All good things must come to an end

Here is the sin bin...a month of waste from a family of four. I like the symbolism of the smashed globe...
Did we cheat? I don't think so. We didn't include the wind-blown litter that accumulates in the front garden. We did give some hard plastic pots to Dr. Claire Barlow for a research project. And we are going to put all our plastic food bags into the recycling at Waitrose (who accept bags made from LDPE and HDPE, or codes 2 and 4).

What sacrifices did we have to make? No bags of crisps. No dairy desserts. No snack bars. No doubt my husband can think of a few more.

And what are we going to do now? I like not having a waste bin in the kitchen: it feels like we are living light. Maybe we can make do with a little bag under the sink. The crisps will come back (the children like them too much). We will continue buying food on the market and from small shops. And I think we have been seriously sensitised to waste: how long that lasts is anyone's guess.

The messages I want to make? Buy local, use the market. And we seriously need to address the plastics problem, both by tackling the supermarkets and by increasing our recycling capability in the City.

A solution for the smallest room

My campaign to find a supply of eco-friendly toilet paper has finally ended. Having spent some time trawling through various supermarkets and finding only one brand which didn't use plastic wrapping (it comes in a bijou little cardboard box containing a few (undoubtedly choice) sheets - hopeless for a family) I hit upon CCL Supplies (see link) on the High Street in Chesterton.

This shop sells cleaning products, mainly to professional cleaners. The manager, Owen Moon, tells me that he makes the effort to source products from manufacturers with excellent environmental credentials - not only biodegradability, but also treatment of effluents, use of recycled materials, and energy and transport.

He stocks 100% recycled toilet paper, wrapped in paper. This is the interleaved kind, for a dispenser. Apparently he now supplies the City Council and this stuff is being used in the Guildhall. Hurrah. And to cap it all, Owen gave us a couple of packs to try out. What a star!

Smothered in a sea of plastic

Another major lesson I am learning concerns the ubiquitous plastic wrapping. There is a lot of talk these days about plastic carrier bags. There is even a town somewhere in which all traders have agreed to stop providing carrier bags for their customers. But carrier bags aren't even half the story when it comes to plastic waste.
This is the collection of plastic bags we have accumulated over the last few months. It is dominated by bags for sliced bread, wrappings for toilet tissue, and bags for vegetarian sausages, frozen peas and seafood. Apart from those irritating plastic bags that have replaced envelopes for catalogues and magazines, it is a typical haul of stuff which is wrapped around supermarket food. Before we started the challenge we used to put all this into the carrier bag recycling box outside Tesco.

But at the beginning of June we thought we ought to check with Tesco first. We emailed them, using the address given for queries on their website. The answer is that Tesco only want Tesco carrier bags in their bag recycling facility. No bread bags. No Sainsbury's bags. Absurd images spring to mind of someone somewhere sorting through the bags, sending off non-Tesco bags to landfill, while recycling the kosher Tesco ones. Can these people be serious?

So then I emailed Waitrose. They were delighted to tell us that carrier bags from any retailer were welcome in their recycling facility, but no other types of plastic wrapping were to be put there. I emailed for further clarification, but their waste expert is currently on holiday. I await developments.

By this time I was getting a trifle cross. Supermarkets use masses and masses of plastic to wrap their food. It is everywhere. They even use it to wrap up things which are already well packed, such as boxes of beer bottles. But they are apparently unwilling to recycle it. They don't even print on the bags what they are made of, to enable someone else to recycle it. Essentially they are relying on us, that's you and me, to pay to solve the problem. We are paying landfill tax so that they can have the convenience of using plastic. And let's not even go down the road of what happens when they do actually recycle it and it ends up in a village in rural China, polluting their environment.

So what are we doing now? While we wait for Waitrose's complete reply, we are avoiding buying anything which is wrapped in plastic. No more sliced bread (but that's a bonus!). Boxed frozen vegetarian sausages and burgers. We are even going to go to the market with a tupperware box to see if the coffee retailer will let us avoid plastic bags for ground coffee. And I have found somewhere which sells toilet paper wrapped in paper (and when I spoke to him on the phone, he had actually heard of the Challenge!).

