Reduce: Green(washed) Bags
You know how everyone raves about green bags? We have a bunch of them at our place, in our efforts to reduce the number of plastic bags we bring home from the grocery shop. You all heard me rattle on about my unwilling connection to plastic bags, and my alternative green bags a while ago.
Well, it turns out green bags aren’t so green after all.
I had a suspicion this was the case. I knew they were made from plastic, but I already owned the green bags and never really bothered to look into it. Bad hippy, I know. Anyway, now I know the deal:
- Green bags are also made of plastic (which comes from oil and biodegrades extremely slowly)
- Green bags are difficult to recycle
- If green bags are recycled, they make nasty thermoplastic elastomer (used in things like snowmobile tracks, shoe soles and catheters)
- Green bags tend to be manufactured overseas and thus plenty of energy is expended getting them to you
- Green bags break too, eventually (trust me on this!) and are difficult to repair
- The piece of black plastic in the bottom of the bag snaps and is generally a pain in the arse (it’s not recyclable either).
Ok, so the last two I added myself, but they are just as valid.
We buy 5kg bags of basmati rice in a cotton bag (sort of like the little one on the right).
Do I think green bags are a better option than regular plastic bags? Sure thing. It’s still better to reuse plastic a bunch of times than go for single use items. However, if we can make the same product out of natural, biodegradable fibre (like our Guard basmati rice bags), isn’t that an even better choice?
Add comment December 16, 2009
Reduce: Pig Poo Pollution
Treehugger reported today that a Taiwanese farmer has successfully trained his pigs to use litter trays rather than defecating all over their pen. He’s reduced his water usage by 50%, reduced pollution and is easily able to capture the manure for use in fertilisers. The Taiwanese government is advocating other farmers follow in his footsteps. Apparently pigs are easy to train due to their intelligence and the fact that they like to live in a clean environment anyway. (Yes, you often see them covered in mud, but this is only to cool down. Contrary to popular belief, pigs don’t sweat.)
Pigs are clean, intelligent animals... that can use their own toilet.*
This development is, in a way, great. Surely it’s a more humane way to farm pigs, not to have them living in their own excrement. Also, the cleaner the environment, the fewer diseases there’ll be and thus the fewer anti-biotics are required – which is great for the pigs, the humans and the environment.
However, what I wanna know is – if you get friendly enough with piglets to toilet train them, how can you then raise them for slaughter? How can you have that kind of relationship with an animal – as smart as a dog, as smart as a 3 year old child – and then kill and eat it, and sell whatever you don’t eat?
I don’t understand.
While this advancement is definitely great news, wouldn’t it be so much greater (from a humanity and an environmental perspective) if people just stopped eating pigs?
*Pig picture from My Crazy Fat Piggy Site.
Add comment December 15, 2009
Reduce: Summer Fruit Food Miles
It’s summer in Australia and that means it’s hot. I live in Queensland, so that means it’s bloody hot! (Ok, South East Queensland isn’t hot to the rest of the Queenslanders, but it is to a lot of the outside world.) My point is, it’s too hot to stand in the kitchen over a hot stove. Summer in Queensland is typically the season of salads. Among others, there’s pasta salad, Greek salad, potato salad, Ceasar salad, mango and avocado salad and (my favourite) – fruit salad!
Fruit salad is soooooo good on a hot summer day!
I’ve been going to town with the fruit eating lately, and I’m not generally a fruity person (fruit is sticky and I really dislike being sticky). The fruit is so cool and refreshing though, that it’s worth getting a little messy to enjoy it. Plus, then you get to have a cool shower afterwards (or a jump in the pool or ocean) to cool off. Mangoes and melons are my particular favourites, and the best thing about them at this time of year is that they’re all in season (you can check here). This means they’re cheap, but as well as that, buying ‘in season’ fruit means you tend to buy local.
Queensland, in particular, grows a heck of a lot of summerfruit (stone fruit, like peaches, plums, apricots and nectarines), melons (such as watermelon, rockmelon and honeydew), pineapple, bananas, passionfruits, pawpaws (papaya) and mangoes in the summer. Queensland farms also grow less well known fruits in summer, like dragon fruit, lychees and longans (which Yankee Elv likes to eat for breakfast). Basically, pretty much every succulent, juicy fruit you can imagine wanting to eat in summer, we have here in cheap, local abundance. I love it!
