The no-waste week, maybe

The deeper I get into this project, the bigger it seems. Just trying to read what others have done to live simpler, eco-friendly lives is a full-time job (or would be if I didn't already have a job). What's more, everything environmental overlaps and is interconnected. And is connected to other stuff: kindness, awareness, community-mindedness, economics...

So, while I'd intended this week to be about reducing waste, even going zero-waste,  in reality there are several issues going on concurrently and I’ve been thinking about packaging, rubbish and recycling for two and a half weeks already. One of the things I love about having a project like this, though, is that it makes you see things – the way you live, the things you do, the products you buy, where to shop, how to spend your time – through a different lens, which has the side-effect of making you pay attention to what you’re doing.

Last night, for example, it was my turn to cook and I found myself deciding between having noodles (in plastic packaging, bought before this experiment) and rice (no packaging because bought from food co-op but uses electricity for the rice cooker) – I chose rice because we’re focusing on waste this week. 

To get down to the nitty gritty, Suzuki’s Green Guide, by Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki and David Boyd, suggests a few ways to achieve zero waste:

1. Reduce your consumption: buy fewer things and whenever you do buy something, make sure it has minimal packaging. Annie Leonard makes some thought-provoking observations in her animated videos on her website The Story of Stuff. Such as: 99 per cent of the stuff people buy in the US is trashed within six months, and every American citizen makes about 2kg of rubbish a day.
2. Re-use stuff: like the glass jars I found in the cupboard and now fill with rice, oats and muesli at the food co-op or market. The cloth shopping bags – I’ve got one by Apple Green Duck that stays rolled up in my backpack ready for impromptu shopping excursions (not that I believe in having to buy stuff to save the planet, but it really is a good bag and holds a lot). The clear plastic wrap on my delivered weekend newspapers (before I cancelled my subscription) now keeps leftovers fresh in the fridge.
3. Repairing stuff: The only thing I’ve repaired lately is a skirt that was losing a button.
4. Recycling stuff: More on this below.
5. Composting kitchen and garden waste: We have two compost bins in the kitchen – one for food scraps for our “pet” worms (in a worm farm in the backyard), one for food scraps the worms won’t like (onions, citrus peels, etc).  

Back to recycling. My local council, Manly, began a Zero Waste strategy in 2005, with the intention of having zero waste by 2015 so they have lots of measures in place. There's a regular e-waste collection for computers, televisions, etc - so they are recycled and their parts re-used. The council picks up old fridges. Plastic recycling is now more efficient than ever: apparently any plastic that holds its shape is recyclable (so the external packaging on a packet of Mint Slices are trash-bound, but the little trays inside are recyclable, joy). And recycling can be fun – have a look at this clip a friend sent me about recycling, flashmob-style. 

The not-so-good news is that a lot of things we think are being recycled are really being "downcycled": so plastic bottles get made into lower-grade plastic bottles and other things, again and again, until eventually the plastic is so low grade it can’t be made into anything else and must be thrown away. And then it keeps deteriorating until it breaks into bits that eventually find their way into the oceans to create such monstrosities as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch so small that marine animals and birds end up eating it. 

Last week in just two days, the two people in this household created a shopping bag full of recycled plastic, (organic) milk cartons and glass bottles. To be fair, we were cleaning out the cupboards (when I say we, I mean Craig) and getting the house ship-shape, but still, it's quite a lot. 

So this week, we're going to try to go zero waste (minus compost and recycling). And make positive impacts such as picking up rubbish wherever we go (without being flashmobbed, hopefully). Of course much of what we're using today will be thrown out months or years from now, but for now, let's see what we can do. I'll keep you posted (with this paperless postal service we call the internet)...

Gum trees and poetry in sunny Melbourne

I'm back from a brief trip to Melbourne (yes, I know, see my "Not so No Impact" post) and feel quite refreshed. Melbournians are good at living no-impact. They ride bikes (there's even a bike share scheme, Melbourne Bike Share, started up in May 2010, a la many European cities) and catch trams - which, I know, run on electricity, but apparently one crowded tram takes 140 cars off the road (and not in the dramatic way that sounds, thankfully). 

At the hotel I stayed in and had an all-day meeting in, The Lyall, we were given jugs of iced water instead of bottled water - it's the little things...

