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Long time no blog...

How about an update of good habits and slippage? Where are we over a year after zero waste week?

Food buying habits are still pretty good I think. We still head to the local shops or market as much as we can, and we don't buy much processed food at all. There has been a bit of slippage on the baking front, and a few more cereal bars and similar snacks being bought, but we're back on home made cake this week. Yay! And we still fearlessly laugh in the face of Best Before dates and Consume Within advice, and trust our noses, with no should-have-been-edible food going in the bin. There are a few things that have gone in the compost when they've gone off too soon, pears and satsumas being a bit prone to mouldiness for some reason.

There has been a loss to the eco-shopping scene in Norwich. Wholefood Planet closed this month. I said when I originally blogged about it that it was out of the way, and I think that probably did for it. In an industrial unit down a dead end road on the very edge of town is not the place to open a shop, or a cafe (as they added later). It is a real shame, as it deserved to do well, but it also deserved to be better located for passing traffic and those who don't drive (presumably a fair proportion of their target eco-audience?). I will miss the large packs of wholefoods.

We have reluctantly moved away from the Bio-D washing liquid and softener that came in 25 litre containers and saved us lots of packaging. It was causing huge amounts of what can only be described as gunge in the washing machine. I don't know if it deteriorated because we didn't use it quickly enough, but there were grim mucus-y blobs in the softener, and a similar substance building up in the tray (and presumably in the pipes). We are trying some other eco alternatives including concentrated softener and, I'm afraid, wrapped tablets. Any comments on better-packaged things that work and don't cause gunge?

We had a new situation back in November - workmen in the house. Our old boiler went pop (more like dribble, actually) and so we replaced it with a more efficient one, requiring some changes to the whole heating system. The plumber took away the old boiler, feeder tank from the loft, and the insulated hot water tank from the airing cupboard. But he left behind cardboard and polystyrene packaging, broken tiles, leftover mortar/plaster stuff, assorted screws and general waste. Unfortunately he left it in the recycling bin, since that's outside the front door and the rubbish bin is tucked away behind the garage since we use it less often. So we had to tip up the whole wheelie bin and sort out the contents. Even when I mentioned it to him, MORE waste went in it the next day. ARGH.

There have been some changes to our Freecycle group in that it's become Freegle, but it still works just as well as ever. We had some great publicity in the November 2009 issue of Your Rubbish Your Choice (you can read it online from that link - page 16-17), and once again went to te Norfolk Waste Partnership conference to spread the word. In YRYC you can read about Recycle-PC, who collect all manner of old IT equipment through Freegle, make working systems, and give them away to those who need them - not to mention disposing properly of the bits that are no longer useful. I was really pleased (and not a little surprised) to find out that old PCs from work go to these guys, and passed on a whole vanload of computers to them at the end of the year. I'll be adding some bits of our own as soon as my husband's not looking ;)

The dreaded lurgi

No, I'm not ill - but there's something wrong.

I still carry on my Zero Waste Week habit of baking some sort of tray bake for the week, rather than buy packaged cereal bars etc, but the past two weeks have ended in disaster. Green, furry disaster. Despite being stored in airtight containers, my cakes (banana last week, date and walnut this week) have been showing mould after just 4 days. And I don't mean a mouldy corner that you can cut off before eating the rest of the cake (I'm not squeamish!) - I mean a fine fuzz of filaments across the cake.

At least the birds have had quite a feast!

Both cakes came out quite moist, so I wonder if that is it - in this humid weather I guess any mould spores in the air will just go crazy given some yummy sticky sweet bits to feast on.

I think I will have to bake something I can freeze this weekend - if I take a piece out in the morning it will be defrosted by lunch time. I'm just very annoyed at the waste :(

Keeping tags on rubbish

Thousands of pieces of household rubbish are to be tracked using sophisticated mobile tags (BBC News and MIT press release)

Three thousand smart tags are going to be attached to things being thrown away. OK, so the researchers say that the resource use and manufacturing of the tags is justified by the information that will be gathered, but how does adding a tag this size (we're not taking a James Bond micro-gadget here) not contaminate the recycling stream of whatever it's attached to? One of the items mentioned is garden waste - I don't think they will compost, somehow. And the tag is made of electronic components, which are hard enough to reprocess thanks to all the toxic metals and so on.

"We hope that Trash Track will also point the way to a possible urban future: that of a system where, thanks to the pervasive usage of smart tags, 100 percent recycling could become a reality," says research assistant, Musstanser Tinauli.