Now, when I say local, in some instances I really mean local – mangoes are in season all around me, for instance – the neighbours have a massive tree they’ll never completely harvest because it’s just too tall, so the possums, flying foxes and fruit bats are going to have a feast. It gets me every time I go out on the back verandah. There’s this mango tree up the road that I pass on the way to the bus in the mornings… it is so laden with fruit it’s all I can do not to jump the fence and start in on it. Only the fact that it’s not cool to steal, and that it must be a mid-season variety (the fruit is only just starting to get a pink blush on its very full cheeks) is stopping me! We have pawpaws, bananas and passionfruits in suburban backyards and along fences all over the place. Mmm mmm good!
In other instances, though, Queensland isn’t quite that local. Some people, like Asphyxia from Fixie’s Shelf, live in smaller states (in her case,Victoria), so just consider the whole state local. That won’t work for Queensland though. You’ve got to remember – you could fit the US state of Texas more than five times into Queensland. We have a lot of area (no, not as much as you guys in Western Australia, but let’s not go there). Most folks agree that when it comes to food miles, local equals a 100 mile (roughly 160km) radius from your home. For me, that means I can go as far south as Lismore, almost as far west as Dalby, and my northern boundary is between Gympie and Rainbow Beach. To the east, I have Moreton Bay, including the islands I guess, although they’re not really cultivated. If I ate seafood though, I would be set! You can check your 100 mile local food radius using the Radius Around a Point tool – see Julie’s (from Towards Sustainability) instructions to learn how.
So what does having a huge state mean? It means that getting melons from Yeppoon (which I always considered quite close by) is about twice again as far north as I’m supposed to go, according to my radius. Not so local. That being said, I think it’s better to eat a melon from Yeppoon than a packet of biscuits from the nearby Weston’s factory. I guess for me there’s more to reducing food miles than just how far away the food was grown/produced – it also involves reducing the environmental impact of the food I eat in a more general way. In this example, I think it’s better to avoid the plastic and all of the energy expended on producing the raw ingredients and then on creating the biscuits (including the energy required to run the factory and ship the biscuits), and just eat a damned melon. The melon requires no packaging and much less energy is expended to produce raw food as opposed processed food. In addition, most fruit is shipped around Australia by electric train – a far better method than by truck or air.
Aussies are a bit greedy too, we eat most of our fruit right here in the country. Yum. There’s nothing better than a big platter of stone fruit in the middle of the Christmas table at lunch time. It’s the perfect interlude, between a morning spent stuffing yourself on Christmas treats and an evening cool enough to eat a hot dinner. Plus it’s light enough so you can spend the day in the pool without getting a cramp. Yay for local, seasonal fruit!
Add comment December 14, 2009
Review: Reverse Garbage
Yankee Elv and I went to Reverse Garbage today to kick-start our Christmas shopping. As always, the place inspired me, so I came home and wrote a review.
Reverse Garbage is awesome
Check it (the review) out!
Add comment December 13, 2009
Spotlight: Composting
So it’s taken me a good long while, but I finally have our compost bin up and running! I used this post on You Grow Girl to guide me, but I didn’t add quite as much to the bin as I want to keep using it as I go along, not fill it up right away.
You could buy a special composter, but I decided to use a big, old, concrete laundry tub as my compost bin. It has three sections, so it will be easy to turn the compost from one section to another as required. I put a bit of gutter guard we had lying around over the drain holes to stop them getting clogged.
The compost bin is an old concrete laundry tub.
First I put in a layer of ripped newspaper (darned free papers they keep dropping off in spite of our No Junk Mail sign).
First, a layer of paper...
Then I put in a layer of browns – mostly dead leaves, sticks, dead camelias and crusty old passionfruits and grapefruits that have been rotting on the ground. I can add to this with old pasta, pet hair, paper and other dead bits and pieces from the garden.
Then, a layer of browns...
Next came a layer of greens – weeds, passionfruit leaves and frangipanis. I’ll be adding to this with grass cuttings I don’t use to mulch the garden, tea bags and food scraps.
Next, a layer of greens...
Finally, I wet the compost. It’s supposed to be as wet as a wrung-out sponge, so I think I overdid it a little bit.
Finally I wet the compost!
Luckily the tubs have drain holes from when they acted as sinks, so the compost won’t stay too wet. I added ice-cream containers underneath to catch any drips (with bricks in the containers to weigh them down).
Too much water - luckily there are drainage holes!
Yankee Elv got me a big piece of wood from Reverse Garbage to work as a lid, and I’ve used bricks to weigh it down so no animals get in. I can’t imagine they would anyway – the bin is in the fenced area under the house so nothing bigger than a possum could get in there.
Yankee Elv got me a lid, and we already had the bricks.