And another lesson learnt: Not only do you get a nice chat and personal attention in small shops, but independent retailers are happy to help us with the Challenge - they can make their own decisions and are not bound by company guidelines. Zero Waste means Community.

Global catastrophe

This globe had been cracked for a while, but being knocked off the kitchen counter was the last straw. It is broken beyond repair.
Events like this, creating a large amount of non-recyclable waste, don't happen very often but for this particular one there doesn't seem to be a solution. It can't be mended. Landfill seems the only option at the moment.

I have organised myself a little mending corner in the bedroom. The sewing machine is open and ready to go. There is a box of sewing threads of every conceivable colour. And suddenly there's a constant stream of things needing to be fixed. One of the unsolved problems of the Challenge so far is where all the mending comes from and where it used to be: suddenly every pair of the childrens' socks seems to be coming into holes; jumpers are getting torn; shopping bag handles are coming off. I don't remember this constant stream of mending work before. But I do enjoy that glow of smug satisfaction when I take a few minutes to get something sorted and put back into the laundry stream.

Not giving up...

Ever since we started this challenge I've been wrestling with the problem of how far to take the Zero Waste ethic. Should we shun everyday staples to keep down the waste, then start buying them again next month? How far should I push it? I considered, for example, 'going Indian' for the month - i.e. not even using (recycled) toilet paper. Having done this in India I know I could, but it's not so easy in this country where all loos are geared toward paper usage. However some time ago I stopped using disposable sanitary products, and this poses less of a challenge. I shant go into detail, but if ladies want to know more, just visit http://www.mooncup.co.uk/ One of the best purchases I've ever made.

Back to more everyday items, and I decided that there were some things we wouldn't give up, but we'd make more of an effort to minimise the waste created. The main example of this is yoghurt. We have stopped buying individual portion-sized pots of yoghurt. Instead we buy a large waxed-cardboard pot (compostable) and decant the yoghurt into small airtight tupperware pots for lunches. The pots still have a plastic peel off lid, but one of these is better than 6. Maybe we can persuade the organic company that makes the yoghurt to make the lids compost-heap friendly too?

We're avoiding things wrapped in plastic, but actually anything that comes in a plastic bag is still looked upon as a resource at the moment. With the green dog loo still waiting to be installed we need bags to take out dog-walking, and I don't want to have to buy any!

In for the long haul

After 18 days a certain ennui is starting to set in. The constant planning and thought which goes into every day is getting to be a bit of a grind. Major issues arose recently with the advent of the end-of-year party season for the University. My husband holds a party for his students which always revolves around strawberries and cream, with lots of exotic biscuits. This year he trekked out to a Pick-Your-Own place for the strawberries (only to find the nice cardboard punnets had plastic handles!), to be eaten without cream, and we bought all our biscuits at a bakery which sells them in paper bags. And for the next party he made some cheese straws - more fun, but much more time-consuming than buying them in the supermarket!

So how are we adapting? Fruit and veg are easy - just buy them on the market. Bread is easy too, and since we started buying all our bread on the market we are eating a lot of it - it just tastes so much nicer than the sliced-in-a-plastic-bag stuff we relied on before. We bake our biscuits. We have found one brand of ice-cream which comes in cardboard (Walls vanilla), and one brand of chocolate which comes in paper and cardboard. We have found one brand of butter wrapped in paper (Tesco's cheapest of the cheap...why is this one the paper-wrapped one? Who knows). Flour is easy, but only white sugar comes in paper. Brown is always plastic-wrapped. Baked beans are easy, as is tinned fish. But we have given up on yoghurt and other dairy desserts, pre-packed snack bars, and breakfast cereal. Fish needs plastic bags, and I will be writing more on the subject of plastic wrappings once I have regained my composure after round one of an exchange with supermarket consumer relations departments. On balance we are eating well.

Work in progress

Last week I visited Dr. Claire Barlow and her student Amanda Wycherley, in the Engineering Department of the University of Cambridge. Amanda is working on a post-graduate project, trying to meld together waste fabric and plastics.

