John's Weird World

A greener life is not just about recycling, using public transport, buying fair-trade and having a pot of basil on the windowsill.  I place quite a lot of importance on creativity, health and a well-stimulated mind. Therefore I have a lot of time for art... I especially like looking at (and touching!) sculpture, and there are certain photographers I like too.

Books per se are not that green.  They use lots of resources in their manufacture, are printed in one place and have to be carted all over the place and are heavy.  Most are only read once and then sit in a bookshelf... OK, bookshelves are a way of sequestering carbon, but really we should share our books and use libraries more... but I am going to suggest you go and buy a good book. (And when you've read it, lend it to friends!)

I am very fond of Kate Lock, whom I first came accross as a columnist in the York Press, and soon met as she was having some problems with her compost and she asked a volunteer York Rotter to come and sort it out.  It turned out that she was on some kind of mission to be greener and that my assisting her meant that I would appear in the book she was crafting.  That book is now on sale and I have spent a good few hours of my holiday immersed in it..   'Confessions of an Eco-Shopper, the true story of one woman's mission to go green' (ISBN 978 0340 954676, Hodder & Stoughton 2008) is an excellent read, with everyday challenges such as having a veggie-box delivery and wondering what to do with unknown veg,  growing her own herbs and salads, ethical fish suppers, dispensing with the bleach and using vinegar instead, experimenting with 'green and reusable' sanitary protection, finding out if fair-trade tastes as good as 'ordinary' teas and coffees.  Kate put a lot of effort into researching the book, trialling all-sorts of products and lifestyle changes.  Of course my favourite 'Isle' (its arranged like a supermarket!) is the one on rubbish and recycling, where we follow her path from non-composter to happy and successful rotter, even trying out a wormery and 'Bokashi' to recycle her cooked and meaty foodstuff wastes.

I read the book cover to cover, and learned a lot.  It is really good to read a female approach to living a greener life... so many commentators are male, and they tend not to write about clothes, cosmetics or sanitary-wear.  So I am going to shamelessly plunder some of these topics for future blog posts.  Although Kate thanks me for helping her with her composting, I'm sure she will see this as a 'fair swap'!

I get the feeling that it's actually Gordon agreeing with me... has he been reading this blog?  Well, maybe, but I was pleased that the issue of wasted food was raised at the highest political levels, at the G8 Summit in Japan.  Many people were not pleased at Brown's 'advice' and the fact that the group had a huge multi-coursed meal with associated..... WASTE!!!

More often we are hearing various terms bandied around in the media and some of them are not self-explanitory... one of these is 'Peak Oil'.  So last week I attended a York Greenspeak meeting which was all about this fascinating and very current subject.  I knew a bit about the theory that oil reserves are about half finished, but less about how this will affect us economically and socially.

Peak oil was suggested by Shell geologist Dr Marion King Hubbert in 1956 as he had worked out that the discovery and extraction of oil would follow a 'bell curve' distribution.  He accurately predicted peak US oil production (1970) and that world oil production would be somewhere about now, ie that we may be about to start the long period of reduced oil extraction.  Peak world oil discovery was 1964, which means that although there is probably more oil to be discovered, it isn't the 'easy to get' stuff and it will be smaller quantities, and more expensive to get out.  Meanwhile, world oil use continues to rise, as developing countries continue to develop and human populations continue to grow.  Published world oil reserves suggest that peak oil will be about 2030, but recently Shell has drastically reduced their reserve figures, suggesting that oil companies may have overstated their reserves (to boost confidence and share prices?).

So, we are heading for a situation with less available mineral oil, and this will affect us in a number of ways.  Firstly, scarcity drives prices up.  We are already experiencing this.  When the price of a barrel of oil goes up, it becomes more economically viable to extract oil out of 'unconventional' sources such as tar sands and oil shales, but these require more energy to get the oil out, so the price won't go down again.  Higher prices also mean that investment into alternatives such as hydrogen, biofuels, coal liquifaction and nuclear will go up.  But all of these alternatives have problems and knock-on issues... biofuels for instance are competing for finite arable land for food and biodiversity, the hydrogen economy depends on either electricity to split water or fossil gas to provide the hydrogen, and coal and gas both add carbon dioxide to the overloaded atmosphere.  The two greenest solutions to the coming energy crisis are energy efficiency and renewables from wind, sun, tides and hydro.

So how do we 'ordinary people' deal with this knowledge?  Well it would be responsible and prudent to reduce our energy use, by driving less and in smaller more efficient vehicles, by reducing energy use in the home by insulating, having more efficient appliances and switching them off when not in use, by reducing meat and dairy in our diets, by buying less and recycling more, by buying locally and in season... you know the score by now!  Unfortunately, we all know what we SHOULD do but are finding it very difficult to change.

This week in Community Care magazine I have a column about Britain's favourite hobby, gardening. An essential part of any garden is making compost, and this is my favourite pastime, so much so that my wife says I have 'OCD', Obsessive Composting Disorder'.  I've been obsessed by it and related subjects since childhood... I used to put food items in glass jars and watch the various bacteria and moulds develop over days and weeks, and I've always liked mushrooms and creepy crawlies.  Since coming out as a 'green' in my early 20's I've known that home composting is the best way to recycle all of the stuff which goes smelly in your dustbin, to save energy with reduced bin-lorry weight, to reduce landfill space, to reduce pollution from landfills, to help biodiversity by creating habitat and food, to help trap carbon in soils, to help fertilise soils to grow healthier plants, to reduce the need for peat which should stay in peat bogs, to reduce the need for fertilisers which use fossil fuels in their manufacture, to help reduce rainwater evapotation from soils and not need irrigation.... I could go on and frequently do.  I even did my dissertation on composting!

