Food waste

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about how much thin plastic was dominating my domestic, internal rubbish bin. I thought this was so peculiar and a significant burden on the landfill to which this rubbish was destined.

 (Source: Tree Hugger)

The second fact is still true, but as I washed my dinner dishes this evening I had a bit of a light bulb moment. At the time all this plastic was going into the bin I was doing a bit of a cook up. I perhaps might not have noticed the complete dominance of plastic in my rubbish bin if I had been mixing all this plastic with food waste as well. However, there is very little food waste that enters my traditional (in urban environment) rubbish stream.

Food waste in my house generally gets separated between the worm farm, the compost bin and the dogs. Hopefully in the near future I will also be sharing my scraps with some chickens too! In fact, I might not have enough food waste to sustain the chickens and may have to actually grow some goodies for them! Amazing.

All green waste from kitchen, including fruit and vegetable peelings, fruit stones, ends of herbs and old and sloppy fruit and vegetables all go to my worm farm and compost bins. The meat wastes and any small amounts of old left-overs go to my dogs! The only food scraps that on occasion goes into my mainstream garbage stream is my onion and garlic skins. Worms don't like these and as such most of the time they go into the normal rubbish bin.

 (Source: Colin J via Earth 911)

Interesting what little light bulbs turn on when you're up to your elbows in grey-water appropriate soaps suds!   Pin It

Clean Up Australia Day

My family and I trundled down to our local park to help out at an organised Clean Up Australia day event. Thankfully the weather was fine this morning and decided it was a great morning to do something a little different. At the park, we registered, got our bags, took out our gardening gloves and set to work cleaning up the site.

There had already been some collectors of rubbish, in the form of cub scouts, in the main park area before we had arrived, but we decided to take a leisurely stroll through the broader surrounds of the park. Not only did we collect a bag full of rubbish, we took our dogs for a walk and involved our toddler in a community volunteer activity.

So what did we collect?

A fair few beer bottles (the area is next to a bowls club), some aluminium cans, a 2L PET bottle, some plastic scraps (including broken down plastic shopping bags), paper from the inside of cigarette boxes, chocolate bar wrappers, newspaper and cardboard, a plank of wood broken off a fence from the local neighbourhood probably and a section of plastic that I think is part of the protective bits from under a car.

At our event, there certainly wasn't millions of people volunteering but by the time we signed up I think the site organiser had registered about 15 people and probably another 10 by the time we left. The site certainly was improved (measurable by amount of observable rubbish) after the efforts of all the volunteers and it is nice to make a little bit of difference to our local community.

Special treat on the way home was purchasing some locally grown, spray free bananas, which are especially sweet.

Looking forward to hearing of all the rubbish that was collected around Australia as part of this event and some of the wacky locations people chose to clean up this year. If you managed to make it out to help Clean up Australia, I look forward to hearing of your experiences.


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Alternate to plastic bags

Recently I visited my local organic supermarket for a trip of excitement. So many great products, inspiring ideas and generally a lot of great organic treats. This store has the typical bulk food bins allowing you to purchase the amount you really require, save some money, buy some traditionally unavailable products and maybe in the long-term the potential to save on packaging typically used to provide these products in mainstream supermarkets.

In many of the health food stores or places you typically buy these bulk options the store still typically provides some sort of traditional plastic bag for you to place these bulk items into. The store I visited today however had rolls of corn starch bags, which are able to be composted. What a terrific idea!

As you may have seen in one of my previous posts, I have previously determined that I can reduce my plastic bag consumption by using reusable shopping bags and generally refusing plastic bag options, however I was stumped as to what I could do as a liner my regular garbage bin in my kitchen. I think I now have an alternative. Corn starch compostable bags!

The premise is that these bags can break down in about 12 weeks time in the right conditions. The right conditions are more likely to occur in your backyard compost than the local landfill, but I believe that surely these compostable bags have got to be a better option in the landfill than your regular plastic bag. Surely?

So, my next thought process was, where can I get these things from and how much do they cost? Well based on my hour long internet search for Australian suppliers it seems there is a variety of products and also a wide variety in cost. They generally seem to be available in bulk, however there are a few companies that seem to be directed at the residential interest with less than 100 bags per roll or box type quantities available. However, I guess if you got a few friends interested I'm sure that the you could buy a bulk supply and then distribute these across a few families quick enough.

Also, found an interesting group called Say NO to plastic bags today! which discusses alternatives to plastic bags and provides some information to retailers in regards to impacts of traditional plastic bags and strategies to either reduce the use of plastic bags in their business or encourage the use of alternatives (with much of this information also a useful resource for the general public). This group also has a User's Guide directly aimed at retailers as a printable information sheet to assist in this transition process.

