know, contact us one of us through gmail: Guineverefaichnie@gmail.com thankyou.
Hey you three! Sorry we missed your comment. Hope the project went well! Let us know if we can help in any other way – we are looking more into the connection between climate change and waste + plastic now that the Climate Change Commission has released its advice to the government!