Mrs Green’s recycling stories
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It’s my favourite part of the week – time to share some link love!
Each story I feature will focus on one of the 3 Rs and help us lead a more zero waste lifestyle.
Peasticks and bamboo
Each year I find my old bamboo canes for growing runner beans up. This year, however, I’d not been a good custodian and the harsh winter had taken its toll.
I went to the garden centre to replenish them – they’re a zero waste product which can be bought individually without packaging after all.
However, it was Michael over at green Living Review that bought my attention to the bigger picture. Find out what he has to say about ‘peasticks and beanpoles‘.
Zero waste vegetable packaging
One of our facebook fans shared a link to a great story about plastic vegetable packaging.
Overwhelmed by the wasteful nature at his local market, Ben Huttly from Bournemouth has designed zero-waste packaging for fruits and vegetables. Not only is Huttly’s design delightfully modern and minimal, but its is also biodegradable and can even be planted!
Check out “zero waste vegetable packaging you can also plant”
Cost to the environment vs cost to self
Any of you who are trying to do the ‘right thing’ in terms of green will know many of the dilemmas we face. I touched on one of these dilemmas the only week when I pondered if it was better to buy a whole naked cucumber and toss half into the compost bin or buy a half wrapped in plastic to reduce food waste.
Over on the Quince Tree, Sue is on a zero waste challenge. She switched from supermarket to milkman delivered milk and had containers ready to visit her deli – but in both instances a huge dilemma awaited.
Read “It’s not easy being green“to find out exactly what happened.
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It isn’t easy being green at times I know.
I bought some mussels once and kept most of the shells. I varnished a few for decoration and gave a few away. I’ve now crushed the rest. Are they useful on the allotment for anything?
@teresa, they’ll probably keep slugs away?
I have milk delivered by the milkman. Yes it costs more, especially since we have organic dairy products, but it saves me spending money! Before, when I ran out of milk, I’d also stop and buy a magazine, some nice rolls, a bit of cous-cous for lunch. All stuff I didn’t need. Now with a milk delivery and a bread machine I don’t do that any more 🙂 Plus my milkman can deliver all sorts of other things too. We get croissants on a Friday for Saturday breakfast etc.
If you don’t use it you lose it.
I have milk delivered for similar reasons to LJayne, and I also know several older neighbours who rely on the milkman- they can’t nip out for a pint of milk. One day that might be me, and I’d quite like there to still be a milkman!
Also, and this isn’t a dig at that blogger in particular, but who says that we should be able to buy milk for 35p a pint? That’s got to cover the cost of the cows, their feed; profit to the farmer; transportation to the dairy plant from the farm; processing; manufacture and transportation of the bottle; wages to the plant workers and tanker drivers; profit to the dairy; transportation to the supermarket; profit to the supermarket….
I’m amazed that can be done for 65p a pint, and if it is being done for 35p, I think we can all guess who is making sure they still get adequate profit out of that chain and it is no wonder Countryfile on Sunday did yet another piece on dairy farmers going out of business or choosing to expand into mega-herds with thousands of cattle.
Somebody was wheeled on to say the size of herd has no bearing on animal welfare, but nobody interviewed would say that we wouldn’t end up following the US into enormous feed lots where the cattle are inside in small pens and fed grain; battery cattle. The farm they showed wasn’t far off any way, and the owners justification was that it suited these ‘high producing’ cows. Yes, like caged hens suit being in cages because they get so fat so fast they can’t live outside. Some justification.
I’ll step down off my soapbox (milkcrate?) now, and will reiterate that I am not lambasting anybody for their choices. Times are hard, choices are difficult, money doesn’t go as far as we would all like. I feel as though my weekly shopping is a continual compromise of packaging/organics/fairtrade/local producers against what I can afford and of course not continually saying ‘I’m not buying that’ to my family. (I seem to say it a lot!)
My anger is mostly directed at supermarkets who create these choices and misuse their power and ability to support farmers and producers.
End of rant!
@Teresa: Hi Teresa, I’m not sure, but thinking of the myriad of products that contain blood and bonemeal they must be good for something!
@LJayne: that’s a really good point, Lesley – I think we all pop in to the shops for one item and come out with at least half a dozen…