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I also tried a recipe for sweet chilli sauce, so I won't have to buy any more bottled sauce from the supermarket.... not that the sauce I had created that much waste (recyclable glass bottle), but the cap is not recyclable (not an issue if I want to reuse it) and it came with a piece of plastic wrapped around the top of the bottle. But why buy it when you can easily make it cheaper yourself? In the photo below, the commercial sauce is in the saucer on the left, the home made sauce is on the right.
My menu plan for this week is to have in the fridge
- cooked brown rice (heat oil in heavy-bottomed pan add 2 cups of brown rice and stir for 15-30 seconds, add 2 cups water, salt, bring to the boil with lid on, then reduce temperature to low and simmer for 15 mins. Turn element off but leave pot on the element with the lid on. Will be cooked in just over an hour, with all the water absorbed.)
- cooked beans (soak pinto beans over night, drain, put in pot with just enough salted water to cover (this is less than normal), bring to the boil, reduce temperature to low and simmer for 20 mins. Turn element off but leave pot on the element with the lid on. I peeked after 2 1/2 hours, IIRC, when the side of the pot was no longer warm to the touch, and the beans are cooked perfectly, with a small amount of pot liquor still remaining.)
- tinned chopped tomatoes
- sweet chilli sauce
EAT SOME COLOURED VEGES, GIRL!!!! :-)
I made fried rice with egg and veges for lunch, using brown rice I'd cooked by the absorption method last night, and that finished off a bag of frozen mixed vegetables, so the plastic vege bag was also added to the trash. I started to cook some soaked dried black beans today at lunchtime, to use for dinner tomorrow. I brought the beans to the boil in a stainless steel pot, lowered the heat down to 1 and simmered them for 20 minutes, at which point I switched the element off, because I was leaving the house. When I got home again this evening, I set about making a hay box, thinking I'd bring the beans back to the boil again and finish them off in the new hay cooker.
I put it together from stuff I already had sitting around in the garage, so it didn't take too long. I took a 10-gallon Sterilite storage tote which stored Christmas decorations* and packed it with shredded office paper instead of hay. I don't have a Dutch oven, but I do have a billy can used in our camping days, so I packed the shredded paper in leaving a billy-can-sized gap, and stuffed an old pillowcase with the rest of the paper for covering the top of the can. Then I went to transfer the black beans into the billy can, thinking I would heat them up again, and test out my hay box. But they were already cooked! This means that beans that supposedly need to be simmered for 2 hours only needed 20 minutes of actual electricity and then you can just switch the electricity off and let the retained heat do the rest, without even using insulation. I never knew you could cook dried beans, as well as rice, this way.
Only now my hay cooker will have to wait until next week to be tested.
* I'm going to donate these to the Salvation Army or St Vincent de Paul, they are too... meh.
- two books by Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework, and Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash;
- Rubbish!: The Archaeology of Garbage by William Rathje; and
- Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash by Elizabeth Royte.
Two: I came in to the kitchen to find DD peering intently at a packet of frozen chocolate swiss rolls. She had just noticed the small print on the box that said not to store longer than six months. "The only trouble is, I can't remember when I put them in there," she muttered. "There's no date on it". Ha ha, who amongst us doesn't know that feeling? They are Pam's brand, which is the less-cheap of Pak n Save's two house brands, and Pam's is generally trustworthy and not likely to break food regulations, so I took the package and carefully inspected it for the best-by-date. I'd just given up when I spotted it cut into a cardboard flap, i.e. no ink involved and really only visible when the light struck it exactly right. But there it was: BBD170208. OK, so it's Best By Date was 17th February this year, I told her. She looked a little sickly. "Well, don't waste it!" I told her, "I'll eat it if you're afraid to". I didn't really expect her to take me up on it, but after a pause she said, "Go for your life". So if you never hear from me again, I've fallen victim to gluttony and a packet of chocolate swiss rolls. But I think I'll survive - I may have a fragile brain but I have a cast-iron stomach!
Three: SuPerfluous Annoying Marketing award goes to Telecom for yesterday's letter offering a free Telecom Security Suite licence. It's not the unsolicited letter itself I object to, it seems like a good offer (if you're not already covered, which I am, nor do I want an AV solution that's tied to an ISP I look forward to leaving). But stuck to the bottom of the letter is a small (4cm * 2.5cm) plastic doodad that looks like an envelope. DD immediately offered to pay the postage if I would write Telecom a letter returning the seemingly pointless piece of plastic. A surprising offer, which I accepted. "Oh great! I'll bring home a pre-paid envelope home from work then." Zing!