Now I can divert the majority of our kitchen rubbish into the compost bin! I’m very pleased about it, especially when you consider articles like this one indicate that people in the US waste 28% of their food (I imagine Australian stats are similar). I hope I don’t waste that much, but whatever I do waste will at least no longer be going to landfill. Have a look at this video if you wanna learn more.
I’ll be using these two posts to guide me on what I can add to the bin:
- Things you can compost that you didn’t think you could, from You Grow Girl
- 163 things you can compost, from PlanTea.
In several months, I should have some compost to put in my garden (or give to Mum as a gift, just in time for mother’s day). Now all I have to do is control myself enough to not go fiddle with it everyday just to see how it’s doing!
2 comments December 10, 2009
Reduce: Tissues
I’ve been feeling guilty about not making a bunch of hankies a bit sooner, like I said I was going to. Reusable hankies will help me stop using tissues so much. That being said, I don’t often need to blow my nose, except when I’m sick.
But when I’m sick… oh boy.
I’ve just gotten over a sinus sort of thing. At the height of it, I used about 4 boxes of tissues. As Yankee Elv so eloquently put it as I went to recycle box #1: ‘You killed a tree today!’
Yeah, thanks. Now I feel more guilty.
My only consolation is that I would have had to use some tissues anyway, cos there’s no way I would have made enough hankies to keep up. My biggest regret outside of the environmental factors is that apparently cloth hankies are softer on your nose than paper, and my nose got sooooo chafed.
Another thing I’ve been doing to try to reduce my tissue usage is make these flannelette face wipes. I’ve been slowly hand sewing them out of old, ripped pairs of pyjama pants.
Flannelette facial wipes made out of old pyjama pants
I use tissues to apply my witch hazel toner, so these will dramatically reduce my tissue consumption. I tried one out yesterday and it worked well! I was worried it was going to take a lot more witch hazel to soak through the material than it does to soak through a tissue, but it didn’t actually, so that was unexpectedly good news. (Especially since I’m using bloody expensive organic witch hazel so I could refill my bottle rather than buy a new one. I’m still not sure whether I’m going to do that again.)
I got the idea to make flannelette facial wipes from this post on the Towards Sustainability blog, but I made up my own pattern. All I did to make one was cut two circles out of flannelette, put them together (right sides facing each other, so the un-sewn pad was inside-out) and sew around the edges using a regular hand-stitch. Once I’d sewn all around the edge except for a little gap, I turned it right side out and carefully sewed up the gap. Then I sewed all around the edge in blanket stitch to make it look pretty and to ensure the two pieces were securely attached. Voila! Facial wipes.
Now they facial wipes are done, I’m moving on to the hankies. For once my chunky thighs are paying off – more pj pants material with which to make hankies! Wasn’t that just so totally Pollyanna?
Add comment December 8, 2009
Reduce: Laundry
How do you manage your laundry? In our house, I’m the laundry lady. As such, I get to skip out of all kitchen chores, which is super awesome as I hate doing dishes with an absolute passion. In contrast, Yankee Elv hates laundry so it works well for us. Anyway, although it might seem like a routine chore, the way you choose to do your laundry can impact your electricity and water usage.
I have a front loader washing machine. Front loaders are more energy and water efficient than top loaders – top loaders actually use twice as much water. I only ever wash full loads and use cold water (unless I’m washing work clothes which go through on permanent press). This saves water and electricity.
Once I have the clothes washed, I don’t put them in the dryer (in fact, I don’t even own a dryer). I hang them on the line. I know that this isn’t common in the US – in fact, in some places it’s actually illegal to have a clothesline – but here in Australia it’s totally normal to have a clothesline. Every house has one, and I put up ‘under-the-house’ lines within the first two weeks of moving in here.
Under-the-house clothesline
You need to be able to dry your clothes if it’s raining, right?
Another under-the-house clothesline
We have an outside line too.
The outside clothesline
When I lived in the US, we only had a dryer, and the reduction in electricity used here as compared to in Texas was dramatic, and based mostly on not using the dryer. As well as being good for the environment and your electricity bill, it’s also better for your clothes. When Australians hear that lots of Americans don’t have clotheslines, they all look horrified and ask how their clothes don’t get ruined – bras, flimsy shirts, elastic in underpants!? (Once a British colleague asked an American colleague this question and he responded by joking that all their clothes are polyester anyway, so they withstand anything.) Just remember to hang your clothes inside out or the sun will fade them.
I know in some places, line drying isn’t a feasible option in winter (and thus this post isn’t particularly timely for those of you in the northern hemisphere), but keep this in the back of your mind for spring. It’s good for the climate and your bank balance!
