Day 3...tupperware, worms and polythene

So the paper experiment at the butchers hasn't really worked...well, its OK for ham etc, but not for meat that has a tendency to bleed! So Vikki bought extra large Tupperware containers and Chris the butcher kindly put all our meat in the Tupperware....perfect!! He thought it was a fantastic idea and said that's how they used to do it....so what happened....we used to use reusable nappies and hand them down from generation to generation, we used to use reusable pop bottles and return them to the shop, we used to use the milkman.....

At some point, somebody, somewhere, must have forced us all to stop being sensible and make us completely lose touch with reality. We all love convenience, but not at the expense of the environment...and common sense!

I blame Leo Baekeland, a Belgium chemist who apparently invented synthetic plastic in 1909. Was that the start of our consumer society....and when we suddenly decided that everything disposable was beautiful.

Enough of that...the worms arrived today, 500g of them, not as many as I thought but hopefully they'll help do the job...also bought them a nice little duvet made of coir! This keeps them warm in the winter...

Finally, following the excellent advice from Almost Mrs Average (http://therubbishdiet.blogspot.com/), about polythene recycling, I dived in the bin tonight and retrieved 2g of polythene which I'm saving to send to the polyprint plant. Now I'm expecting a few carbon conscious comments here...."surely that has more impact on the environment through the transport emissions"...well, its a good point, but I have 2 answers to that, factually correct or not:

1. The post van/train/lorry would be on the road anyway and I'm ensuring it's at capacity. It would be worse if I used a courier for an individual trip from home to recycling plant, but I'm not, I'm tapping into an existing transport network that would be running irrespective of my parcel.
   
3. I'm voting with my polythene...by sending it off to the recycling plant I'm making a point, albeit a quiet one, that I'm not prepared to send it to landfill. Hopefully, if enough people do it, the cost/benefit will start to stack up and other entrepreneurs will see that there is an opportunity and set up a service...or local government will subsidise it to avoid landfill tax fines.

Unfortunately, plastic recycling is often difficult to justify because it is a low weight, high volume material. So the only other way we can make a difference is to refuse the products in the first place and phase its use out that way...we'll continue to do that and through reusable containers and careful purchasing, I think this is one area we're really going to improve on.

2 days to go...

getting nervous now...have we set ourselves up for a fall!



Following the radio interview on Thursday, BBC News are now interested and coming to see us on Monday morning as we have our first weigh in...this is when we'll be taking the black bag waste from the week before Zero Waste Week and seeing what we normally throw out...a week later we'll see what difference we've made!



So the pressures mounting...I'm really worried that we wont get the right message across...the whole point of doing this is to show that an average family of 4 can make a real difference to their waste by doing some simple things...OK, so as the boss of an environmental organisation you could say that we're not a normal family and that we should be leading the way already...but reality is that we do our best, but it could be better. Yes we recycle, compost, reuse and try and buy products that are recycled and recyclable...but if you see our black bag today you'll notice that there's a lot we can do to improve...hidden nasty's like the odd pull up for our son can really make the difference...although we've been avid users of washable nappies throughout their childhoods, its getting more and more difficult as they potty train and as our lives become more hectic...but that's no excuse and during ZWW (Zero Waste Week) we'll be ditching the disposable completely...a new government report was published yesterday, under the cover of darkness because it highlights the errors in a previous report conducted by the government that slated washable nappies....this new report is much more positive and shows parents that if you use washables sensibly, you can lower their carbon footprint by over 40%, that makes them significantly better than disposables...and as a user of them, you have a choice over what impact they have on the environment...with a disposable nappy you don't because the impact is largely in its creation...see www.crnp.org.uk for more on washable nappies.

I've just bought some new worms for our wormery as well...our food digester (http://www.greencone.com/home.asp?lang=1) has started to slow down over the winter so I figured a new injection of 500 worms (http://www.wigglywigglers.co.uk/) would help us get rid of all our kitchen waste, and that's meat and dairy as well....food waste can be up to 60% of your waste to landfill so composting and using wormeries makes a huge difference, and the kids love it! Right, dinner beckons, meat from the butcher (no packaging), vegetables from the farm shop (no packaging) and smoothies made from real fruit this afternoon...no packaging but lots of mess!!