That night, I caught a tram to a Melbourne Comedy Festival gig and probably exhaled a bit more carbon dioxide than usual by laughing at the stand-up comics. But made up for it on Saturday morning by having a lovely, sunny breakfast with my friend Kim at a riverside, gum-shaded cafe called Kanteen, which doesn’t overtly serve organic or free-range or fair-trade fare but the staff seemed kind and patient, the food was deliciously fresh and wholesome, and they do breakfast until 3pm. Yay. Plus it was my first outdoor dining experience in Melbourne that didn’t include a side-order of traffic sounds. 

The most environmentally friendly thing I did in Melbourne, however, was a poetry walk. This new venture, started in Sept 2010, gives you maps to lose your way and, as its home page says, "navigate only by memory and heartache, history and nostalgia, lyricism and rhyme". This is the idea: a group of performance poets each wrote a poem about a Melbourne landmark; then they recorded the poems, in a shipping container studio (recycling in action), and the Melbourne Poetry Map was born. You download maps and audio files onto your ipod or smartphone, then stroll non-pollutingly around the city listening to poets tell you, in their own voices, stories about the State Library lawn (Nathan Curnow), City Square (Eleanor Jackson), Chinatown (Josephine Rowe), Collected Works poetry bookshop (Maurice McNamara)...

Collected Works is a calmer, kinder Black Books, without a Bernard or a Manny but with all the same love of writing and humour and Joan Baez singing, through a dusty CD player, The House of the Rising Sun. It's a perfect poem in four, book-lined walls. Next door is every poet's dress-up box, a Lion, a Witch and a Wardrobe-like vintage clothing store (the largest in Australia in fact) called Retrostar with whole racks of flanno shirts, tables of hats, hangers of velvet jackets rubbing shoulders. Alas, I had a carbon-neutral Skybus to catch (to the airport, though I like how it makes me sound like a no-impact Jetson), but I vowed to return. Maybe by hot-air balloon next time...

Not so No Impact

I’ve realised something: unless I feel slightly deprived, or aware of what I’m doing, I feel as if I’m not doing enough to live a “no impact” lifestyle. And, something else, there are a few ways, ok lots of ways, I’m not changing my high-impact ways. I still work at a laptop all day (laptops use less power than desktops though, I think), I still watch a bit of tv at night (if there's something worth watching, like Black Books), I still use products that come in plastic bottles (even though they can be "recycled" but are actually just "downcycled" into different plastics which eventually break down into ever-smaller pieces that might even end up in the Pacific Garbage Patch).

And here’s a big one: I’m flying to Melbourne on Friday, which will create 0.4 tonnes of carbon dioxide. I have already offset my flight ($9.42 with Climate Friendly) and booked the Skybus, which offsets its emissions with Greenfleet to take me from the airport to the Melbourne city centre. I even considered taking the train, even one way – which, incidentally, costs about the same as flying but takes 11 hours instead of 1.5 hours, and made me realise that I’m less committed to being No Impact than I’d thought I was – if I was really committed, I reasoned, I’d find a way to not fly. But I guess part of this whole project is being aware of where we can make changes and where we can’t. At least not right now. It’s a process, right? 

Another way I’m being “not really No Impact” is that I’ve been using the car the last few days: to drive to the mechanic (for a pink slip inspection because my registration is due this month), to Palm Beach on Sunday (a pleasure drive of 30km each way, though we resisted buying non-organic bread and take-away coffee, and when we did stop for ice-cream we made sure it came in a cone, not a wrapper with a wooden stick inside it).

And, just this morning, we drove to the beach for a surf. I forgot to say this early on but I decided before the start of the project that I’d allow myself to drive the 3km return to my local surf beach because it’s too far to walk with a surfboard, wetsuits, etc. Then, happily, I broke a toe on my left foot, which meant no surfing for a few weeks, which fitted in with the No Impact plan, even though not-surfing isn't part of my normal life. So today I started surfing again, and drove there and back. I offset my car’s annual emissions with Greenfleet, don't drive much, don't commute (because I work from home) but still, the guilt wanders in, uninvited. Can I make it welcome?

"This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes 

as an unexpected visitor..."

