Compost, preserves and I have a feminist dilemma

My favourite shops used to be State of Grace ( http://www.stateofgrace.co.nz/ ) or Karen Walker (http://www.karenwalker.com/ ). Voon was also a favourite ( http://www.voon.co.nz/ ) and occasionally I indulge in the guilty pleasure that is Juliette Hogan (http://www.juliettehogan.com/ ). After all, what could be better than New Zealand designers producing beautiful New Zealand made clothes in stunning fabrics and at prices that I can’t really afford but sometimes pay anyway?

Well, I have a new favourite shop. And it has nothing to do with clothing, shoes, jewellery or anything to do with the decoration of my person. My new favourite show is Bunnings ( http://www.bunnings.co.nz/ ). This is a surprising discovery for a city girl without much idea how to hold a hoe and who doesn’t own a pair of gumboots.

Today I decided to fix another of my major refuse problems. I was never going to take a hammer and some nails and a few planks of four by two and make a compost bin. It never will happen. The four by two would have been split by my ineptitude with a hammer, nails would have made their way into my hands, splinters would have flown out of the wreckage and burrowed their way into my eyes. I can’t catch a ball, let alone build a wooden barricade for my garden waste.

Thanks to the small miracle that is Bunnings Warehouse I did not need to. I breezed into the hardware and gardening megamart and I followed the helpful signs. Finally after scurrying away from many oh-so-solicitous young men in red aprons (I said I liked it, I never said it was my comfort zone, okay? Yes I’m a bit scared of the shop assistants – or is shop assistant only a term for a boutique? I don’t know!) I arrived at a whole aisle of compost bins. I could have bought a seven tier worm farm, I could have purchased a 500 litre mega compost ornamental pyramid. It was like standing in compost bin fairyland looking at kitset compost bin palaces.

After a great pain of indecision I settled on a 250 litre plastic, well-ventilated, assemble it yourself sort of deal. I took it home, added the twelve nuts and bolts to the side and voila! I had this:

It looks like Darth Vadar's helmet, but it actually is a compost bin.

Now all the items marked in green on last week’s refuse chart will go in this. We will make healthy, fertile compost. Some of it will go in my potplants and the rest . . . I’m not sure yet. But I think we can find some sensible use for it and it’s got to be better than sending all that kitchen waste to landfill. Maybe that garden I’m hoping for will come to be.

The compost bin and the reusable produce bags are all very well, but really in terms of eco-friendly living they are a couple of wobbly steps by a child learning to walk. I don’t want to remain an eighteen-month-old with wobbly legs, I want to become an eco-athlete. I want to leap buildings!

When I was doing the supermarket shopping today I was thinking about everything in a new light and I noticed for the first time, and I mean really noticed, how packaged everything is. I’m congratulating myself for no longer needing produce bags, but they seems to be the only plastic I can properly avoid unless I shop elsewhere. And I think it might come to that.

Today I bought ham (free range). It came in a pair of matching plastic basins with plastic peel-back tops. I got pasta, each packet neatly sealed in plastic, I got shampoo in elaborate plastic bottles. Each bag of bread was in plastic, the Boyfriend’s muesli bars were in plastic and then in cardboard and the meat sat on a polystyrene tray with plastic over the top. I imagined all this packaging taken off the products and blowing down the street and I thought I might drown.

When I got to the tinned tomato section I stopped. Oh sure, I can recycle the tins, but surely if you don’t need to it’s better not to. Recycling requires energy, after all. Tomatoes are not too expensive at the moment, so I went back to the produce aisle and I got two and half kilos of tomatoes.
When I got home I boiled and simmered and pureed and I ended up with six jars of homemade Tomato passata ( using this recipe http://easygreenliving.co.nz/pc/tomato-passata-recipe-8067/ ). I also stewed and bottled a couple of kilograms of plums (using this recipe http://davstott.me.uk/index.php/2009/09/27/plums-bottled-in-syrup/ ) that I got from the boyfriend’s mother’s place.

The very orange looking ones are the tomatoes and the red the plums.

But while I was mighty pleased with myself for my efforts, I also started to develop a niggling concern. Does living green have to mean becoming a housewife? I can bottle vegetables and fruit to recycle jars and enjoy a less processed product. I can start a garden, I can make my own bread to get away from the plastic packaging, I can sew bags . . . I can probably even start making my own cleaning products, baking homemade muesli bars, shopping at second hand clothing shops and altering things . . . idyllic, eh?

I could also tie myself to the kitchen bench, put on a floral apron, take a couple of valium and go back to the days before Betty Friedan.