Hang on - I can accept that for one research project it could be a good idea to track a load of rubbish. Pervasive (i.e. much wider) use of smart tags does not, to me, seem to be the way to go. Tags tell you where your stuff has been (if you care) when it is/after it has been there. What needs to happen is that the information from the research project needs to be used to identify where the biggest improvements to recycling flows can be made, so that consumers who do throw things away don't have to worry about it - as long as they put them in the appropriate bin, they are dealt with properly. There's no need to tag everything!

(Of course this research should also just be a part of the bigger picture, where efforts are also put into reduction and re-use so that there is less to recycle anyway, rather than reinforcing the idea of "I recycled it, so that's OK" regardless of whether or not the item was actually necessary in the first place, or still had useful life left in it.)

Concerns aside, I'll be interested to see where the tags end up, at what point they get removed (will they be crushed and melted down if attached to a glass bottle? Will they get recycled themselves if they are on other electronic equipment? What happens when an item is split up, e.g. mobile phone into plastic casing, screen and circuitry?), and whether the information gathered matches up with what we think we know from the conventional records of where particular waste streams go. It could shed some light on the old "recycling collected by X council actually goes to landfill" stories we see in the media from time to time. But as ever, the important thing is then what's actually DONE with the information...

What a waste

There is a by-election coming up in Norwich following the de-selection of Ian Gibson. I am not in that constituency, so have been spared the doorstepping and reams of leaflets that are no doubt clogging the recycling bins of Norwich North as I type, but I still see things in the local media.

Like this:

With piles of election leaflets landing on the doormats of families in Norwich North, one candidate has hit on a way to stand out from the rest - he has posted a DVD of his election address to just under 80,000 voters.

(Update: I had a link to the Evening News story, but it's now gone.)

Good grief. How many of those will even get watched? Even if they do I doubt they will be kept as a cherished souvenir. But can they be easily recycled? No. So all eighty thousand of them will end up in landfill. Wonderful.

Are you ready, fact fans?

A stack of 25 DVDs on my desk is 12cm in diameter and 4cm high, so has a volume of about 450 cm3. 80,000 will have a volume of 1,440,000 cm3 or 144 m3. That's just under an quarter of the volume of the shallow pool at the Sportspark (1.2m x 25m x 8 2.5m lanes). Or, since a quick Google (I have no scales!) informs me that 50 DVDs weigh about 900g, that means 80,000 of them have a total weight of 1440kg, i.e. 1.4 tonnes.

What a colossal waste of resources. Grr.

LFHW - wrapping it up with soup

So, my week of LFHW blogging comes to an end. This morning I was out on a bike ride, much tougher than expected thanks to the incessant headwind for the first 25 miles, and so I had a bit of emergency refuelling to do. This would not have been the case had I not let us get into the parlous state of having NO CAKE in the house when I left. No cake!! I rectified that this afternoon, making the parsnip cake that horrified Mrs Green with its lack of butter and eggs. I can confirm it is still very much delicious, proved by the fact that I seem to have eaten four pieces. Oops...

So how's our waste total for the last day?

Breakfast: same as Monday, porridge/cereal and tea.
Food-related waste: a teabag.

Lunch: The other half of yesterday's soup, and an individual fondant fancy wedding cake each, from yesterday.
Packaging waste: paper cake case.

Snacks: banana, cereal/fruit/nut bar, bottle of fruit juice, lots of home made cake and tea.
Food-related waste: banana peel, more teabags.
Packaging waste: plastic wrapper, plastic bottle and lid.

Dinner: Roast pork fillet, roast potatoes and parsnips, carrots and peas; stewed rhubarb and yoghurt.
Food-related waste: a few manky bits off the potatoes, parsnip peelings, rhubarb trimmings.
Packaging waste: thin plastic bag from pork.

Compostable food waste: 145g.
No non-compostable food waste.
Recyclable packaging: 2g (cake cases).
Non-recyclable packaging: 45g (plastic bag, wrapper, bottle*).

*sadly I just wasn't able to carry the juice bottle home to recycle, and there was no recycling bin in the village where I bought it, so I've counted it as non-recyclable.

This brings the total for the week to:

Compostable food waste: 1890g
Non-compostable food waste: 433g
Recyclable packaging: 1282g
Non-recyclable packaging: 133g
Grand total: 3738g



So, of all my directly food-related waste, 85% (by weight) has been composted or recycled. I could only make serious inroads on that with something like a bokashi bin (worth it for less than 500g?). I hold my hands up to one "could have been eaten but wasn't" item (the sauerkraut) but overall I think those numbers are not too bad at all. The secret? Just a little bit of forward thinking:

• Plan it! Think about your shopping before you go, and think in terms of meals rather than individual items. Look for links between meals to help you use all of an ingredient if you can't buy exactly how much you want.

