First month
Zero waste starter guide
The shortest route to a first month of changes, with zero waste tips for beginners and nothing that needs new equipment.
Read the starter guide
About this guide
Who writes this manual
Rubbish Rebels is a UK guide to zero waste living and upcycling what you already own. It is written by people who have run their own bins and given up on the swaps that did not survive a normal week.
Most zero waste advice assumes you have money, space and time in quantities most people do not.
Read how we research a pageWho runs the site
Rubbish Rebels is run by a small editorial team based in the UK. We test the setups we write about in our own homes: flats, shared houses, kitchens with limited storage, gardens and balconies. Some of us compost with a council collection, some with a bokashi bin, some with a garden bin. The advice on this site reflects that range, not a single setup.
If you want to know who specifically is behind a page, write to us and we will tell you. We do not write under pseudonyms. That matters for a low waste home guide: if a method fails in a small Bristol flat, we say so rather than repeating it because it reads well on a landing page.
- Where we test
- Flats, shared houses and rented kitchens across the UK
- What we compost
- Council collections, bokashi bins and garden bins
- How to reach us
- Send a question
Research standard
How we research guidance
Every page starts with a specific question a UK household actually has: what to do with soft plastics, how to compost food scraps at home without a garden, whether beeswax wraps usage and care is worth the effort, how to buy in bulk without wasting. We answer the question first and the background after.
- We check council guidance for recycling and food waste rules, because these vary by borough and the wrong information wastes people's time.
- We read UK packaging and recycling material from government sources where it is relevant to a swap or a plastic free alternative.
- We talk to readers who have run the setups we describe, and where a method has known failure points, we name them instead of hiding them.
- Where the evidence is unclear, we say that. Where a topic is genuinely contested, we describe the disagreement rather than inventing one correct answer.
We do not claim to be scientists and we have not run studies. Our pages are reading notes from ordinary kitchens, cross-checked against public guidance before they go live.
How we stay independent
No ads, no sponsorship, no commission
Rubbish Rebels does not take advertising, sponsored content or affiliate commission. If you click through to a shop from anything on this site, we do not earn money from it, because we do not run those links. When we mention a specific product type, it is because the method works with it, not because we have a deal with a brand.
If this ever changes on a future page, the change will be labelled on the page itself, not only in the footer. We would rather lose the placement than surprise a reader who came here for sustainable shopping tips.
The line we hold
A mention is a method note, never a payday.
That is why the pages read the same whether a product is easy to find or hard to find. Findability is not our ranking system.
What we do not do
Some of these would be easier to sell. They would also be less useful.
No kits, no boxes
We do not sell starter kits or run a subscription. A zero waste starter kit is something you assemble from what your kitchen already has.
No brand certifications
We do not certify brands and we do not call any product the greenest of its kind. A badge from a guide site is worth nothing to you.
No borrowed proof
We do not use claims like "scientifically proven" without a named source, and we do not invent numbers to make a swap look bigger.
No zero-waste promises
We do not promise the site will bring you to zero waste. That is not realistic for most UK households, and chasing it is often what makes people stop.
No household-alone story
Household waste matters, and so does the packaging that arrives at your door, which is largely decided upstream. We say which parts you can change and which you cannot.
No hidden placement
Nothing on this site is paid for by a brand and left unlabelled. If that ever changes, the page will say so at the top, in plain words.
Four ways in
Where to start
You do not need to read the whole site. Most people get the biggest result from one or two pages.
Kitchen
Kitchen swaps and storage
Zero waste kitchen swaps, plastic free food storage and eco friendly kitchen cleaning that survives a busy week.
See the kitchen swaps
Making
Upcycling projects
Creative upcycling ideas, how to upcycle glass jars, repurposing old clothes and upcycled home decor DIY with tools you own.
Browse upcycling projects
Food scraps
Composting at home
Composting food scraps at home without a garden, including the smells, the pests and the fixes that actually work.
Start composting food scraps
Shopping
Shopping and bulk buying
Sustainable shopping tips, how to buy in bulk and a reusable produce bags guide that fits an ordinary weekly shop.
Plan a low waste shopStuck on something?
Send the question directly. Reader questions are where most of our new pages come from.
Corrections and updates
Keep us accurate
UK recycling rules change. Council collections change. Where we know a page may have drifted out of date, we update it and note the change on the page. We would rather fix a page than leave it wrong, because a stale rule costs you a trip to the kerbside with the wrong bin.
Spot something wrong, particularly a council-specific rule? Send it to us with the borough and the page name.
We do not track individual readers with anything that identifies you. See the privacy and cookie policies for details on what is collected and why.
Questions readers send
The three we get most often, answered the same way we would answer them by email.
Do you earn money from the site?
No. Rubbish Rebels does not take advertising, sponsorship or affiliate commission. If this ever changes for a specific page, it will be disclosed on that page rather than buried here.
Who writes the guides?
A small UK-based editorial team. We test the setups we write about in our own homes, and we say so where a method has known limits. Sustainable lifestyle habits are easy to describe and harder to keep, so the notes come from ordinary weeks rather than ideal ones.
Can I suggest a topic?
Yes. Send it through the contact page. Reader questions often become new guides, and a question about how to reduce household waste in a specific kind of home is more useful to us than a general request for more content.
Write to the people who write the pages
There is no call centre behind this site. Questions, corrections and topic suggestions come to the same small team, which is why asking about the specifics of your home gets a better answer than asking for a general rule.
Rubbish Rebels
- 42 Greenfield Lane, Bristol, BS5 6TY, United Kingdom
- +44 117 496 0283
- [email protected]
- Monday to Friday, 9:00 AM – 6:00 PM. Saturday, 10:00 AM – 2:00 PM.
Start with one page, not the whole site
Pick the page that matches the problem in front of you. Eco friendly living ideas only matter if you can keep them going past the first fortnight.