The idea is to find a method of making a composite material which can be used as insulation, and thereby creating a financial incentive for recycling.
They are currently working on High Density Polyethylene (HDPE, which is coded 2) and Low Density Polyethylene (LDPE, coded 4) so I was delighted to be able to give them some pots and bottle lids from our stash of non-reduceable waste.

Crouching dog, hidden rubbish

Last week was national Recycle Now Week, and I was busy running neighbourhood roadshows on council estates, holding stalls at city centre parks and the Arbury Carnival, door knocking and taking part in a Sustainable Living Exhibition in the Grafton centre. For this exhibition we had invited Michelle Reader, an artist who uses waste materials in her work, to come and make a sculpture in-situ. Michelle did bring her own rubbish, but as you can see Marian and I took our bags of rubbish from the first week of Zero Waste to see if she could reuse any of it. Over the course of the day a fantastic transformation took place, as piles of rubbish were diminished and the sculpture grew into this wonderful dog! The County Council are now going to run a competition to name it.

We didn't get rid of all our rubbish unfortunately, but it has inspired me and I would like to make something out of what we collectively have left at the end of the month (maybe a trophy for the person with the least waste - ha ha!)

Things that are annoying me this week:

You used to be able to get yoghurt in a glass jar - what happened?

I can't find any margerine that isn't in a plastic tub

Overpackaged boxes of chocolates received as gifts (close to finishing one, eek!)

When I asked the girl on the fish counter to only use one plastic bag for my haddock, she said "I normally get told off if I only use one bag"

Boxes of ice-cream cornets that you assume will be wrapped in paper inside the box but the paper has a needless layer of plastic in it (best to stick to the brands you know!)

13 days, 17 to go...

So here is what we have stashed in a tupperware box on our kitchen counter. The illicit product of almost two weeks of Zero Waste.

Our only defence, m'lud, is that the vast majority of it is a consequence of tidying up the house and finishing food which was already started before the Challenge began.

We will attempt to recycle some of it - the spiral binding may be reuseable, and the string the beetroots were tied up with will be useful in the garden somewhere. But the dried wood glue? Clingfilm? Medicine packs? Those ubiquitous envelope windows? Yellow balloons?

I am off to the Engineering Department at the University tomorrow, to visit a lab where they are working on developing composites using hard plastics. So we are bidding a fond farewell to the margarine pot and sundry lids. They will be donated to science, melted down and mixed up with waste fabrics to make insulation panels....watch this space!

DIY Debris

We are redecorating. Our youngest daughter is making wedding plans, and we are turning her bedroom into a guest room. The trouble is we are no good at this sort of thing and it is taking us ages. It is also raising issues about recycling that we see on a much larger scale in skips all over the city.

Because of the zero waste challenge I am painstakingly separating the bits of old coving (expanded poystyrene) from the wallpaper (green bin), the old screws (recyclable?) from the old rawlplugs (landfill). But what about painted wood? This is a question for 'Ask Victoria', but I do wonder if it can be used in woodburning stoves without polluting the air. We only have a few batons, but there are tons of the stuff being produced every time people move house or redecorate.

This has also lead me to think about how we can enable small building firms to recycle their rubbish. It is very labour intensive. Time is money for them, after all, and we cannot expect them to do what I am doing.

Putting a lid on it.

My younger son likes chocolate, and in particular he likes chocolate spread on toast in the morning. Every morning. Without fail. But the chocolate spread we get in the local Tesco comes in a glass jar with a plastic lid. Inside the plastic lid there is a plastic seal. Neither the lid nor the seal are recyclable.

For the first few days he bravely ate lemon curd on his toast, or homemade strawberry jam. But the initially muted complaints got louder and louder until a crisis point a few days ago.

His father undertook to find him chocolate spread in recyclable packaging. This was not straighforward. He visited every food shop in town until he finally found something in the Cambridge Cheese Shop. This something is disguised as shoe polish, in a sweet little tin, at much more that we would normally spend. I have to say that it is the best chocolate spread I have ever tasted: it is wasted on a 4-year old. But the price mitigates against us using this amazing stuff every day: it is the sort of thing you bring out, with great reverence, under a silver salver when the bishop comes for tea.

