The Blue Planet Effect

I’m loving the Blue Planet Effect. Never before has plastic packaging had so much attention.

But I’m noticing that people are sometimes deciding to ditch single use plastic in favour of other forms of single use packaging, which can be more carbon intensive to produce. Paper, glass, and compostable packaging are undoubtedly less damaging to the ocean.  But all packaging comes with its own issues.

Plastic has become a popular packaging because it is lightweight, which reduces the carbon footprint of transportation.  Plastic is cheap, which helps keep prices low.  Plastic is waterproof (until it rips!) so helps with deliveries that could otherwise be spoiled by rain. Some advocates of plastic say it helps to reduce food waste. For example, plastic packaging (of the airtight kind) can help prevent oxidation which leads to discolouration of foods such as meat or avocados.  It is said that cucumbers are wrapped because it slows down the rot, making them last 10 days longer (as long as you don't open the plastic, I guess).  As I read on one pro-plastic website:

"Try as we might, we will always create some waste. In the end,

 which would we rather create – a little bit of plastic waste or a lot of food waste?"

They've got a point, of course, but we won't mention the tonnes of wonky cucumbers that get wasted because they are not the right size and shape to go through the packaging machine.

Another advantage of plastic is its recyclability. Unlike paper and card which can only be recycled up to 5 or 6 times before the fibres become too short to be usable, plastic can be recycled over and over again.  For food grade plastic, we can't say that it is infinitely recyclable like aluminium or glass, because a tiny fraction of the inside of the plastic is scraped off and disposed of to ensure the resultant rPET (recycled Plastic) is clean. However, it is more recyclable than paper and card.  

Furthermore, a paper bag has a carbon footprint of approximately 16 times that of a plastic bag yet probably doesn't last as long.  It seems like we can't win, doesn't it?

The big problem with plastic really is almost the same as the advantages.  It is lightweight and cheap. Because it is lightweight and cheap it is hard to ensure that transporting used plastic for recycling is economically viable.  It needs to be crushed and baled in order to get rid of the air before it is transported.  Because it is cheap, not many organisations that produce waste plastic value it enough to  have the space for a baler and to store enough bales for it to be viably transported.

Because it is lightweight it is easily blown about by the wind.  So even if you do put your used plastic into a bin, if the bin is not well designed the plastic can find its way out again.

The real way forward is to ditch those things you can do without altogether by switching to reusables.  Here are my top 5 easy switches:

·      Straws …either refuse or get a reusable, dishwasher-proof stainless steel straw. 

Metal straws with cleaning brushes

·      Bags… you can buy or make lightweight reusable net bags for your fruit and veg and reusable shopping bags are plentiful and equally easy to make your own.  In my local butchers we have no problem taking our own tubs to buy our meat and we can reuse our egg boxes too. 

Net veg bags from Onya

·      A reusable water bottle will save you money and be kinder on your health as well as the planet. We know the downside of fizzy drinks, and don’t be fooled by flavoured waters, milkshakes or fruit juices as they can be just as bad or worse. Bottled water has a carbon footprint 1000 times greater than tap water in a reusable bottle.

My refillable water bottle comes with me everywhere.
 It has saved me a lot of money over the years.

·      Cling film – it is a nightmare to use anyway, so swap for a lidded container or a plate that fits over the top of the bowl.  Clean tea towels are also a good thing to cover food with as they prevent the food from drying out, keep off any flies and (most*) other creatures.  Unlike cling film, though, a tea towel will stop the food from sweating. I also invested in some reusable silicone baking sheet and this sometimes does the job of lining things that I might previously have lined with cling film, like for making fridge cake in a loaf tin.  I also invested in a couple of packs of Bees Wrap which I find very handy.  It rinses really easily and I have been using mine for a couple of years now and it still looks like new.

Various alternatives I use in place of cling film.

·      Takeaway coffee – break that habit and you would save a fortune, but if you really can’t then make your savings bit by bit with a reusable coffee cup. Many outlets now offer money off your coffee if you bring your own cup.

If I don't have my coffee cup with me I don't get coffee
 unless it is in a proper cup!

If you are not quite ready for reusables yet, you can still do your bit by making sure you recycle all the plastic packaging you can.  In the UK we recycle 58% of our plastic bottles. That means that a whopping 42% get discarded in the general waste and in the hedges and ditches of our countryside.  