It turns out you can pry open this envelope, and inside it says, "This is how easily an unwanted attachment can sneak in." Ha ha ha. But what's it supposed to prove, really? Curiosity kills the cat? Am I supposed to think, "oohh oohh I'm so dumb because I opened the mystery plastic doohickey, gee I better go download that Security Suite tout suite, because OBVIOUSLY that proves I open all my email attachments willy nilly too!"?
There's no digital quarantine or trash can for the physical plastic payloads your ISP spams you with... there's only the landfill. So one unrecyclable plastic marketing doohickey was added to my trash.
- Mood:
cold
Subject: I'm not quite sure I understand.
It was scary to think how easily that tiny piece of plastic could have gone into the waste water system.
Is this something that would have been awful in its own right? Or is this something that is a minor evil, but the cumulative effect of a lot of small pieces of plastic would be awful?
It was scary to think how easily that tiny piece of plastic could have gone into the waste water system.
Is this something that would have been awful in its own right? Or is this something that is a minor evil, but the cumulative effect of a lot of small pieces of plastic would be awful?
I don't see this as an either-or situation or understand what the definition of "minor evil" would be. The cumulative effect of plastic in our oceans is awful (see Donovan Hohn's Sea of Trash article in the NYT (NYT registration required)) but as far as I can tell, even one small piece of plastic floating around in the ocean has the potential to cause harm to at least one sea creature. Is that awful in its own right? Moreover, I don't see the point of making the distinction. Which is worse, something that's "awful in its own right" or something that's cumulatively awful? Both kinds of awful are worthy of my attention.
Also, what would have happened had your brush been made out of some biodegradable material? Would this have counted as a piece of trash? Would you still have been taken aback at how easy it would have been to wash that bristle down the drain?
If the bristle had been made out of biodegradable material (and since I caught it), I would have added it to the compost. No, a biodegradable bristle wouldn't have counted as a piece of trash; I'm not taking an inventory of everything I compost. Once seen, I wouldn't have just let it go down the drain even if it had been a biodegradable bristle. But if a biodegradable bristle had gone down the drain unseen and made it out into Tasman Bay, at least it would degrade over time, like maritime trash did before we invented plastic. Still, if I decide to retire the current brush (on the grounds that it's better to send it to landfill intact than to let it break into smaller pieces that could get into the waterways, should they get through the screening and grit removal filter at the treatment plant), I will keep durability in mind when shopping for a replacement.
And an unrelated question: How long are you planning to continue this experiment? Are you planning a year of it, with an assessment/review at the end, and a decision about what you will continue doing and what you won't? Or are you seeing it as more ongoing, dropping practices as they stop working for you, adding practices as you can?
I don't think of it as an experiment with a result and a conclusion. There's no question in my mind, or hypothesis I'm testing. In my Weltenschauung, waste and rubbish are Not Good Things, and the less we make them, the better. It's more like a project without an end in my lifetime. I'm not planning on a year of minimising my waste and making a decision at the endpoint. How could I decide not to bother any more?! It's like that Oliver Wendell Holmes quote: "The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size." There's no going back! I'm sure that after a year I will be able to look back on a body of knowledge I've acquired over the year, but finding out what I can and can't do is ongoing.
- Mood: disappointed
Then my mother came around to drop off a couple of cartons of clothes (she cleaned out her wardrobe over the weekend) and drew my attention to a parcel delivery on my front doorstep. It was the coffee grinder I bought second hand off Trade Me. It was packaged in a cardboard box (recycle) stuffed with shredded paper (dampen and add to the worm bin for bedding) and 2 pieces of polystyrene (trash). This box was wrapped in plastic bubble wrap (reuse), placed in a plastic shopping bag (reuse, then trash), which was then wrapped in a paper bag (recycle or compost) and taped up with a lot of plastic packaging tape (trash). It also had a plastic Track and Trace sticker (trash).
DD can pick through the clothes first and see if there's anything she wants. After that, I'm going to try and sell the clothes on Trade Me- some of them still have their tags, and others are size 20 or larger, so I'm hoping there will be a market for those second hand. If they don't sell, I'll take them down to St Vincent de Paul. Mum's too busy preparing for an Alaskan cruise in late August to sell them herself.
I couldn't wait until tomorrow to try out the coffee grinder, so I bought some Va Va Voom Trade Aid coffee beans at Bin Inn, which come from the Resurgence Roastery in Riwaka. It works great!