• Get friendly with your freezer. Use it to store up whole meals or excess ingredients (if they will freeze), and use it to help you save time and effort through cook-once-eat-twice thinking.

That's my LFHW week over, but the campaign continues, and if you can count on anything at all you can count on there being more low-waste and leftovers recipes appearing on this blog as it continues!

That was Christmas...

As the waste blog world is summarising its collective Christmases, I thought I would join in!

We had a pretty low-key Christmas, thinking we would try it at home on our own this year - it was nice, although the family visiting season is now much extended into January. I'm not counting those as Christmas (is that cheating? :)

Our tree is plastic (gasp) but was bought back in hubby's bachelor days and therefore nothing to do with me :) It's decent quality, and will see us through several more years, so I think for now we'll leave the pine needles on the trees in the woods, and not on our carpet. We splashed out on decorations and bought 2 (count 'em) new baubles, loose, which were wrapped in tissue paper. What we didn't do was put our unwanted old decorations on Freecycle - next year!

Pressies given were mainly home baked goodies (gingerbread and shortbread) in cardboard gift boxes. There was barely any non-recyclable waste apart from some butter wrappers and a sugar bag. I chose to use greaseproof paper when packing them, to avoid greasy marks on the gift boxes and make them reusable, but that itself can't be recycled. Choices! We also gave some charity gifts from Good Gifts, gift vouchers, and books.

We'd asked for no pressies, still got a few but they were remarkably good on the whole and included a pretty tin with home made fudge (yum!) and a large Toblerone with cardboard and foil packaging (well thought out, Alex!). Other things like silicone bakeware, a running top and some books all had minimal or no packaging, mostly cardboard. However, special mention has to go to the best and worst packaged items:

• Best: six bottles of good beer from my brother, in a re-used cardboard box, packed with recycled brown paper packing. A consumable present in fully recyclable packaging and wrapping! Bonus points for delivering it in a reusable hessian bag.
• Worst: sad to say it was a Hotel Chocolat Dark Chocolate Immersion box from hubby. Six tablets each of six types of plain chocolate... all individually wrapped in plastic, held in a plastic tray, in a cardboard box that was wrapped in film. (Note that the packaging is not fully shown on the website...)
  

I do appreciate that the flavour is the key with the chocolate (the box came with tasting notes) and so you wouldn't want the types affecting each other - there were ginger, orange and chilli flavours as well as three types of "just chocolate". And the chocolate is absolutely heavenly (yes, there is some left! On twelfth night!). But it is a little bit of a shame to see so much packaging and I have to confess to a brief twinge of disappointment on seeing it (the packaging, not the chocolate). Now that sounds rather mean, and I have to stress that it's no reflection whatsoever on the giver - the scale of packaging simply wasn't apparent until opening. And I suppose if anything I am even more determined to savour and enjoy the contents so that the packaging was not in vain ;)

Food was also a reasonable success. All the fruit and veg came from the greengrocer in paper bags or no bags at all. We visited another local butcher for all our meat, and so there was a small amount of thin plastic waste but no trays or other packaging. We bought a turkey crown and boned ham, so there was minimal food waste there - in fact minimal food waste overall. I didn't get around to making mince pies or bread, so we bought those and a few other sweet and treat bits, and therefore had a few bits of plastic to deal with.

I haven't weighed it all but in a qualitative sense I feel like it's not a bad showing. A bit more planning next year and I'll get those mince pies and snacks sorted too :)

Paying and throwing and wondering

There's an interesting post by Mrs Green over on My Zero Waste, about a radio programme discussing Pay As You Throw in response to a government pilot scheme. Quite a range of views were represented, but the thing that really stood out for me was the show's presenter saying from the start that this is a good idea. With all the moaning, knee-jerk, "stealth tax", "it's what I pay my council tax for" reactions that usually make their way into any debate on this subject, it's quite different to see the positive viewpoint put forward so clearly!

That said, I have a bit of an internal disagreement over how I feel about introducing PAYT. It would work if everyone actually cared and understood that we need to reduce waste. But not everyone understands or cares. Some just don't give two hoots, and some people seem to be actively against the idea that we should put less stuff in the bin (possibly an automatic reaction to what they see as nanny-state-ism). I am definitely worried that PAYT would lead to more flytipping problems and people's bins being "hijacked" by others with more waste. Education and awareness raising can go some way to help, and some councils are very successful at prosecuting flytippers, but I do feel there is a core of quite solid resistance that will be hard to overcome.