4 comments December 7, 2009
Spotlight: Transition Towns
Hands up anyone who’s heard of a transition town. Anyone? No-one? Nah, me either, until the other day when I was freaking out about Peak Oil. I came across thsee articles on Treehugger about transition towns generally and in Australia.
What’s this? I thought. Gotta find out some more about this shiz.
So I did some looking around and here’s what I found.
Transition towns started in the UK (things always start in Europe!). They’re groups of people within specific towns that are focussed on transition to a permaculture-based way of life after peak oil. These folks recognise that with energy descent (the downward slope of the peak oil bell curve) life is going to change, pretty dramatically, for all the reasons I outlined the other day. So instead of freaking out about it, they’re doing something about it, from growing organic food and saving the seeds for the next season to beekeeping to local living to environmentally appropriate water management. The basic tenets are outlined here on the Sunshine Coast Energy Action Centre site. Alternatively, have a look at this flash animation.
Passionfruit vine on the side fence - really local food! (I took this pic in early spring and it's now summer, so this vine is waaay bigger now.)
A big bonus for me is that Queensland, and South East Queensland in particular, are well represented as far as transition towns go. There is a Brisbane hub that I’m definitely looking into further. It doesn’t seem as organised as the Sunshine Coast hub, but it’s clearly more local. I like that while they’re not waiting for the council to drive initiatives, they’re also hoping to eventually work with the council to go even further with the transition.
I’m simultaneously excited and nervous about contacting people in real life. I’ll keep you all updated.
Add comment December 6, 2009
Reuse: Bioregions
Sweden has pioneered these funky areas called bioregions. A bioregion is an area that is set up to be self-sufficient from an energy perspective. For example, you might use waste cooking oil from a Maccas to fuel a car, or excess heat from central heating to provide heat to another business. Biofuels are used (from waste wood). This all started as one man’s vision, and now it’s being implemented across the European union.
I mentioned in an earlier post how Sweden is the only country with a Zero Population Growth (ZPG) that I could see on the Breathing Earth simulator. What with these bioregions, Sweden is also the (western) country that uses the least fossil fuels.
Sweden is the eco-bomb!
Clearly, Sweden is the bomb. If it wasn’t so darned cold then maybe I would go live there. Except I’d have to learn to speak Swedish, which could be a challenge.
Apparently Nordic languages are hard.
Add comment December 5, 2009
Friday Feast: Quinoa-stuffed Butternut Pumpkin
Today’s recipe is a bit of a quirky one that I made up a few months ago and perfected this Thanksgiving. I really wanted to try out quinoa, a grain commonly eaten in Peru and really protein-rich (great for folks who are after low-carb meals). It’s about the size of couscous, so I figured making it into a stuffing would be a great idea.
Quinoa - it looks sort of like couscous, but it's a protein-rich grain
Here’s the recipe!
Quinoa-stuffed Butternut Pumpkin (Squash)
Quinoa-stuffed butternut pumpkins (squash)
Ingredients
- 1 butternut pumpkin, cut in half with the seeds and some flesh scooped out
- 1/2 cup uncooked quinoa, rinsed
- 1 cup vegetable stock
- 2 apples, diced
- 1 large onion, diced
- 2 ribs of celery, diced (you can also include the chopped celery leaves)
- 1/4 cup fresh parsley, chopped well
- 1 handful of broken pecans
- 1 small handful of craisins (dried, sweetened cranberries)
- 2 bay leaves
- salt and pepper to taste
- olive oil
Celery, onion and apples - oh my!
Method
- Preheat the oven to 180°C.
- Rub pumpkins all over with olive oil and place cut side up in a roasting or casserole dish. Rub some brown sugar on the cut areas. Place in the oven until the pumpkins are justsoft enough to pierce with a fork, but still firm enough to easily hold their shape.
- Meanwhile, place quinoa and vegetable stock in a pot and bring to the boil. Reduce heat and simmer with a lid for 10 to 12 mins. Remove from the stove and set aside, covered (the liquid will absorb).
- Pour some olive oil into a large frying pan and add the veges/fruit as you chop – celery, onion and apple. Add salt and pepper, then cook for 10 to 15 mins to soften the vegetables/fruit.
- Add the parsley, celery leaves (if using), pecans and craisins, and cook for 2 mins more, til the greens wilt and the craisins plump up a little.
- Remove from the heat and add the quinoa.
- Tightly stuff the pumpkins with the quinoa mixture, cover the dish with foil and return to the oven. Cook for approximately 30 mins.
- Remove the foil and bake for another 10 mins, unless the pumpkin is soft.
Pecans, parsley and craisins, ready to go into the pan.
Let me know what you think!
Add comment December 4, 2009