Retailers not happy about the change.
Meanwhile, in New Zealand....
Say bye-bye to the $1 lightbulb (incandescents banished from store shelves by the end of next year)
The other item is the plastic Easiyo yoghurt base and culture bag which I used yesterday. I hope that by saving half a cup of yoghurt to act as a starter for the next batch, I will be able to continue making my own yoghurt without buying these packages. They're not exactly a money saver either. Each 140g packet makes 1kg yoghurt and this one cost me $2.99 on special. Back in March I could buy 6-packs of 150g (i.e. 900g) yoghurt for $1.99 on special. I estimate if I provide my own starter culture and use milk powder, I can make a kilo of yoghurt for a third of the price of buying the Easiyo mix.
The worms I bought are due to arrive tomorrow! ~500 new sentient beings to care for!
- Mood:number crunching
My first plan of action was to buy a new camera. This camera was already second hand when I bought it three years ago. I fired up Trade Me and quickly found this camera. I was almost about to bid on it when I saw it had had a battery pack replaced in 2007, and it comes with a battery recharger. That confused me, as my camera takes two AA batteries which I just charge separately and replace as needed. I had a closer look at my dying camera, and found a hitherto unnoticed compartment which hid a Lithium 3v battery. Great!, I thought, maybe that's the problem. Just replace that battery and hopefully my camera will be back to normal. So I didn't bid on the TM camera auction.
Meanwhile, DD had her own suggestion. Instead of buying a new camera, we should just share her camera (which she doesn't use that much). That is smart thinking. Maybe there's hope for her after all, LOL. The greenest product is the product you don't buy.
I did buy a replacement Lithium battery, but it's clearly not the point of failure in this camera. It could be replaced with a much better PowerShot for less than it'd cost to repair. But DD's suggestion to just borrow her camera when I need one is the most environmentally sound choice. Not to mention, the most thrifty.
This idea of communal stuff applied to digital cameras feels strange. Because obviously it's a slippery slope to COMMUNISM! I'm used to having the stuff I use being MINE. I'm typing this on MY laptop, for instance. Personal ownership makes sense for 1) stuff I use all the time (like the laptop), 2) stuff I can't borrow easily, or 3) stuff which is truly personal (toothbrush, diva cup, clothes, shoes). A digital camera doesn't fit into any of these categories. On Squalor Survivors, I advocated borrowing stuff rather than buying and storing it in case you needed it ("the fine art of MOOCHING") . But I didn't practice what I preached. Restraining myself from just buying a replacement "MY camera" will be a Do Something Different experience.
Who knows?, once I get used to the idea, maybe it won't be long until I'm rifling through her room to see what other cool stuff she has that I can mooch! I'm just remembering that a couple of weeks ago I recycled a pair of brand new jeans in her direction, so it's only fair....
The whole thing reminds me of an innovative suggestion from one Bright Young Thing:
book rental service?
was just thinking. my sister does -alot- of reading, and spends like $1000 a year on just books alone. most of them she reads once then never looks at again. is there any kind of like…video rental store but for books? would make things alot cheaper, plus once one person had read one the next person can get enjoyment from it etc
I'll put both Lithium batteries in the junk drawer, in case we have some other gadgets that take that size. If not, they'll need to be disposed of separately from general household rubbish. The new battery came in a blister pack, so the plastic blister is trash, while the cardboard backing can be composted. The 16MB flash card from the PowerShot can probably be recycled (even if DD did fall over laughing at how antiquated it was). I think I'll take the camera down to St Vincent de Paul and see if it can be sold or given away as a child's toy. I could tuck a note saying it's non-functional in the battery compartment so no one is misled into thinking it just needs batteries.