If you're interested I can post a list of suppliers of some of the truly biodegradable bags in the future. Pin It

Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Have you ever heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? If not, here is a little bit of information about it.

Basically it a massive amount of plastic pollution floating around in the Northern Pacific Ocean circulating with the oceanic currents. Apparently it is quite large, between 0.41 & 8.5% of the Pacific Ocean. It is however difficult to gain a true estimation of its size because it isn't visible in satellite imagery as the material is suspended in the upper water column rather than directly on the surface and much of it is plastic particulates rather than entire plastic containers.

Its presence was originally hypothesized in a paper in 1988, but its presence was 'discovered' by a sailor in 1997 who brought its presence to the attention of the scientific community. It is thought that the patch has formed over time through the accumulation of marine (plastic) pollution collected in oceanic currents, with wind-surface currents retaining the pollution within the Pacific region.

If this was a visible feature on our coastlines I'm sure people would have paid attention to the issue more readily before now, but as it is out of sight, I guess it is also a little out of mind. My hope is that the dissemination of such information will bring about changes to people's habits, particularly in relation to consumption of products within plastic containers to start with (as it has to go somewhere once you're finished with the product) or alternatively just dispose of these items more appropriately.  Reduce, reuse, recycle! Pin It

Don't tie up your garbage bags!

A friend of mine has currently been spending a lot of time at the refuse transfer stations around Brisbane for reasons that remain a little foggy. But despite his new odour (just kidding) he has some insight into what happens to our 'normal' rubbish after it is collected by the rubbish truck each week.

Upon taking our rubbish from our wheelie bins it goes to a transfer station where our rubbish is sorted. Seriously! I just didn't think that would ever happen. All the stuff that goes into our bins I thought that it would all be taken immediately to a large hole in the ground, compacted and then covered over. But no! It is sorted into products that can be reclaimed, recycled, composted, etc. I find this amazing!

The moral of the story is thus, don't tie up the plastic bags you put your household waste before you place them into your wheelie bins! Why you ask? This is because if your garbage bag is tied, then the products in the plastic bag are generally less likely to be sorted into their appropriate waste streams (recycling, reclaiming, composting or landfill) and just end up going straight to that landfill stream. So if you leave your bags untied the contents can escape and be appropriately sorted. Pin It

Plastic Bags in Recycling

Don't do it people. I have heard and yet to confirm that the companies that collect and sort the recycling can end up dumping whole truck loads of recyclable material into landfill if there is a portion of the truckload tainted with plastic bags.

There are options to recycle your plastic bags. This can be done through a number of large supermarket chains, but not through the recycling wheelie bin pick up route.

It infuriates me to see plastic bags hanging out of people's recycling bins in my street and suburb because I think of all the time and effort that I go to to sort my recycling items and ensuring that I recycle as much as I can. Then I see my effort potentially being wasted because my neighbour has contaminated the entire recycling load with plastic bags in their recycling bin. End result: my recycling getting chucked out with theirs. Aaarrrghh! Make the effort people, it really doesn't take that much time! Pin It

Plastic Bags

I am sick of the greenwash that supermarkets are using with respect to their plastic bags. The uninformed person is probably starting to feel ok about their acceptance of plastic bags at the end of the supermarket check out queue because of the words emblazioned on their bag "degradable' plastic bag". To me this is such a slap in the face. Of course it is degradable, everything is degradable, some products just take millions of years!

I was interested to know exactly how long it would take one of these 'degradable plastic bags' to degrade. So after a little bit of internet research it seems that it doesn't take as long as I originally suspected, but the length of time and the likely end point (being the local landfill) still leave the opportunity for environmental damage and degradation to occur as a result of these bags.

One plastic bag manufacturer did overseas research to determine the length of time it would take one of these bags to degrade and in the right conditions and exposure to sunlight it would be about a year. They then extrapolated their research and determined that it would probably be 3-4 months with full exposure to Queensland sun for a plastic bag to degrade.

I think what is regarded as 'degraded' as they discuss on the plastic bags is that the end product is not going to significantly impact upon the environment and in the context of this product, its context within landfill and the possible exposure of animals to a product that could cause them harm.

Well, this to me is certainly interesting and an eye opener. I suspected that it would take at least 10 years for a product such as a plastic bag to become environmentally benign. Nevertheless, I will continue to try to avoid the acceptance of plastic bags in the shopping queue. My issue is (after this research) I don't currently have a replacement for the humble plastic bag to store my rubbish prior to its collation into my wheelie bin each week. This obviously means that I am still contributing to the plastic bag issue. Guess I now have to look into some of the more biodegradable products, maybe something like the cornstarch products are more appropriate. More research needed to reduce that footprint I guess. Pin It