The fact is that sometimes I work 60 hour weeks. Sometimes I get home and am too damn tired to cook dinner, let alone whip up a batch of eco-friendly preserved vegetables picked from my own garden. To be perfectly honest the only way I’ve been so productive today is because I was listening to the audio book of Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh, and it was amazingly good. Perhaps this is the solution.
So I’ve set up my compost today, preserved things and I even planted some lettuces . . . had I not had the audio book I would not have enjoyed myself so much. I’m not going to pretend that doing this sort of thing could ever be all I wanted to do with my free time. Right now it is 9.30 p.m. and I still have quite a bit of work to do before I go to sleep tonight.

The whole point is to do this and live my life too. I wonder how many compromises I’ll have to make . . . and I guess that’s the question for everyone, isn’t it? How much can you do? I might have to make more compromises than I thought. For now I see myself consuming a lot more audio books.

How to make your own reusable drawstring bags

Today my reusable produce bags had their first outing at the supermarket. It all went rather well, I have to say. The produce went into the bags, the bags did not fall apart and no supermarket bureaucrat came up to me and demanded that I use the supplied plastic bags. At 29 grams for the largest of the bags they don’t add to the price of anything more than maybe a couple of cents and when I got to the checkout the person processing my purchases even said, ‘What beautiful bags.’ Plastic avoided, bags functional and praised for aesthetic reasons. Success.

Of course it was a bit depressing to have my little victory with the produce bags and then realise that everything else in the supermarket was encased in some sort of packaging . . . but I think that’s a post for another day.

Someone asked me how to make reusable drawstring bags. If you too would like to know, then here are some instructions. Please remember that before I made the bags I didn’t know a sewing machine’s backside from its frontside, so they will be a little imprecise and erratic . . . but that’s how I made them. If you also want to make them in an imprecise and erratic manner, well, all I can say is that it does work

Making reusable drawstring bags

You will need:
            x1 metre net curtain fabric or similar

            x6 metres lightweight drawstring cord

            x8 drawstring stoppers

x1 spool cotton

sewing machine

safety pin

perseverance – but not too much of this

1.                    Cut two rectangles of fabric. Decide what size you want them to be (I made three different sizes, a small a medium and a large) then add 1.5 cm three sides for seam allowance and about 3.5 cm to the top for drawstring allowance .

2.                    Pin the fabric together

3.                    Sew three sides of the fabric together leaving 1.5 cm for the seams and 3.5 cm at the top for the drawstring.

4.                    Zigzag stitch along the two raw edges at the top

5.                    Fold in the fabric on the sides at the top and sew down so you have two large long flaps at the top with the right and left edges sewn down.

6.                    Fold down each flap and sew a long seam along the top so you have a long narrow tunnel of fabric.

7.                    Pin a safety pin into the top of a length of drawstring cord and thread through the narrow tunnel you have made at the top of the bag. Thread both length of cord through the end of drawstring stopper and pull tight.

You should have a drawstring bag. If you have chosen pretty net curtain fabric you will have a very attractive bag. It can be used for a number of things that you might once have used a plastic bag for.

Baby steps. Beating the bag

 ‘Would you like a bag?’

This is something shop assistants are programmed to say.

‘Er … yes, please.’

This is something I am programmed to say.

The ‘Er . . .’ represents a complex cognitive process.

Every time I get asked if I want a plastic bag this goes on in my head:

Plastic bags are bad. But what are you going to put all this stuff in? You don’t want to walk around carrying a motley collection of oddments like some bag lady do you?
Er … no. But won’t I look more like a bag lady if I have a bag …
Quiet! Take the bag!
But plastic bags are the axis of all evil.
No that’s avarice and probably pride and apparently lust and envy – you should watch Seven. Just think ... things will be so much more convenient if you take the bag. No juggling. Separate items stay together. And it's got a brand name on the front so everyone will see where you have been shopping.
Fine!
‘Okay, I’ll have the bag.’  

I do solemnly swear that this is going to happen no more.

For years and years the Boyfriend and I have had reusable supermarket bags that we take when we do the grocery shopping. I’m all in favour of them. But they seem a bit pointless when everything in the supermarket is wrapped in plastic anyway. What's the point do you need a eco-friendly bag if everything is already wrapped in plastic? To take the chill off your middle-class guilt? It's a bit like taking paracetamol when someone has just cut off your leg.

One thing that I always do that's very, very bad is use the little plastic bags in the produce section. I think this is conditioning. It’s handy to have a bag to put say, six apples in to keep them together. But when I started picking up a single avocado and putting it in a plastic bag just because, it started to seem like something was wrong.

