Sunday Roundup
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It’s our first round up of 2010 and what an amazing start to the year it’s been. With press coverage galore it’s been a busy week of interviews, make overs, telephone calls and photographs.
I’m going to start with a brain teaser for you. Is there a word for ‘seven times’? We have doubled for 2 times, tripled for 3 times, quadrupled for 4 times – what is the word for seven times? I wanted to start off by saying that our readership increased seven fold after the story about us came out about our zero waste challenge in the Daily Mail, but wasn’t sure how to word it! There’s nothing like getting the grey cells ticking over on a Sunday morning …
If you can come up with an answer in the comments below, I’ll stick all the names in a hat and we’ll pop a ‘wrap ‘n’ mat’ in the post to the person who is chosen.
A wrap ‘n’ mat is a great alternative to clingfilm and provides you with an instant place mat; making it perfect for taking out and about, giving to your kids for their lunchboxes, taking on picnics or even though you know you shouldn’t, eating on the run <gasp>.
Turkey leftover recipes
Christmas isn’t long behind us (yes really! I bet you’d forgotten that already, eh?) and we know that many people are left with lots of turkey to finish up. We came to the rescue with 12 recipes for using up left over turkey. You’ve added your suggestions too and we’d love to hear more. What is your favourite recipe for using up leftover Christmas turkey?
Christmas food leftovers
Continuing the Christmas and food theme, I invited you to take a look in my fridge. If we’re not wasting enough already, food waste increases by a massive 80% during the Christmas period. This represents a staggering 230,000 tonnes of festive food worth approximately £275million. We urged you to take stock of what you had before heading to the shops and received some great ideas from you all.
Landfill, incineration and recycling
We hosted a great debate on Thursday headed by sustainable writer, David North. He investigated whether or not increased incineration led to a decrease in recycling. The comments were fabulous, with each of you having your say. Do you have an opinion or experience to share? pop over to the post and share your ideas.
My zero waste in the news
On Friday, along with our weekly weigh in and food waste report we shared news of all the media interest we have had this week. From the Times to the Daily Mail and all the way to Australia, people wanted to hear about our story and I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all our new readers and subscribers for coming to the site, having a read, taking part in comments and sending us emails.
Rechargeable batteries
In the UK we buy around 680 million batteries every year, most of which are disposable. Only 2% of these batteries are recycled, the rest contribute to an estimated 19,000 tonnes of landfill material. In our post about batteries, we talked about the benefits of rechargeable batteries. Do you use them at home? How do you get on with them?
Reusing Christmas cards
Now that Christmas is but a dim and distant memory, what are you going to do with all your cards? For all you artistic people, we’ve come up with some suggestions for reusing your Christmas cards and some of our lovely readers have added their ideas too. Why not share yours?
Close the loop
It’s not much good recycling unless you close the loop by purchasing recycled products. We need to create a demand for recycled products by looking out for them and voting with our money. How easy do you think it is to find good quality recycled products?
E waste
E waste is a hot topic. It would appear that some unscrupulous companies and organisations are simply shipping off our old computers to poorer countries. There *are* responsible ways to dispose of your E-waste but you need to ask the right questions. Find out how exactly to recycle your old computer responsibly.
Reducing paper
We’re all drowning under a sea of paper – 250kg per year to be exact. Most of us get junk mail, letters from schools or companies, flyers and papers in the post. It’s great to recycle it, but even better to reduce the amount that comes into your home. Simple tips like printing on both sides of the paper and using the back of junk mail for shopping lists can help us reduce our paper consumption. If you have some ideas, please share them!
Well I think that’s about it for this week. Our most popular search string was ‘myzerowaste’ which is inevitable after all the press coverage. Once again, we welcome our new readers, give thanks to our regular contributors, some of whom have been with us from the start, and we’ll have more goodies for you next week.
We’ll be sharing more about our personal new years resolution and gearing up for 13th Jan when our dustbin is going to be collected for the first time in a year. Would you believe I get tearful when I think about that?
We’ve also got some exciting news about a new addition to our site. No, it’s not the patter of tiny feet; we’re currently building a new sister site which will tell you exactly how to achieve a zero waste lifestyle yourself!
Don’t miss it! You can subscribe to our RSS feed or sign up for email notification of new posts (if you look in the right hand menus on the site, you’ll see a box for ’email and updates’. Alternatively book mark us and pop back every day where there will be something new for you to read. If you’re ready to say no to disposable plastic carrier bags, we still have some of our own recycled rice sack bags for sale. Have a browse of the designs in our shop and place your order!
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I imagine the word you are searching for must be heptupled – this is based on the same nomenclature as is used for athletic events such as triathlon, heptathlon, decathlon… and polygons like pentagon, heptagon, dodecagon… Some systems seem to mix Latin and Greek roots but I can’t think of any alternative for this one. Sounds good anyway!
Maybe it should be septupled as below ?
septuple (adj)
1. seven times as much or many; sevenfold
2. consisting of seven parts or members
What do you think?
A seven fold increase is a fantastic achievement and compares with the double coverage on the national newspaper websites. There is no doubt that there is a political angle to the coverage since all 3 parties have spoken on the issue of Zero Waste/Waste Reduction. There was even an own goal by one politician, who shall remain nameless, after mistakenly panning an opponent’s proposal, which had already proved a winner.
Recognition for your family effort over the year is well deserved and you can be proud of a successful conclusion though there will be an ’emptiness’ when the bin returns to its position. It will be worth reading your views at the end and, of course, on the next challenge.
The blue bin collection today misfired when an access gate froze solid overnight, preventing the usual routine at the 7am pick-up. That was a first and totally unexpected. There was no problem since it would take many weeks to fill the bin, 16-20 possibly. My Sweet Basil plants are still alive and should survive the winter even if it is 5 months in duration, as predicted by someone.