So child's father resorts to the internet and finds http://www.plamilfoods.co.uk. This place sells chocolate spread in recyclable packing AND, when phoned, the nice lady assures us that the packaging they use for postage is ALSO recyclable. Sorted.

But I am starting to think about this packaging business. Much of it can be avoided by buying local and making things from scratch. But what exactly are the relative merits of metal versus plastic lids? Right now we are choosing metal lids simply because they can be easily recycled in Cambridge. But maybe making them in the first place, and then re-making them into something else actually uses more energy and resources than plastic would have done? Shouldn't we take into account the whole life cycle of the packaging? Maybe if Cambridge recycled plastic lids (and, in fact, the whole range of this ubiquitous plastic packaging) a plastic lid, on balance, would be better?

If it's broke, fix it!

News just in - I have heard through the grapevine about a meeting being held on Tue. 19th June, at 8pm. at the CB1 Cafe, on Mill Road in Cambridge entitled 'If it's broke, fix it!'. The idea is for people to share their knowledge and experience of repairing goods, who can do it, how much money you could save etc. They want to build a local resource of information and advise about repairing goods.

I think it is free, if you would like to go any questions, comments or suggestions can be sent to FixIt@red-inc.demon.co.uk

It's a dog's life

Determined to get off on the right foot, on Friday evening I rooted out the 'green dog loo' that's been in the shed for months and cleared a space to install it. This is basically a bin with holes in that you bury, put dog poo in with an activator and flush through with water every so often, thus composting the waste. Over the month I will need to dispose of about 60 of our dog's doings. Most of these are collected on walks, and at the moment we reuse plastic bags from bread etc, and most of them go in the special bins in the park - but this is still landfilled. On examining the instructions on the kit though, I discovered that I have to dig a hole about a metre wide and 70cm deep, and then back-fill it with stones and gravel which I don't have. Realising that this is a bit more complicated and time-consuming than first thought, I decided I need my other half to help out. As he's away it will have to wait - so much for getting off on the right foot!

To cheer myself up I took our considerable backlog of plastic bottles to the recycling centre, and spent Monday evening making fish cakes from scratch for the first time. This added about an hour onto the usual cooking time for bought fishcakes, but there was no packaging, I froze some for homemade 'ready meals' and they were delicious! Now I can feel smug again.

Bin Diving

One thing we didn't anticipate was our cleaner's lack of commitment to Zero Waste. It is difficult at the best of times to get her to understand about recycling: what goes where, what needs to happen to it on the way, that sort of thing. But in her zeal to get her job done, everything (and I do mean everything) goes straight into the black bin. Do not pass GO. Do not sort out the plastic and glass and toilet-roll cardboard cylinders. Despite my clear and obvious system in the kitchen for collecting recyclables. So I had to do a bit of bin-diving yesterday in order to remove those things from the black bin. Unfortunately, because there is so little in our black bin at the moment, it was a bit of a stretch to reach the lone bag right at the bottom, but I did it. I think she goes on holiday next week :~)

Slow Food

I think I am beginning to understand this Zero Waste idea, at least as far as it applies to food.

If we want to control what goes into our black bins we have to buy local. We buy from the people who grow the food, so we get locally sourced products. Locally sourced products don't need to be taken by lorry to a central sorting depot, to be placed into robust packaging that will survive another journey to distant stores, and then the rigours of being stacked on a supermarket shelf.

So Zero Waste means Slow Food. It means local growers who know what they are talking about; who can tell you how long it will be before the new potatoes are ready. It means local artisan bakers. It means specialist cheese shops. It means (for non-vegetarians) knowing which field your meat grew up in.

Like Slow Food, Zero Waste means more time. We have got used to dropping into the supermarket on the way home from work, but I am learning that dropping into the market during my lunch break is actually much much nicer. I am starting to look forward to the individual visits to specialist shops. And I welcome the chance to bake biscuits with my children, and to experiment with making things we would normally not give a second's thought to buying ready-made and over-packaged. Sometimes slow is good: it gives us a break from the whirlwind, and time to reflect.

