What if I forget to take my bags? But what will I use for my bin liner? 

I think we should steer away from putting up barriers after an unusually progressive move from supermarkets, so the answer to the first is easy: you’ll have to pay, giving you a cash incentive to take responsibility for the single-use items you choose to use.

But, thinking about the alternatives for plastic bin liners, I realised I didn’t really know the answer to question number two.

I’d been buying “compostable” bin liners, but recently read that these may be no better for the environment than supermarket plastic bags.

For my birthday a couple of months ago, I asked for a compost bin (yes, really) and this, along with the War on Waste revelation that is soft plastic recycling, really cut down my non-recyclable waste each week. 

Fruit, veggies, egg shells and coffee grounds go in the compost and any soft plastic that can’t go in the yellow-lid bin goes to a RedCycle drop off.

With this system, we had barely been producing a single bag for the red bin, but – each week – were still putting an actual bag – essentially made of plastic – in the garbage.

So, for the past couple of weeks, we have simply USED. NO. BAG.

Yep, that's right - you don't actually need to use a plastic bag to contain your garbage, as it is going in the bin. 

It wasn’t easy to convince my clean freak partner (or my mum, who came over and stared horrified into our bagless bin) to go without but I persisted, and so far, we’re surviving. 

You just have to rinse out the kitchen bin and hose out the red bin every few weeks, and – if there’s something smelly like prawn heads or chicken bones, it can be worth storing them in a container in the freezer until bin night.

Easy.

And if you’re really worried about putting naked food scraps into your dirty old rubbish bin, the solution is here – literally, right here. 

That’s right, you can wrap it in this handily biodegradable newspaper. (Okay, if you're reading online, this shtick totally doesn’t work, does it? You’ll all just have to go and buy the paper!). 

But really, I promise I’m not just trying to drum up sales – some experts even say food scraps stored in paper will smell less than that stored in plastic.