I had a hankering to try miso soup, so I headed down to Pakky where I found a packet of 12 individual packets of instant miso soup.  It was only after I'd been through the self-service checkout that I thought about the waste ramifications of what I'd done.

Also, I've gone back to buying my milk powder in foil packets from the supermarket instead of in bulk from Bin Inn because the price of the 1 kilo bags has dropped twice at Pak N Save since November, from $11.25 to $10.25 to $9.25, while the price at Bin Inn remains $11.90/kg.  We were told before Christmas that due to the drop in milk solid prices, we should  expect lower prices at the checkout for dairy products to filter through after Christmas... so I'm a bit disappointed that Bin Inn's price has remained the same.  I don't know if Bin Inn simply want to make extra profit or if their stock is genuinely pre-November; either way, Pak N Save's milk powder seems like a better choice at the moment.

We went to see Wall*E yesterday (didn't enjoy it as much as, say, Ratatouille, in fact I piled up the z's at times) and while I was in town I checked Briscoe's spring sale for coffee plungers, to replace the one that broke.  I was happy to find a stainless steel one (i.e. appears unbreakable!) marked down from $70 to $15.  It wasn't overpackaged either, coming in a plastic bag (trash) inside a cardboard box (compost).  The bus trip home used up the last section on my 10-trip card and I let the driver add it to his rubbish bin.  DD remarked that this was cheating, so I went back up to the driver and retrieved it for my worm bin.  For some reason this totally embarrassed DD.

Today we went to the new Powerstore opening sale - DD was going to look at their mobiles.  I'd wandered off to look at whiteware when she came and told me she'd seen a camera that looked like a good buy to replace my broken Powershot.  It is another Powershot, the A470, which is 7 MP and comes with a 1GB memory card upgrade and a free camera case (supposedly worth $70, wtf!).  It cost $149.  The worst thing about the camera packaging is the clamshell packaging** for the memory card, and that it came with 2 AA alkaline batteries.

** UPDATE: Requested by a reader for re-use, so no longer trash... yay!

I realise now that when I posted a couple of days ago about being one appliance failure away from blowing out my trash stash, I had some kind of magical belief that if I put the possibility into words, it wouldn't actually happen.

Heh.

Last night, out of the blue, the DVD player took an early retirement. I bought a replacement Philips DVD player/recorder this morning. At least it was cheaper to replace than a washing machine! I don't know of any option for e-waste here in Nelson yet. There have been annual e-waste collection days up in Auckland, but most e-waste in NZ ends up in landfill. The dead DVD player won't actually fit into the kitchen rubbish bin, so I'll banish it to the garage until such time as I graduate to a proper rubbish bag.  I've put the packaging from the new DVD recorder in the garage as well, in case I have to use the 2-year warranty.  Rebecca says this is "hoarding and cheating". I say this is just being prepared and organised, as long as you are only keeping boxes from stuff that is actually still under warranty.  (I only have the boxes from my laptop and the DVD recorder, IIRC). What say you?

Interesting information about paper cone packaging and detailed instructions on how to fold them:
 http://home.swipnet.se/roland/conefold.html
Found on The Nappy Network.

I asked DD (5'10") to get down some rolls of TP so I could stock up the drawers beside the toilet. They are stacked two 12-packs high up on the laundry shelf, and so the top row was out of my (5'5") reach. She filled the two lower drawers by the toilet, put the remaining six rolls on top of the other pack, then took the plastic wrapping and added it to her bag of rubbish ("since I'll be the one using it"). I guess that's not exactly cheating, and it was thoughtful of her. Thanks, babe! Mum told me today she thought the toilet cloth was a good idea, which took me by surprise. I underestimate her sometimes(*). Not that I think she's going to go the cloth way herself! She can't even convince her DH to switch to Meridian, let alone cloth TP. It's going to really hurt her each month when she writes that cheque for Contact Energy.

I browsed The Nappy Network forums last night to see if anyone there was going TP-free (I did find rag_grrl_nz , who is using "wee rags"). I'd heard this community was a great resource for sustainable living tips, and as the members are New Zealanders, the info there will be more immediately actionable by me than that found on American blogs. They have an Eco-Friendly Living forum, and a sticky thread titled The Ultimate Eco Website List! A very familiar site showed up in the "household and cleaning stuff" section of the list: Squalor Survivors. :-)

(*) Right after that, though, she told me you can't give someone an empty wallet. (She'd bought her DH a wallet and gave it to him with $200 Canadian in it for when they go on their cruise in August).  "You can't?  Why not?  What will happen?" I asked her.  "Well, you just can't.  Whenever you give someone a wallet or a purse, it has to have money in it".... this segued into a long explanation of how back in the old days they would always make sure a gift of a wallet at least had a penny in it.  I just kept repeating, "Or else....?", until finally she said  the "or else" was that money would just fly out of the recipent's hands thereafter.