Sevenfold works for me.
I pressure cook the turkey leftovers and carass into turkey soup base and stock, deep freeze them for when my turkey tastebuds return by easter.
We’re doing the Woodlands Trust recycle /tree scheme via school for Christmas Cards; same with plastic bottle top school collection/recycling scheme.
Envelopes need redesigning with legislation so they are easier to reuse, easier to compost (biodegradable greaseproof paper window, rather than plastic; and less glue..so easier to recycle in MRFs. Thoughts welcome.
Well done – the coverage you received is very well deserved and the impact you are making is enormous. As you are no doubt aware both the WRAP / DEFRA love recycling campaign and Wales’s own Waste awareness campaign has spent large sums of money getting the message out – but your message is more real, more clear and far more optimistic because it explains how to do things for people. Yours is a very personal message.
As I mentioned previously as far as IO’m concerned 99.35% waste reduction is as near to Zero Waste as makes quibbling – quibbling.
The Waste Industry needs to take note.
best wishes again
Mal Williams
Cylch-Wales Community Recycling Network
Sevenfold seems to be the one. Well done on this marvellous achievement.
There is septuple, of course – but somehow that is quite an unattractive word. (septic etc).
Anyway – I am new to you and am finding the emails enormously useful. The useful ways with Pesto has given me loads of ideas for other “left over” bits in jars!!
Having recently retired (September) I am finding more and more time to recycle properly and we have a fantastic council run recycling centre in our town.
Keep up the good work.
Kind regards Linda xx
Um-diddle-diddle-um-diddleye, Um-diddle-diddle-um-diddleye. I think the only word that comes to me is “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious ” LOL : -)
Well done for getting the message out there Mrs G. And as ever, you’ve got my full support xxxx
P.S @JohnCostigane. I had the same problem with my gate today as you experienced, but my time was up!…there was no choice but to get that bin out today. Made me realise what I’d been missing (or rather not missing) 🙂
@Almost Mrs Average: That is the best offer by far and the lyrics are spot-on.
The freeze is becoming deeper and and ice has replaced the loose snow from the previous bin collections, catching many folk out. Sorry to see you forced into action with a full bin after such a good result, for a family of four, in waste reduction.
We not had any problems with frozen gates but that’s because our recycling has been out on the drive edge since Monday 21st December! Yes, you DID read that right. It should have been collected that day but it was the day of the big snow here in Berkshire so they couldn’t get through. Fair enough.
So the message to householders was leave it out and we’ll work as hard as we can to get it all done by Christmas Day. Fair enough.
But they failed and still the message was leave it out and we’ll get to it at some point……
Monday is our usual collection day and they came today. I’ll give them half a mark 🙂 for the fact that under the expected collection roster for holidays we should have been Wednesday this week, Tuesday next week and then back to normal the week after that.
As for seven times, I like the symmetry of the welsh – saith gwaith – but have no idea how to pronounce it! or the Dutch zevenmaal.
Great job on all your media coverage!! I can’t wait to hear about your resolutions!
Happy New Year and well done on the the article. I did get a pleasant surprise when I opened my Father-in-law’s paper! I came across very well, you can never tell with these newspapers, I know people that have very bad experiences where they have basically given the story the twist they want which is often unhelpful. So well done and onwards and upwards for 2010.
Happy New Year!!
Great to hear about all the press coverage!!
Wishing you lots of success & even less waste in 2010 too!! 🙂
@Grandma Green: Heptupled sounds good Grandma Green – thanks 🙂
@Anne: Ahhh, now I’m not sure – septupled sounds equally as feasible LOL! I’ll definitely have to put both names in the hat unless I can find out for sure 😉
@John Costigane: Hi John, thanks for your comments; as you know we appreciate your unwavering support. Interestingly, I think I am going to be tearful on the day our bin is collected as the impact of having this landfilled will be so great. I’ll no doubt write more about that at some point.
@Rob Whittle, NAIL2: Hi Rob, I rather like sevenfold too! GOod idea about saving the turkey for when it seems a treat. How do you get rid of bones in your household? It’s great to hear of your local school supporting the Woodland trust and milk bottle tops – it would be great to see more of this happening. Your envelope design sounds good to me; as with many types of packaging, we do need more legislation.
@Mal Williams: Hi Mal, thank you! One of the things we hear from our readers is that we are more ‘reachable’ if you like; I think people feel they can relate to us; we’re not a faceless corporation, we are real people (despite recent media coverage portrayals LOL!) trying to do out bit.
99.35% waste reduction sounds fab – thanks for doing the maths 🙂
@Linda Ryan: Hello Linda; lovely to see you and thanks for the comment. Another vote for septupled – I’ll pop your name in the hat too 😉 Do share any ideas you have for using up the leftovers in a jar; tips like these can help people to take those small steps to reducing their own waste. Great to hear you have a good recycling centre near by – enjoy your retirement.
@Almost Mrs Average: Hmmm, well that’s a new take on ‘sevenfold’ Mrs A! Glad you’re out your gate and your bin has been put out at last 😉
@LJayne: Hi Lesley, I like your suggestions! And what a farce with the recycling. Still it’s gone now, so you have a clean slate for the new year 🙂
@Jen Clean Bin: Thanks Jen – happy new year to you and thank you for sharing a great post this week about cumulative effects; it was very thought provoking.
@russell: Thanks Russell; we were pleased with the coverage and the number of new visitors to the site means it has generated a lot of interest 🙂 Have a great 2010 yourself!
@Layla: Happy new year, Layla and may you have a wasteless year too!