Brown paper bags

Whatever happened to those little brown paper bags my mother used to wrap my sandwiches in?

Everything seems to come in polythene bags with handles like the ones you weigh your fruit and veg in at the supermarket.

I get the nice old-fashioned bags when I buy my apples and spuds at Cambridge Market, but can't think of anywhere else.

Not only do they get the bio brownie points (sorry, no pun intended) but you can write on the contents - very useful when sending child off with lunchbox.

Delivered veg box scheme helps cut packaging

One thing that makes quite a difference for my packaging waste, I believe, is that I use an organic box scheme, which in my case is Abel and Cole.

The bin men already benefit from this, as the cardboard box (for veg) and polystyrene box (for chilled stuff - meat, milk etc) that my delivery comes in taken back the following week to be re-used. Also, the packaging for things like tomatoes is in compostable trays, with bio-degradeable film.

However, doing the challange has had me look at what I get even more closely though. I wondered about the wrapping around my bread, and the window in the packaging for my muesli. Here's the answer I got:

Dear Mr Upstone,

Thank you for your email. We are delighted to hear you are taking part in the Zero waster Challenge, it certainly sounds like an excellent initiative.

Making sure our packaging is kept to a minimum and completely recyclable is one of our primary concerns and something we do a lot of work on. Currently all plastic used with our fruit and vegetables can be composted and we are working on making this the case for other items too. With the meat we offer the plastic has to be sturdier to keep in the juices so unfortunately is not recyclable at this time. You mention the Superfood Muesli packaging and you can put this in the compost, however the plastic packaging for the bread cannot be. We get the bread from independent bakers who provide the packaging themselves so the final decision about the packaging they use is with them. We do have a close working relationship with our bakers and do of course remind them of our goals regarding recycling whenever possible.

We also take other steps to ensure our waste is kept to a minimum, such as turning any cool boxes that we deliver chilled items in that are no longer usable into wall cavities. Any leftover fruit or vegetables we have go to Longleat Safari Park to be enjoyed by the animals and we of course collect all our delivery boxes and use them again.

I hope this helps, and we wish you the best of luck with your challenge, do keep us informed on how it is going. If there is anything more we can do to help, or if you require any further information do not hesitate to contact us.

Kind regards,

Christopher

If only all our retailers were as ambitious. Perhaps we can all give them some encouragement. What I think Abel and Cole are showing is that we could easily mandate bio-degradeable packaging for many items already.

Little room for improvement!

Like Marian, my husband is a bit put out by this exercise. He and I are both committed recyclers already, and spend a great deal of time sorting our rubbish so as to put as little as possible in the black bin. Rare is the time when we put out a full black bin, and there have been weeks when we haven't put it out at all, preferring to save it until the next fortnightly collection to save our hardworking bin-men one bin.

The difficult bit for us is changing our shopping habits. The main culprit in our lives is food packaging. Fruit trays (especially for soft fruit like raspberries and strawberries), yoghurt pots, that sort of thing. Do we change our dietary habits, or can we persuade Waitrose to take the wretched things back? Last Friday I made my first shopping trip under the new regime. I combined it with a visit to the launch of the new battery recycling scheme at Waitrose (3 cheers for them! Not that we use many batteries in our house...). I found it took me much longer to do my usual shop, having to linger over choices whereas before I simply grabbed the usual stuff. Instead of taking the laundry blobs I usually buy, I opted for a bottle of Ecover washing liquid, which I can later re-fill at Daily Bread (at a cost of X for the additional fuel and time it will take me to get there!).

Sunday I took a meander to the market to buy cakes from Tom (took my own carrier bag, which is usual practice anyway) and a couple of items of veg from Simon Steele.

I think I will be pushing for a more comprehensive kerbside plastics recycling service in the next year's Council budget round, to include all types of plastics - not just bottles - and also Tetrapaks! Watch out Colin!