In any case, it looks like there is no interest in PAYT in Norfolk at the moment, according to this article in the local press. South Norfolk says "people don't want it", Broadland says it's "unpopular and costly" (and with their great food waste scheme their recycling rate already tops 50%), and Norwich says it's "just another tax", and it would be more interested if the scheme was based on rewards rather than penalties. No council wants to antagonise their residents, naturally. However the national survey quoted in the same article says that over 70% of people thought either carrot or stick would work - incentives would encourage them to recycle more, and penalties would make them "be more careful about creating waste". Over 50% of respondents thought that a link between amount of waste and amount paid would be fair.

I wonder if the councils have fallen victim to the phenomenon that often affects "what do you think?" consultations? If you get a bit of publicity about the prospect of PAYT (as we have had locally due to South Norfolk Council having microchipped bins, although the chips are no longer used), then people who feel really strongly will contact the council and complain. I doubt there is anyone who feels as strongly pro-PAYT as some people are anti it! However, when a national market research company (NOP) does a proper survey, approaching over 1,000 people and asking what they think, I think I'm more inclined to trust their results.

It has been acknowledged that the South Norfolk trial was not successful, for various reasons including the unreliability of equipment. But the fact remains that other countries do use PAYT. So the question is how? Can our apparently immovable national trait of being rubbish (ha ha) at governmental IT projects ever be overcome? We can talk about it until we are blue in the face (and believe me I think talking about this issue is a good thing), but unless implementing it is actually a practicality, should we redirect some of our effort to other solutions?

Last word on this comes from a letter in the Times. And it's a good point. In Waste Free Week I reduced the weight of my waste by 25% (that sounds quite pathetic now!) but the volume of waste was reduced by 70-75% as far as I can visually estimate. When you think in terms of bin lorry trips and landfill sites, it's clear that volume is more important. But as my estimate just here shows, it's easy to measure weight and harder to get a quantitative measure of volume for such a random and irregular thing as a bag of rubbish. There have been arguments over this in the past, suggesting that councils concentrate on collecting heavier recyclables like glass as they are better for meeting purely weight-based government targets. It's worth thinking about - how can we really measure the reduction we are looking for here?

Waste free week summary

It was all going so well until I was derailed by that damn duck yesterday.

Our Waste Free Week total is.... (drumroll)...

Everything Else: 308g (plus one large and two small plastic cups, a plastic fork and some disposable chopsticks while out and about - so call it 350g?)

The Duck: 675g (tray, film, giblets bag, carcass, skin, and a yoghurt pot full of fat) - that's nearly twice as much as the whole rest of the week! The whole duck when bought was 1.9kg + packaging so that's 33% unavoidable waste.

Overall total 1.025kg, but in a much smaller bag (left) than last week's 1.4kg (right). I've filled in my record sheet - have you?


Reflecting on the week, then... going waste free really does come down to planning and thinking things through. You have to be on the ball and taking waste seriously all of the time. One dodgy decision can put paid to a lot of previous careful behaviour!

Of course, you can't change 100% in a week. It takes time to work through what's already in the cupboards and to change ingrained habits. But the good effects of this week's shopping will carry forward, as there are fewer waste-heavy items in the fridge and cupboard waiting to be used up.

I still have to get myself sorted to take advantage of a few more waste-free tricks (yogurt maker, more tupperwares to take to the butcher, maybe a bokashi bin). And I think there are some things that cause waste I'll just have to accept for the moment - for example, boxed pasta is much more expensive than the stuff in a bag, and it is hard to get wholewheat pasta in either boxes or in bulk, but it is a real staple food for us. But the week has definitely opened my eyes to exactly what I would have to change and do without to be truly waste free. That's a big step at the moment, and I am not sure we are ready to go that far, but if even everyone just did "the easy stuff" that we've tried, think of the difference it would make!

Well done and thanks to all the waste free bloggers who've been writing and commenting this week - I hope there might still be at least the occasional post from all of us as waste free week recedes into history? A slim bin is for life, not just for a week in late October ;)

Benchmark

It's sort of a benchmark, anyway. The bin bag that went out this morning (before any more waste was generated!) contained 1.4kg of waste. I think it might stretch back beyond last Sunday (as I wasn't organised for WFW then!), but let's call it a week's worth. That's for a household of 2 adults. It's quite a big bag as it is mostly unsquashed plastic with some non-compostable food waste (fish skin and chicken bones).

Photo to follow. Can you contain your excitement?

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