There has been a lot of talk about the Chinese ban on waste form other countries. Switching to brands using recycled packaging helps to keep the value of recycled plastic high and this will help the UK companies that recycle plastic. Higher demand means higher prices and that comes from brands that use recycled plastic in their bottles getting good sales and those that don't losing market share. We can all help with that by checking out the packaging of what we buy.  Many years ago Coca Cola did an experiment to see if a 100% recycled bottle was a viable option.  It was, but we are not recycling enough of our plastic to meet the demand for 100% recycled so they opted for 25% recycled content.

Switching to compostable packaging helps too but only if you then put it on your compost! Compostable packaging breaks down in a home compost or industrial compost facility, but it won't break down in anaerobic digestion and it will take many years to break down in Landfill.  I decided back in 2015 that I wouldn't buy snacks like crisps, cakes, biscuits or nuts unless they are in compostable packaging, which I do then take home with me for my compost.  Making that decision has, I am sure done me a lot of favours, as I usually take some nuts and dried fruit from home in a small container when I am travelling about and otherwise, I just wait until my next proper meal.  I think my waistline thanks me for that decision on a regular basis!

* Neither cling film nor a tea towel will deter a mouse.  It will just chew right through it to get to the tasty offerings beneath :)

Digital Detox

I spend way too much time at my computer screen.  I'm probably not alone in that thought.

When I go away for a week I am almost scared to not look at my email account for fear of being overwhelmed when I come back.  And... what's worse is that I often don't want to read the emails and just hit delete...hit delete...hit delete through maybe 20 or 30 emails in a session.  Each one of those emails has a carbon footprint - and it is a carbon footprint that most of us probably don't even think about, like the carbon footprint of a Google search.

In so many aspects of my life, I'm making efforts to lower my carbon footprint.  I create almost no physical waste.  I put my dustbin out once a year, with rarely more than what would fit in an "old style" single use plastic carrier bag.  But my digital waste is horrendous.

So this year, I've decided to do something about it.  I'm having a digital detox and a good old tidy up of online life.

I have had a half hearted attempt at this before and unsubscribed from a few emails, but this time, I'm going to be far more thorough.

Instead of clicking on delete without reading an email, I'm catching myself with that thought process and making sure I do open the email and find the unsubscribe button.  With apologies to these retailers as it is nothing that they have done to wrong me, but I know that no amount of email from Next or Monsoon or Laura Ashley or any other lovely retail outfits is going to make me impulse buy clothes/homewares etc.

I have completely changed my shopping habits over recent years and I do impulse buy on occasion - but that is largely when I have five or ten minutes to spare between appointments and seek shelter in charity shops.  I have also been making attempts to make regular donations to charity shops and I am very free and easy with the impulse buys while I'm there.  But I'm not going to impulse buy because I see something on an email, so what is the point in allowing that email to arrive in my inbox.  I think that will probably cut down the number of emails I receive by around 25 percent if I keep up the thorough unsubscribing.

Yesterday I realised that lots of the email I have to delete my way through is from Twitter.  I use Twitter a fair bit.  I do like to catch up on the news that's really important to me - the environmental stuff - via Twitter.  I learn a lot from reading articles I click through to from like minded people that I follow.  But I don't need to know every time someone new follows me.  I do regularly find new information sources from new followers that I then choose to follow back as we clearly have common ground on Twitter, but I can do that on Twitter or Tweetdeck itself.  I am sometimes getting three separate notifications about things, one from the app on my phone, one by email and one on my computer.  So I took a look at the settings and had a think about what I really do find useful and I unchecked all the rest of the boxes.

Today, I have noticed that the only emails I received were things I really did need to know about.

For January, I'm going to content myself with monitoring my online life in order to continue the clean up of future incoming stuff.

Next month I'm hoping I'll find I have more time to do some pro-active cleaning up of emails that are still in my Inbox - all 3800 - of them.  It is not as if I don't have a comprehensive filing system for emails I need to keep.  I have that already - I just don't keep on top of it.  But with fewer emails coming in, maybe I'll manage that aspect of digital life better.

If anyone has any top tips and great digital clean up habits, please do let me know.

The Virtual De-clutter

Whenever I have a period of being particularly busy away from my desk I always come back to  a mountain of email.  I expect that's not unusual.  It is just part of life these days.

Much as I try to keep on top of my emails by deleting them when they are dealt with or filing them if I need to keep them, I regularly end up with well over a thousand emails in my In Box.  Each one of those emails has a carbon footprint.  Mike Berners-Lee, author of How Bad Are Bananas - The Carbon Footprint of Everything, estimates the carbon footprint of a spam email to be 0.3g (that's slightly more than two pints of tap water).  A proper email (because you spend longer at your computer dealing with it) he calculates as having a carbon footprint of 4g and an email with a 'long and tiresome' attachment can be up to 50g (about two thirds of a banana).  Today after an interlude of being mostly off-line for a couple of weeks, I find I have 2941 emails in my In Box.

So today I've made a decision.  As I try to have a cull of email, each time I find an email that I would normally delete without reading, I will open it (unless it seems like a virus!!) and click on the 'unsubscribe' link.

Clearing out email that is no longer needed has several advantages.

Firstly, it is easier to find that email you do need to find when you have less of it for you or your computer to search through.

Secondly, all that email is taking up disk space on your computer.  So many computers are clogged up with unnecessary emails, poor quality photos and old documents you are never going to open again.  The more clogged up your computer is, the slower it becomes.

Thirdly -well maybe this is just me - it makes you feel better when your computer is nice and neat and organised.

I find an easy way to clear out my In Box is to sort it by recipient and then often you can delete a whole  group of emails in one go.

So here goes, I'm off to unsubscribe from a few newsletters I never read, to tidy up a few loose ends of work and have a good virtual de-clutter.  I know I'll feel cleaner and greener as a result and no doubt save a few bananas-worth of CO2 in the process.

The Paperless Office

My office is a sea of paperwork going back 20 years.

I'm aiming to reduce the amount of paper I'm storing by around 75% before the end of the year.  Want to join me?  The plan is to part with all that old paper work you don't need and get it into your recycling bin.  Making paper out of recycled paper uses 45% less energy than making it from the virgin wood pulp.  Recycling one tonne of paper saves around 17 trees.  As paper is pretty heavy, I reckon I can save at least one tree all on my own.

I'm going to weigh the paper I recycle, because I do crazy things like that, so I'll let you know if I've saved a tree by Christmas!

Over the coming weeks I'll post my 12 steps to reducing your paper mountain by 75%


Are you ready... here's a nice easy one to get you started!

Week 1.  Pull out all your old magazines.  You can either give these away or put them in your recycling box/bank.  Every magazine you recycle, makes about enough carbon saving to watch the next six episodes of Downton Abbey!

This week I've recycled:

12 x Writer magazines
4 parenting magazines
4 copies of Woman and Home
3 travel magazines
2 copies of Golfer magazine
2 copies of  RSPB's Birds
1 copy of Good Housekeeping
1 weekend Observer magazine
1 Guardian weekly guide
1 copy of Time magazine (from 1996!)
1 copy of l'Equipe
1 copy of Marie Claire
1 brochure from Oxford University's Continuing Education Department

Yes, I'm a bit of a magazine hoarder, I confess, but I'm sure this is not unusual.  These magazines have a combined weight of 8843 grammes.

If I really want to save a tree by Christmas, then I'd actually need to recycle 58,823.5 grammes in total.  So I've still got just under 50kg to go.  Hmm!  I wonder..?

For next week, you'll need a shredder.  If you don't have one, then maybe you can borrow one from a friend or from work.

Day Four of Zero Waste Week

Yesterday's waste audit looks like this:

30g of chocolate butter icing (lurking in the fridge for more than a year we reckoned)
3 chocolate buttons and 2 squares of chocolate hidden in the depths of the fridge for who know's how long!
Peel and ends of one carrot (I sometimes keep these for stock making or feed them to the rabbits)
6 tea bags
1 small pat of butter that's been inhabiting my cheese drawer unnoticed for way too long

Total weight: 138 grammes

Today I'm going for under a hundred grammes.  Doable, d'you think?

The Twittersphere has planned my lunch for me today.  And it's all about using up those lurkers still.

I have some corned beef and a cucumber in my fridge - again purchased for the cancelled cricket tea last Sunday, but I try to only buy stuff I'd use up anyway, because, let's face it, being a game that gets a little dangerous in the wet, cricket matches do get cancelled.

I'm planning corned beef and lime pickle sandwiches to finish my jar of lime pickle that's been hanging around a while. I've made a cucumber raita style thing which I'll make using the 4 small tubs of garlic and herb dip that has made its way into my fridge from various Domino Pizza-fests that my daughters have hosted.  Recipe as follows:

4 tubs of Domino's garlic and herb dip
Half a cucumber sliced and quartered.
Generous amount of freshly ground blank pepper.

The dip was delicious but I ate it all myself, as I needed a snack due to Junior Daughter finishing school later than expected.  That wasn't the plan, but at least I've discovered a new recipe for using up those tubs of dip!

Tonight will see another jar being used up as I'm adding an ingredient to my butternut squash and Philadelphia lasagne - the jar of sage leaves (picked from the garden prior to the sage bush having a much needed trim).

Getting there!  Here's what I've used up this week...

Bon appétit!

Day Two of Zero Waste Week

Yesterday's food waste amounted to this:

2 banana skins
4 tea bags
The ends of some green beans
Skin and ends of 4 onions
Skin of half a squash.

It weighed 524 grammes - I blame the squash!

Day One - Food Waste 524 grammes

Today, we're challenged to 'Use Our Loaf' and also to check out what's lurking behind the yoghurt pot!

So, for me, Day Two started with 2 pieces of toast & butter for Junior Daughter before she heads off to her first day in Sixth Form.  I decided to have toast too, to make a bit of progress on our excess bread (from Sunday's cancelled cricket tea).  With it, I finished up my mother-in-law's grape jelly (which I fished out from the back of the fridge) and I'm now chomping my way through the remaining blueberries from Friday's party.

I checked on my half Iceberg Lettuce which is now resting in a tub of water - cut side down -  and it hasn't gone brown yet.  If you haven't signed up for the daily emails then you can check out Day One here: http://www.zerowasteweek.co.uk/zero-waste-week-2013-day-one-salad/.

Yesterday I made an onion soup, and we usually have this French style with croutons and grated cheese.  So one way to use up some of the bread crusts would be to turn them into croutons for tonight's dinner.  I was also fairly sure that the cheese drawer would be where most of my use it up stuff would be found.

The rest of my spare bread was already safely stowed in the freezer.  I find this is a great way to store extra bread as it only takes a few minutes to defrost just the amount that you need.

Of the ingredients that needed using up yesterday, the only things that didn't go into yesterday's dinner or tonight's soup was some leftover dip from Friday's party and two beef burgers from Sunday night.  I had burger shaped rolls stored in the freezer (from the cancelled cricket tea on Sunday) so I took out two of those to defrost and have with our burgers.

The lettuce was still in good order so there was no waste.  I used the two outer leaves to add to the burgers and I used up the tomato relish on mine and Senior Daughter had some barbecue sauce on hers.  It made a great sandwich.  We had some sliced cucumber with it and I used my cucumber to dip into the leftover guacamole.

Onto the zone behind the yoghurt pot.  Scary!  I decided I'd have to pull everything out of the fridge and see what was lurking at the back.  Most of my lurkers are jars of conserve and pickle or various long life sauces, but I know my worst offence is the cheese drawer.

I'm really the only person in my family who likes cheese other than cheddar or parmesan. For a long time,  I've only bought other cheese when we've had dinner parties.  But still it gets left over.  So now my new rule with cheese is to buy a selection of different cheddars for a dinner party with maybe just a goat's cheese or blue cheese, which is easy to use up in pasta.  I have cut my waste by doing that, but there's bits of cheese in my fridge that are verging on veteran.

Brace yourself, here's the photographic evidence of the fridge clear out today!

I had a collection of cheeses that ranged (from right to left in the picture above) from the pefectly fine, through edible in sauces/soup to definitely straight in the food waste caddy.

The fresh and healthy cheese went back into the nice clean cheese drawer along with the cheddar and butter.  Then I started work on the rest.  I cut up the bits of camembert - there wasn't much left and put it into my onion soup.  I grated up some of the smoked cheddar and put the rind into the soup.  I also snuck in the dodgy cheese slice that was left behind by friends rather a long time ago, but as it's so processed anyway, I figured it'd probably outlive most of my family before going off, so in it went!

But, sad to say, I had to add 408 grammes of manky cheese to my food waste caddy.  Just think how much that would have cost me!  Still, it will serve as a reminder to never again buy a cheese I'm not likely to use up, if my dinner guests don't eat it all.  Who am I trying to impress anyway?  No need - here's to my cheddary future!

As for the rest of the lurkers - just look at that collection of jars!  I've got to get using up some of that.

I went through the jars and put back in the fridge the recent and frequently used stuff like, mayo, pickles, mustard, ketchup, horseradish etc.  But that still left me with a dubious collection.

What did I manage to use up?  Not a lot as yet.  Well, I had about an inch of green pesto left in a jar so I combined that with the remaining oil from my sun dried tomatoes and decided the croutons would be pesto croutons.  Lush!

Day Two dinner - onion (and cheese) soup with pesto croutons.

Other than than I put everything to one side to deal with another day.  But, urged on by my Zero Waste Week email, I made a tough decision that if it was not gone by the end of the week, it was out - forget the aspiration and admit it's never going to happen!


Now, I just need to get creative and find something to create with all those saucy ingredients... roll on Day Three!

The Pig Idea

I came across "The Pig Idea" on Facebook today via Tristram Stuart and it really got me thinking and reflecting on all that's happened over the last few weeks while I've been running my pilot Dustbin Diet course.

Yesterday in my DustbinDiet workshop the students were talking about food waste, using up leftovers and also using leftovers to feed pets.  The world has gone a bit mad - thinking that any food that we feed animals has to be specifically engineered for them by humans, hasn't it? Why is it better to feed your cat the same boring diet of highly engineered food pellets, than to share the rest of your tin of tuna with it instead of leaving the tuna to languish in the fridge?  Haven't we all done that at least once - forgotten about the tin of tuna we started until we find it on the next clear out of the fridge?

My mother-in-law's dog eats what she eats, mostly - and no, I don't think they dine at table together when we're not looking, but  Cookie appreciates a bit of gravy and a few peas along with his dog biscuits. There are rules, of course, like no cooked bones, but there's plenty that can go to making up a nutritional meal for both parties.

Ben & Jerry's ice cream manufacturers give their food waste in the US and in Holland to nearby pig farms (apparently they don't like mint).  My Mum used to teach in a local school in the days when schools served proper home cooked meals.  We came home each day with a slop bucket, that would feed our geese.  In return we'd give the school cook goose eggs - because they made great cakes.

How did we get into such a ridiculous state where we can't feed our slops to our pigs?  I had a vague idea that it was something to do with the outbreak of Foot and Mouth Disease but couldn't remember exactly what happened and why the EU ban on feeding food waste to pigs came about.  So I checked out some of the research on The Pig Idea website and this is what they say:

"[In 2001] feeding catering waste to pigs was banned by the British government in response to the outbreak of Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD). It was tentatively concluded that the FMD outbreak originated on a farm that was illegally feeding its pigs unprocessed restaurant waste. The government justified the ban because it considered that there was a risk of infected meat entering the food chain. It was originally intended to be a temporary measure, but a government-sponsored enquiry into the government’s handling of the disease outbreak (the Anderson Enquiry) recommended that the ban be continued. In 2002 it was extended across the whole of the European Union."

That seems a bit like the "no cooked bones" rule being used as a reason never to feed any food waste to your dog.

They also say that:  "With the correct biosecurity measures in place, [feeding leftover food to pigs is safe]. Cooking leftover food renders it safe for pigs, and also for chickens. Pathogens such as Foot and Mouth Disease and Classical Swine Fever are effectively eliminated by heat treatment. Pigs and chickens are omnivorous animals, evolved to eat all the kinds of food that humans eat, and there is no evidence that feeding them properly treated food waste is unhealthy either to the animals, or to humans. That’s why countries like Japan and South Korea encourage this practice instead of banning it."

I think, given the huge problem we have with food waste and the problems we're causing ourselves and the planet allowing deforestation in order to grow feed for pigs it seems time to call for a change.

Check out  The Pig Idea website and sign the pledge.

Of course, we still need to think about the waste hierarchy.  The best way to deal with food waste is not to have any.  But the next best thing is to re-use it. Raising pigs on food waste is the perfect circular economy, is it not?

Image from my "Ice Green Energy" post a couple of years ago
 http://gizmo-the-geek.net/index.php/ice-gree-energy/