Food waste again...

You can tell when a politician is really on the ropes when they get pilloried for making an eminently sensible remark. Now, I'm no fan of Gordon Brown, but when he said we should waste less food, he was damn right.

There was a great article in the Guardian yesterday with tips on how to avoid food waste. One of the points was to ignore sell-by dates for most products - I assume the 10-years-past-its-best-before bottle of Lea & Perrins I found that the back of our spice cupboard is an exception - I wasn't going to try it!

Weekly Tip #16: Say "Bog Off" to BOGOFs

To avoid waste, never take the freebie in a Buy One Get One Free if the product is perishable. You won't feel as obliged to use it in time as it is free so it is more likely to end up in the bin.

This will make you stop and think...

According to WRAP, every day in the UK we throw away:

5.1 million whole potatoes
4.4 million whole apples
2.8 million whole tomatoes
7 million whole slices of bread
1.3 million unopened yoghurts and yoghurt drinks
1.2 million sausages
1 million slices of ham
0.7 million whole eggs
0.7 million whole bars of chocolate and unwrapped sweets
0.3 million unopened meat-based ready meals or takeaways
0.3 million unopened packets of crisps

Time to rearrange the fridge (& the fruit bowl)

If you've been reading this blog for a while you'll know my view that food is probably our biggest impact on the environment - land use, pesticides, fertilisers, transport, processing, refrigeration, packaging, retail and waste all add up to a huge impact. Wasting food is obviously a bad thing and, of what we buy, a third is wasted, half of that unnecessarily (the rest is tea bags, peels, skins and 'endy-bits' that we can't eat).

Well I'm going to have to change my fridge habits (bung it all in except marmalade - horrible cold on hot toast) having read this interesting article in the Guardian about food storage. I've always assumed that cooler = better preservation, but apparently it is not the case for many vegetables - it actually cuts their shelf life. So it's going to be a busy weekend.

I've already evicted the bananas from the fruit bowl. I knew the ethylene they offgas helps ripen tomatoes, but I didn't realise they over-ripen other fruit, leading to them "going off" earlier.

Every day is a school day...

Could you bin your bin?

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned Betsy Reid who is rumoured to be the UK's greatest recycler. Then I got my copy of Clean Slate, the CAT magazine, which had an article on what you might call extreme recycling - giving up your residual waste bin altogether. The idea is simple, but extremely challenging - you buy nothing that you can't recycle.

I'm tempted to give it a go, but I can see immediate problems. While we mainly use real nappies for our little boy, we do use one 'eco-friendly' disposable overnight as they're more absorbent so he will sleep through the night OK. This is the single most important thing for our quality of life at present and I really don't want to risk disrupting it. Another problem is that we're omnivorous so meat scraps can be a problem - not ideal for the compost heap. So I'm wimping out.

Another new idea, which is used in the construction industry, is to become 'waste neutral' - in other words you make sure that the amount of stuff you do throw away is matched by the amount of recycled/reused material you purchase. I'm not entirely convinced this adds up as it might encourage you to buy more stuff just to cover your increasing waste which may in turn increase the amount of stuff you buy - not really going in the right direction.

BTW Clean Slate suggests you convert your old wheelie bin into a water butt using a special kit, but I rather think your local council (which owns the bin) may have something to say about that.

How much does that ring on your finger weigh?

No, this isn't a picture of me standing on a beach on my hols, forgetting to hold in my stomach.

I'm actually standing on a huge toxic waste dump, forgetting to hold in my stomach.

This 'slimes dam' is on the outskirts of Johannesburg is 11km across and 150m high. It is being created to remove lots of little old dams of gold mine tailings from within the city itself which pose a safety hazard to the local populace. The company moving the waste was financing it solely by extracting more gold from the old waste using highly toxic mercury. From every 5 tonnes of waste, they got 1 gram of gold.

So the answer to my question is, if your ring is 24 carot (ie pure gold) and came from this process, its 'ecological rucksack' is a whopping 50 tonnes.

The ecological rucksack of the UK economy is 35 tonnes per person - that's 35 small cars' weight of stuff being shifted around every year just for me, you and every one of us. After 6 months, less than a tonne of that stuff remains a useful product - the rest has been thrown away.

Makes you think doesn't it?