Strawberry Fair presents a challenge... as does the Arts Cinema

What perfect timing to start the Zero Waste Challenge on the weekend of Strawberry Fair.

On Friday night, I headed off to the Strawberry Fair Film Festival (which was excellent), and afterwards, headed to the Fort St George for a pint.

This is where I encountered my first challenge. The Fort were only serving drinks in thin plastic containers, and when I asked for a glass one (I was remaining inside, so saw no problem), they refused.

I find it strange, and certainly not great customer service, that one pub can be being so wasteful, against the wishes of a customer, and yet, across town at The Mill, they've got an excellent scheme where you pay a 20p deposit for a sturdy plastic pint pot.

Again: the beer festival gets this well sorted by giving out glass pots at the beginning of the evening, for a deposit of £2. It works brilliantly!

I'd love to hear the views of others on this one: should we place restrictions on the licenses for outdoor events, to say that they must not use disposable plastic containers. If one event, and one pub can do it, then surely all can.

To add to my frustration, I went to see a film at the Arts Cinema, and, thinking I was being careful about my waste, I asked for something in a glass bottle, a ginger beer... only to see it poured into a paper coke cup, complete with lid and straw!

I'm now starting to realise that my black bin isn't the worst of my waste...

Ask Victoria

We've already been firing questions at our City Council expert, Victoria Kelso, and we'll be reporting on our findings.

If you have any questions regarding waste, how about clicking on the "comment" link below, and adding your question here, and we'll get some responses back to you.

The first weekend

My husband is grumpy. He doesn't like his life made any more complicated. It is already difficult, with both of us working fulltime and having two small boys to look after. It is already looking as though the Zero Waste Challenge adds an order of magnitude to the complexity of daily life. But he is being immensely loyal, despite the grumpiness.

The first weekend of the challenge involved preparing a lunch for a friend on the Saturday. "We can't feed her anything" Stephen protests. "We are not allowed to buy anything any more"....so we sat down and worked out what food could be bought that didn't involve non-recyclable waste. It is taking me aback just how much organisation this really requires. In the end we bought vegetables and fruit from the market from the stalls which provide the food in paper bags, and a piece of fish from a supermarket which was wrapped in a plastic bag (which we think can be recycled in Tesco's carrier bag facility). For pudding we made some biscuits (being careful to buy the margarine wrapped in paper).

The children are used to eating chocolate spread on toast for breakfast. But their favourite spread comes in a jar with a plastic lid. So it is jam and lemon curd for them, until we can source a metal-lidded chocolate spread. And cereal? The only one which comes in a fully recyclable package is Scots Porridge Oats (in its plastic bag). Milk can be bought in glass bottles with a metal top, but that means getting it delivered and the delivery schedule is not convenient for working families. The usual plastic bottles have non-recyclable plastic tops....the list goes on. I can see that we will need frequent recourse to Victoria Kelso's expertise through the month (the council's recycling officer).

Sunday morning was the usual trip to Simon's organic vegetable stall on the market. This is a no-brainer - wonderful fresh food, picked the day before and driven a few miles from Littleport, and sold with a friendly chat and an update on the progress of the farm. And packed into my own shopping bags.

But tidying up the house later on unearthed a quantity of what we are now calling "non-reduceable waste". Any suggestions on what to do with some congealed lumps of wood-glue, anyone?

Friday June 1st - Bin Collection

My black bin is collected for the last time this month!

From now on I will be trying to recycle or reuse everything that might otherwise have gone into my black bin.

Things made out of metal, plastic or other synthetic materials are going to be a problem.

I will have to shop with more care, avoiding carrier bags and packaging as much as possible.

We are going to have to ask a lot of questions...................

INCOMING POST

Like most households, we get a lot of post, and most of it can be recycled as long as we take a few minutes to sort it ...............

Paper goes in the black crate

Envelopes go in the green bin

But what about those wretched window envelopes?

I usually tear them in half and put the window half in the black bin, and think I'm doing rather well, but from now on I shall have to separate the window itself.

And what about magazines that come in plastic covers ? Some say they are biodegradable, but does that mean I can put them in my green bin? I need to ask somebody.