I gave DD an empty Toy Story wallet when she was 7 or so, which could explain a great deal... at least, her savings record is no help in debunking the empty wallet superstition!

There are some deprivations I must undergo for my waste project.  I truly regret not being able to bring this packaging home:



Packaging Fail @ Fail blog

1 small supermarket bag, which was being reused as a produce bag, but it's sprung a large hole, so it's R.I.P landfill, for this bag.
1 empty sachet of 2-min noodle flavouring (this is the last of these, ever).
a large PVC plastic clamshell which came with the battery charger*, and threatened bodily harm to me as I attempted to extract the charger, grrr.
a couple of inches of plastic packing tape which was used on the newspaper that was wrapped around the clamshell.

Confounding Gift Packaging (Denver Post, 12/24/2007)

DD said to me recently that she thinks people are hypocrites if they carry reusable shopping bags which obviously have plastic grocery bags stuffed inside them.  Since I am one of those people, I disagree, and I pointed out that she didn't know the history of the plastic grocery bags.  If those people are letting checkout operators shake open a new plastic bag for their purchases and just using the reusable bags as an easy way of carrying several individual plastic bags, then, yeah, someone's thinking is a bit fuzzy.  But if people are reusing grocery bags they already have, or that someone ELSE (ahem!) brought home, as, say, produce bags, or to keep wet stuff separate, then that seems eco-friendly to me.  If you've got them already and have no way to recycle them, you may as well reuse them as long as you can. While not accepting any new plastic bag offers, of course.

*I bought the battery charger off Trade Me because apparently it is not a good idea to charge my new Eneloop batteries in a low-end charger. Both my current battery chargers are low-end Eveready/Energizer chargers. Next step is to off-load both of these chargers on TM.

I received a beautiful floral arrangement this afternoon from bout2! Pink and purple shades (gerberas, if I'm not mistaken, and tulips), with a golden dwarf sunflower for contrast, plus luscious greenery.  It harmonises beautifully with the log cabin quilt I have lying over my favourite chair. 

I wanted to take a photo to share here and on the SS forum, but my camera wouldn't take a photo... hopefully it is just a case of flat batteries, but if that is what's going on, it means these Energizer rechargeable batteries aren't holding a charge for very long at all.  I got them when I got my first optical mouse, sometime in 2002, so they're about 6 years old.

The flowers came wrapped in paper and netting, with a card, instructions, and a sachet of flower food attached.  The paper can be recycled, the netting I hope to remake into a reusable produce bag, and the instruction card can be composted.  There were 4 staples which I think are steel and can be recycled, so I'll start a small container for scrap metal collection in the garage.  So waste for today amounts to the empty plastic teaspoon-sized flower preservative sachet, and the ribbon from the outside of the bouquet.

Speaking of produce, Aberdeen School's principal emailed me back and said they'd be happy to take the fruit stickers off my hands, errr, apples.  I emailed him late last night (Friday) so I wasn't expecting a reply before Monday at the earliest, but there it was in my Inbox this morning.  I guess all that stuff you hear about principals working long hours is true.  I printed out the Yummy sticker collection sheet from their web site and stuck it to the fridge (with the viola magnet Rosebud made and gave to me).  We have 22 stickers for Aberdeen already.  Even DD is buying Yummy apples now.  And the ones that I bought today mysteriously arrived home with TWO stickers per apple.  Like Sergeant Schultz, “I hear nothing, I see nothing, I know nothing!”

I popped into Bin Inn this morning and saw they now have 2 types of dry cat food in stock.  The bin for the cheaper type was emptied out already, so I got a sample of the other type in one of the used zip lock bags I've taken to carrying around with me, to let Milly try it.  I put out bowls of the new cat food and her usual one side-by-side and so far she is showing a definite preference for the new Bin Inn one.  In fact, I could say she's making a pig of herself over it. Whether that's just because it's different or whether it's because it's better, I couldn't say.

I remembered this photo last night when I was thinking about milk.  I'm kind of ashamed to admit this, but realising that I'll have to pay 10% more for my milk to avoid bringing home a foil bag is somewhat painful to my frugal soul.  Do I really care that much about keeping maybe 15 foil bags a year out of the landfill?  It's a rubber-meets-road moment.  

So, thinking through my options sent me back to the time in 1994 when our little family went vegan for a while (after DD, 5, started asking awkward questions about the dairy industry and then announced she wanted no part of it).  I was buying box after box of Sanitarium So-Good soy beverage (for legal reasons they are not allowed to call it milk).  It was an expensive item on my budget then, but anything for my little animal-lovin' daughter.

This chart shows the pattern of packaging consumption, recovery, and disposal in New Zealand over the last 12 years. 


About one eighth of the rubbish we send to our landfills for disposal is used packaging. Each of us throws away 83 kilograms of used packaging every year. 


There's two decision points in the packaging life cycle: whether/how you let it into your life and whether/how you let it out again.

Here's my shopping list for today: