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.

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.

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!

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?

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.

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?

The Zero Waste Challenge

Cambridge City Council is running an Environment Fortnight, which is an expanded version of the highly successful Environment Week that was held last year. As part of this event, some of the city councillors have volunteered to put themselves and their families through the rigorous exercise of seeing just how little they can put into their black bins during the month of June. A similar exercise was done last year in Bath and NE Somerset (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/somerset/6076100.stm) which caught my attention - but this was only for one week. Reasoning that it is possible to make all kinds of sacrifices for a week, but that a longer period of time requires long-term and realistic life-style changes, the Cambridge volunteers are going for the full month.

The aims of the Zero Waste Challenge are:
1. Demonstrate by example that the City Council is serious about solving the landfill problem which is rapidly overtaking the city.
2. Demonstrate that a significant reduction in landfill can be made by some simple purchasing decisions.
3. Learn first-hand just what is possible and what needs to be changed in order to reduce landfill.

It is not a competition. It is a co-operative learning exercise (even though our unfortunate families are having to suffer too!)