MENU
- Breakfast
Porridge, made with rolled oats and sunflower seeds or ground linseed - Lunch
Pasta with rosemary
Fried rice and egg and vegetables
Sandwiches
Pancakes
Mashed potato patties - Dinner
Barley and Lentil Soup with Silverbeet* with wholemeal scones
Lentils, spiced, with Squash and Raisins* over brown rice/quinoa/couscous
Beef stew with lentils, mashed potato - Snacks
Apple
Carrot sticks
Popcorn - Drinks
Tea or Coffee or Hot chocolate
SHOPPING LIST
- Bin Inn
popping corn 370g 1.07
plain flour 610g 1.22
milk powder 560g 6.44
dates 155g .70
cat food 305g 1.61 - Pak N Save
carrots 1.62kg 2.74
yoghurt starter 2.95
tinned tomatoes 800g 1.45 - Freshly Picked
apples * 7 1.30
TOTAL 19.48
Apart from the way trash deliberately placed in my letterbox made me feel personally violated (what am I, society's dustbin?), it's also not very good for my waste minimisation project stats. While the box was made from recycled content, "you can't recycle paper or cardboard contaminated with food or other stuff (like pizza boxes)" (http://www.reducerubbish.govt.nz/recycle/i
Since I can't lay my hands on the [expletive deleted] who lacked the character to take responsibility for their own rubbish and chose instead to put it in my letterbox, I decided to do the next best thing and return the packaging to its evil scumbag source. I unrolled and looked at the packaging and found that the company that is the originator of this trash was Pizza Hut. I rang their 0800 number and found out they have an outlet in Richmond, Nelson. So this afternoon I took the manky pizza-encrusted rubbish back down to that outlet and handed it back to the Pizza Hut staff member on duty.
I told them that their company made millions of dollars (Pizza Hut made $15.2 miilion in the first quarter of this year, $71 million for the past year), generating tons of trash. They leave it to the wider community to bear the cost of disposal of this waste. As a member of that community who chooses to have no customer relationship with Pizza Hut, I decline to participate in off-setting the environmental damage their business causes. I was therefore returning their waste. I thought I did a good job of stating my opposition to the pollution caused by their packaging, without coming off like a crazy person or making any hysterical claims about them killing our planet.
This week, TV3's Target programme looked at fast food litterbugs and what the fast food companies were doing to clean up the problem (i.e., not much) in the Target "Shame On You" segment on the 10th June (video link). So, to Pizza Hut and the jerk who left their trash in my letterbox, SHAME ON YOU!
But, hey, thanks for the blog post material.
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.
2. The sticky tape that blocks the holes on a container of Barkeeper's Friend.
3. Sellotape taped around the corrugated cardoard holding the Eneloop batteries inside the courier envelope. The envelope went into the plastic storage tub I keep in my study which holds packaging for reuse. The corrugated cardboard piece went to the worm bin.
I read today that one super-green Wellington couple is moving to Kaikoura, because Kaikoura has a zero-waste-by-2015 policy, e.g. all types of plastic are accepted for recycling. While living in Wellington, this couple made one council rubbish bag last six months.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/4568375a23918.htm
Eneloop batteries come fully charged and ready to use, so here are bout2's flowers and the shampoo bar....
| DATE | WASTE | FUTURE STRATEGY |
| 5,6,7,8,9 | tampons | use Diva cup |
| 7, 16 | coffee foil bag | drink tea instead, or hot chocolate |
| 10 | plastic bag contained salt | buy in bulk, fill own container |
| 11 | plastic bag contained frozen mixed veges | eat vegetables grown at home |
| 13 | milk powder packet | buy in bulk, fill own container |
| 14 | pizza plastic wrapping | make pizza from scratch |
| 14 | moulded plastic from new watch strap | |
| 14 | bag from salad bananas | |
| 14 | doohickey off cat brush | |
| 15, 16 | plastic wrapper and empty sachet from 2 min noodles | stop buying and eating this crap |
| 16 | 3 staples from thrift shop purchases | recycle |
| 16, 17 | plastic bag from sausages | stop buying and eating this crap |
| 17 | cat poop in Pak n Save bag | stop feeding cat (J/K!!!) vermicomposting sans bag |
| 16 | courier envelope | re-use |
| 19 | ivy, lots | rot it separately in a black plastic bag |
| 19 | dead TV | |
| 19 | rusty 40 gallon drum | replace with plastic water barrel which won't rust |
| 23 | plastic bag from 1.5kg onions | buy loose onions, using reusable produce bag |
| 25 | small piece of rusty wire found on lawn | not likely to be a recurring item hopefully |
| 26 | plastic bag from 500g spaghetti | |
| 31 | empty sachet and ribbon from flower gift |
So I have strategies for 14 waste-generating situations, and drew 6 blanks.
- Mood:
optimistic
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.
- Mood: cheerful
Waste for today: empty plastic spaghetti from 500g spaghetti.
- Mood: full
( Read more... )
- Mood:determined
She says this is environmentally friendly for two reasons:
- No paper ticket is generated, therefore the transaction doesn't create paper waste.
- You don't have to drive to a Lotto outlet to buy your ticket, therefore it has a low carbon footprint.
- Mood: amused
( Read more... )