We’ve recently started ordering an Ooooby box

http://www.ooooby.org/

Which gives us fresh, organic, locally grown produce. And it comes in a cardboard box, there are no plastic bags. So I feel like I’m taking a step in the right direction here.

But modern life is modern life. And sometimes we have to go to the supermarket for produce. So … if we have reusable bags for the main groceries at the end, why don’t we use them for the produce? I’ve seen little drawstring bags for produce shopping for sale before, but they were expensive so I didn’t get them. Today I decided to make some.

I went into Spotlight ( http://www.spotlight.co.nz/ ) this morning and bought the following:

·         1.5 metres of net curtain fabric

·         5 metres of drawstring

·         8 little spring-loaded stoppers to go on the drawstrings.

Personally, net curtains give me the aesthetic heebie jeebies, although I appreciate their usefulness if you happen to be plagued by peeping toms. But for making reusable produce bags they are great. Unfortunately when I let the sales assistant at Spotlight give me my purchases I unthinkingly let her put them in a plastic bag – oops. I also thought later that I should have found some old net curtains to recycle. But I’m learning.

On my way out of the store I picked up some needles I’d forgotten to get and bought them at another counter. This sales assistant suggested I put them in the bag I already had and then give me an AWESOME card. If I don’t use a plastic bag for five trips to Spotlight, I get my sixth purchase at 20% off. Is that a brilliant initiative or what?

Spotlight not-using-plastic-bags discount card

Then I went home and, although my sewing skills were never much to write home about and I haven’t used them since I got a D for form two sewing, I knocked together eight drawstring bags which were all very lightweight and are also all machine washable and oh-so-very convenient.

Last week when I went to the supermarket we used about seven of those little produce bags. If that is my weekly average then I’d use 364 in a year (that's one a day of course) and 22,568 for the rest of my life from now if I live until I’m 90. If 10,000 people also use 7 bags a week for the next 62 years, (that’s how long until I’m 90) then 225,680,000 bags will be used. If these people all use reusable produce bags then those plastic bags will never be used.

Here is one of my bags. Since it’s staying together with three tomatoes inside I’m quite proud of it.

I have also purchased a fold-up-able shopping bag. It cost me $20 and came from Trade Aid ( http://www.tradeaid.org.nz/ ), and it was apparently hand-made in Bangladesh. And – a big plus – it’s very pretty. If I carry it everywhere in its little bag in my handbag then I shouldn’t need to ask for a plastic bag in many situations.

Hopefully now I can stop umming and ahing and say, with conviction (but not too much or I'll seem a bit eccentric) ‘No, thank you. I don’t need a bag.’

Baby steps people. Baby steps.

Humans are a piece of work

What a piece of work is a man, How noble in
Reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving
how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel!
                                                Hamlet, Prince of Denmark; Act II, Scene ii

I suspect that when Hamlet said this he had his tongue in his cheek. he did go on to say that 'Man delights not me'.


Man doesn't delight me very much at the moment either. Or woman.  After all, how could a creature ‘noble in reason’ and ‘infinite in faculties’ be responsible for one of the worst best inventions ever?

I’m talking about plastic. Check this out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=en4XzfR0FE8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xc6LvdsyJ4U&feature=related

These are just two random examples of the media coverage given to what has been dubbed the ‘Pacific Trash Vortex’. Developed counties throwawaythrowawaythrowaway, it all swirls into the sea, gets sucked into ocean currents and eventually ends up in the mid-Pacific where it has apparently formed an ocean-going rubbish dump which all the media seem to agree is ‘twice the size of Texas’.

I certainly agree that man is ‘a piece of work’ but I can’t praise the ‘noble reason’ of any species of animal that can discard so thoughtlessly.
We’ve had plastic for a surprisingly long time. Alexander Parks patented a plastic material parkesine (made from plant components) in Birmingham in 1856 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic#History ), and the first affordable synthetic plastic was invented by Leo Hendrick Baekeland in 1907 ( ibid ). After that I can just imagine what happened. People got more wealthy (in certain parts of the world) new technologies blossomed, disposable became the new black and soon we thought nothing of walking to a store and buying 300ml of drinkable liquid in a container that we could take away and then discard. What decadence! What excessive behaviour! And how tempting it must have been to do after the depression and World War II when people had been scraping and recycling and living on stingily doled out ration cards.

