I can make candles

A short one tonight, because of deadlines and assorted other commitments today, but I couldn’t let Monday slide by without mentioning that, on the weekend, we made beeswax candles. I'm sorry, a teensy bit of pride crept in there because, well, I’ve always wanted to make candles.

And all it took was a rainy Saturday afternoon, a candle-making kit from QueenB (containing blocks of wax, wicks and 50 little tin cups, theoretically reusable because beeswax burns away clean, total cost $49.95), a Corningware jug from Vinnies ($6) and a candy thermometer from a kitchenwares shop (the first new thing we’ve bought this month), for about $10. Then it was as easy as 1, 2, 3…

1. Melt wax in jug (wax has to be between 70 and 75°C)

2. Pour wax (now clear) into little tin cups

3. Insert wicks when wax starts to go cloudy

Now we have 50 beeswax tealights, each of which will burn for 4 hours. 

That's a lot of candles...

Sure, they’re not as cheap as the 30-for-$3 petrochemical-based paraffin tealights you can pick up at the local bargain shop. But in terms of air quality, you might as well set fire to a piece of plastic, that's how harmful they are to the atmosphere and to you. Not these honey-coloured candles; they're sustainable (thanks, bees), natural ionisers (they purify the air) and carbon-neutral. My inner hippie is happy now. 

Have you ever made candles? How did it go? 

Candle power

Last night we went electricity-free again – it’s becoming a weekly habit, and I like it. No electricity, just to recap, doesn’t just mean no lights and no tv but no laptops, no phone calls (our cordless phone base station feeds on electricity), no mobile phones, no appliances like toasters. When we decided to have toast with our organic omelettes last night, we made French toast in the frypan (we're using gas for cooking, so it’s not a wholly emissions-free night). We could have used the gas stove to boil water for a cuppa (no kettle) but that seemed excessive and we forgot to fill the thermos with hot water earlier in the day, so we went without.

But it didn't feel like deprivation; it felt like quiet-time, together-time. Without lights, we stepped outside to notice the moon, creeping into fullness.

I folded the laundry by the glow of a tall beeswax candle, then lay down on the floor to relax after a long day at my desk. Without the incessant pull of a tv program or the over-stimulation of ads or the endless possibilities of calling or skyping a friend, blogging, finishing some work, looking at photos on my laptop, or any of the other million-and-one things that lure me away from the here and the now, my nervous system relaxed with relief.

I showered by candlelight and, I’m almost embarrassed to say it (but I will anyway), I was in my PJs before 7pm. It felt deliciously cosy. Craig cooked up some mussels and I made the omelette and we ate at our little table by the window, looking out on other people’s lights (thank you to them for the spectacle). Then we played scrabble by candlelight again.

Darkness slows you down; you have to be tidy – the last thing you want when you’re walking from room to room with a candle (like some 18th century heroine investigating a noise in another part of the castle she inhabits with a strange, dark and handsome man) is an obstacle like a wet towel or a pile of discarded clothes.

It also reminds you that electricity is a privilege for many in the world – about 1.4 billion people, 20 per cent of the world’s population, live without electricity, full-time.

But it’s not just for a warm glow that I’m doing this. Electricity is one of the main ways we contribute daily to climate change, especially in Australia.

In a single year, from September 2009 to September 2010, Australia generated an estimated 547 million tonnes (Mt) of carbon dioxide, up 1.2% on the previous year. Almost half of that, 201 Mt, came from electricity – that’s coal-fired power stations to you and me. (Source: Australian Government Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency’s National Greenhouse Accounts.)

The Greens have a plan to close down the seven coal-fired power stations in NSW, and I just found out that my energy biller AGL, invested $2 billion in renewable energy over the last four years. But until we get all our electricity from sunlight and wind-power, the biggest single thing we, as individuals, can do to reduce our environmental impact is to use less of it.

A lot of people I know said they thought Earth Hour was a waste of time, that turning off the lights for an hour wouldn't change anything. They were wrong. What started in Sydney in 2007 with 2.2 million people and 2000 businesses turning off their lights for an hour has become a global movement: this year 5000 cities in 135 countries did the Earth Hour thing.

And the Beyond the Hour campaign is showing that a single, simple act like switching off a light sends ripples out in all directions as people all over the globe pledge to do more acts great and small, like not riding in elevators and not buying bottled water. Millions of tiny steps, one giant leap for humankind. Go Earth.

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