- from The Guest House by Rumi

Organics and the crowd factor

Well, dear readers, we made it to the end of week one of the No Impact Project. It's too soon to really say how it feels but it is changing the way I think and do things. On Saturday, for instance, my boyfriend and I went to the organic market down the road, for the first time ever. After the Food Co-op experience of last week, I was hoping we'd find an easier way to buy organic and local. And we did, sort of. 

Saturday morning, we rode our bikes to the local public school where the market is held every Saturday morning, gathered organic produce (broccoli, beans, cranberries, muesli, lettuce, tomatoes, nuts, and a beautiful loaf of organic walnut sourdough bread), took it all to a man behind a set of scales, who weighed each item and tapped the costs into a calculator then gave us a total: $66.50. For a week’s worth of organic veges, yay! We didn’t have enough cash and they don’t do eftpos but no worries: they said we could pay next Saturday, or pay by direct deposit (another guy wrote down their bank details on the back of a brown paper bag). So friendly, so easy. And because we were on our bikes, they delivered the veggies to our house while we were out that day…

All the produce comes from up and down the east coast of Australia, so it's not technically "local" (as in the 100-mile diet) but it's not imported from other countries either. The other benefit is that there's no packaging. 

One thing I'm finding about the No Impact Project is that you can't focus on one issue for a week, then move on to the next issue. Because, as I’m discovering, all the “no impact” issues overlap and are entangled with each other. Buy organic produce from a market and hey presto, you’ve reduced your packaging too (because things aren’t pre-packaged). Ride your bike to the market and there’s emissions-reduction going on as well. Don’t pass any other shops on the way to the market (because there are none, only houses, the market being in the grounds of a local public school) and you’re reducing consumption too.

Later that day, we caught the ferry to the city: emissions generated but shared between 1100 passengers, so I figure that was ok, and anyway we were going to a rally near Central Station organized by GetUp!, Australian Conservation Foundation, Greenpeace and Australian Youth Climate Coalition in support of a carbon tax, as a start in the move towards Australia having a greener economy based on renewable energy. There were more than 8000 people there, a heartening sign.

The reason for the rally, and the reason it was organised in only a week, was that there was another rally on the other side of Sydney, organised by people opposing the carbon tax, doubting the reality of climate change. 


To those people, I’d like to repeat here what Professor Andy Pitman, director of the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, said in response to Cardinal George Pell, who questioned the reality of climate change:

“It’s odd,” said Professor Pitman. “Legally, I need a licensed electrician to change a light switch. I need a licensed plumber to do my plumbing. My solicitor needs a law degree. A Qantas pilot needs a licence. If I see a doctor, they have to have a qualification and if I see a surgeon, I want one that has loads of on-the-job experience, not one that has merely written a website.

“Yet in climate science, which is about as complex as any area of science, you can apparently be qualified if you have read some blogs. My question to Pell would be: ‘Which papers in Nature, Science, Journal of Climate, Journal of Atmospheric Science, International Journal of Climatology – say in the last decade – does he find contrary to the consensus that humans are primarily responsible for global warming over the last three score years and 10?’ There are none, by the way. Proving humans have not caused the warming over the last half-century would win you a Nobel Prize. The reason there are no papers proving global warming wrong is because there is simply not the vaguest hint that it is.”

Well said, professor. Now can all just get on with figuring out what to do about this global issue? As Marshall McLuhan once said, "There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew." 

Scrabble by candlelight

Last night's electricity-free experiment turned out to be fun. It was like camping, with comforts and your own bed.

After going around the house turning off everything at the wall: laptop, printer, lamps, wireless router, television and DVD player, even the phone (I’m thinking of re-instating our old analog phone, if I can find it; it doesn’t take messages but it doesn’t use electricity either), we cooked by candlelight, watching the blue gas flames flicker. The house was silent – except for the fridge, which droned on. 


Whenever I went into a room that wasn’t lit, I had to find things by feel. I carried a candelabra with me when I went to the bathroom. Because things were shadowy, I walked more slowly than I usually would. I felt my body sighing, relaxing into this. 

In No Impact Man’s book, Colin’s wife Michelle said having no electricity felt like a vacation, and I agree. Without electric lights or the television, the night seemed long. My boyfriend and I played scrabble, then read books for a couple of hours by the glow of the candle flames until sleepiness (instead of the end of the TV program like on other nights) told us it was time for bed.