Of course throwing things away without much thought is exactly what I do and it’s the culture I’ve been brought up in.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve got all the residents of my flat (the Boyfriend the Flatmate and me) to write down every time they throw something out. I’ve been doing the same. After a couple of days of this two things became very clear:

1)       We throw out a lot

2)       My survey was going to be useless in quantitative terms: we could not remember to write down every time we discarded something.

Well? Why would we? Do you think you could write down every time you scratched your ear in a day or every time you looked at your watch? One thing doing this taught me about myself is that discarding things is so ingrained I often don’t notice I’m doing it. The Flatmate is a bit more ecologically evolved than I am, but even so, I know there are a number of things that didn’t get recorded. Paper towels for instance. Dental floss. Toilet rolls. Little bits of paper like receipts and packaging bits.

Here is what we had on our list:


<><><><> <> <><><><> <><><><><> <>

Landfill	Recycling
Hummus container (plastic)	Wine bottle
Dental floss (lots of this didn’t get written down)	Paper catalogue
10 pages of paper	Toilet rolls
Plum stone	Cardboard packaging
Fruit stones	Tin can
Pumpkin scraps	Egg carton
Pawpaw seeds	Yogurt carton
Half a lemon	Documents
x1 bread bag (plastic)	Milk carton
Bread bag tie	Muesli Bar box
x2 plastic bags	Balsamic vinegar bottle
Beetroot peel	Toothpaste box
x2 contact lenses cases	Baked bean tin
Halloumi packet	X3 Shampoo bottles
Broccoli skins	Milk bottles
Avocado skins	Cardboard
Plastic (unspecified)	Soup tin
X2 chicken bones	Margarine packet
Plastic bag	Plastic bottle
Bread bag (plastic)	Weetbix packet (cardboard)
Butter shield (paper)	Custard carton (cardboard)
Feta cheese packaging (plastic)	Paper bag
Plastic bag	Egg carton
Smoked salmon packaging (plastic	Cardboard box
Leftover salmon	Juice bottle
Weetbix plastic
X5 eggshells
Pasta packet (plastic)
Sour cream packet
Plastic salad bag (with some expired salad inside)
Old newspapers in plastic
Plastic bag
Potato peel
Egg shell
Pear core
Rotten avocado
Rotten tomato
Coffee packaging
Yoghurt top
Salad bag
Cucumber wrap (plastic)
Orange peel
Feta cheese packet
x2 plastic bags
Egg shell
Coffee grounds
Paper towel
Meat packaging
X2 biscuit packages
Bread bag
Coffee grounds
x1 teabag
Cork
Brown paper bag
Paper towel
Plastic bag
Balsamic vinegar seal
x1 paper towel
Pineapple skin
x3 teabags
Paper towel
Pawpaw skin and seeds
Glad wrap
Ball of dough
x2 plastic bags
Paper mushroom bag
Chicken packaging
Onion skin
Plastic bag
Plastic bag
Olive pits
Chicken bones
x4 eggshells
Lemon rind
Sticking plaster
Plastic bag
Unloved weetbix leftovers
Mandarin peel
Plum stone
Face mask packet
Turkey packet
Glad wrap
Rice packet (with some rice inside)
Pasta packet (plastic)
Lentil packet (plastic)
Barley packet (plastic)

 There are several important things to note here:

1)       The landfill list is a hell of a lot longer than the recycling

2)       I’ve made the landfill column pretty colours.

Here’s what the colours stand for:

	This should have been recycled – go back three spaces!
	If we had compost it could have gone here. Fail.
	There is no hope for this waste product. It should not be on the market. It should not exist. It should be made illegal. It will inevitably end up in some landfill not breaking down and poisoning small animals. Archeologists in future times will dig it up and use it as evidence that past civilisations had no self-respect and were all-round filthy delinquents.

THE BLUE

Problem:
The blue column is where we have been careless. I think the reason for this is that our recycling lives outside. For those little things it often seems too far to walk.

Solution:

We need to have a recycling bin in the kitchen.

THE GREEN
Problem: We have nowhere to put compost so we don’t. We have a large concrete courtyard that is common space to all four flats in the building and it’s not so good for composting or composting’s close relative, gardening.

Solution: Try to find some sort of composting option that will fit in our outdoor area. I hear there may be community gardens in Grafton, so I’ll try and look those up. Perhaps if we start composting in our arid communal concrete patch the neighbours will join us??



THE PINK


Problem: Nothing to do with this stuff but throw it out

Solution: Don’t use it. Not unless you have to.



This could be hard.

But I might try to use my supposed ‘infinite faculties’ to come up with something of a solution . . .

I know! I will bring death to the plastic bag. This would be appropriate, since the plastic bag is very good at bringing death to others.