So, armed with all those reasons to have a home compost heap or wormery, here's my 'short guide'.  Good compost needs three things, the right mix of materials, the right amount of air and the right amount of moisture.  That's all.  Get those right and biodegredation WILL happen!  Biodegradable materials are any which have come from living things recently, any plant materials or animal materials and their products.  There are a few exceptions, including rubber which has been vulcanised with sulphur (tyres and inner tubes don't rot, although natural latex rubber like balloons and marigold gloves do, eventually) and some plastics made from oil now have an additive which allows them to 'oxo-biodegrade'.  Rotting is the natural breakdown of complex materials into simpler ones (water, carbon dioxide, humus) by the action of bacteria, fungi, and other organisms such as worms.  I find the whole process almost magical!

As home composting is so beneficial and saves the local authority lots of money in landfill charges, most councils are subsidising compost bins, many with WRAP as their partner, and this website also has a good section on composting, one of many guides available.  So get a cheap compost bin, or make an enclosure using pallets, or just have an untidy pile in one corner of your garden.  Throw on a mixture of green/sappy/moist/'nitrogen rich' materials and brown/dry/'carbon rich' materials and wait.  Rainwater will help keep it moist, the browns will help it keep aerated, and turning it over and mixing it will help speed the process.  Your compost is finished when the materials look nothing like what you put in... it ia a brown, crumbly soil-like material.  This can be 'top-dressed' on soil to suppress weeds and conserve moisture as a mulch, or riddled and used to add to potting composts; I mix it with leafmold and loam to grow my tomatoes and cucumbers.

Many websites and books advise on not composting cooked food, meat etc, but this is just because rodents find these foods even more delicious and may find their way into heaps containing them.  It is possible though to make your heap rodent proof, or to process these materials using Bokashi or a wormery so they can be recycled too. Search the web for many suppliers of composting products, or for designs for home-made versions.

Last week, researchers at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced that Carbon Dioxide levels had hit a new record high, of 387 parts per million (ppm), as measured by their research outpost in Mauna Loa, Hawaii.  This may not mean a lot to people less obsessed by CO2 levels than me, but it is significant, since the NOAA people say that the rate of accumulation is increasing, and is over 2ppm greater each year.  This is the highest CO2 concentration for 650,000 years, a level that humans have never experienced before.  This means that in just 6 or 7 years, the level will rise to 400ppm, a theoretical 'line in the sand' over which many scientists think that our climate will descend into chaos and become much more unpredictable and violent.

Plastic pervades many areas of our modern lives and is incredibly useful, durable, cheap and easy for manufacturers to make into 'stuff' for consumers. I am not a particular 'fan' of plastic, as it is mostly made from oil, a non-renewable resource, but I have a balanced opinion as I do (we all do!) have a lot of useful objects made from it. I demonstrated my ambivalence in a recent letter to the York Press commenting on a petition to 'ban plastic bags', which I don't understand nor agree with... I think that taxing them would be better, as in Ireland where a 15 tax to the consumer had reduced use by 80%. The issues are that we use millions of them, mostly only once, and throw them away where they add to landfill, or if we throw them around, they may become a litter-item, caught in a tree or hedge (the Irish call them 'Witches Knickers'!) or get swept out to sea where they look uncannily like jellyfish to unfortunate jellyfish-eating turtles and birds. So it would be better if we used fewer of them, reused them many times and disposed of them properly. My friend in America says she can take her old ones to a recycling point... why can't we do that here?

Some plastic is made from renewable materials, the compost caddy liners I put on my home compost heaps are made from corn starch, although the issues surrounding the use of food materials (in this case sweetcorn) to make non-food items (including biofuels) are helping to put up the price of food... Other plastic has an additive called d2w which makes it 'degradable' in air after a set length of time, so refuse sacks may be designed to last for 18 months but bread bags start to fall apart in just a few weeks.

However, there is another side to plastic which is less well known which is also to do with some of the additives. Some plastic has phthalates in it, which soften it or make it flexible. Some reports link these chemicals with cancer and possible hormone disruption. Then there's DEHA and BPA which may also be less than healthy if ingested.... and these chemicals may leach out of plastics if they are chewed, heated, or re-used repeatedly. Unfortunately, the internet is awash with conflicting reports... some research indicates that there are potential problems, other industry-supported information tells readers that the 'myths are bunk' and there is no problem whatsoever. So I don't know the truth, and I'm not a chemist, but I will keep my 'ear to the ground', and will report on any new findings.

A good way to eat at least your 'five a day' portions of fruit and vegetables is to have some of them dried... it's also an excellent way to preserve certain vegetables and fruit if you have a glut or manage to get a job-lot of cheap items or 'buy one get one free' deals. Dried food doesn't have as much 'goodness' as fresh, as some vitamins are lost, so I am not suggesting substituting dried fruit for fresh, but having some can be an enjoyable change or an addition. I mainly eat my dried fruit in my home-made muesli, but my children, who haven't graduated to muesli, have dried fruit instead of sweets (they have some sweeties too!)

Many people now understand the concept of embodied energy, ie the amout of fuel resources it has taken to make or grow something and to get it to the consumer. However, the concept of embodied water is just becoming known. This may be called 'virtual' or 'embedded' water and it is the amount of fresh water used to grow or manufacture something. Water is just as important to us as fuel and energy, if not more so, and to understand our true use of this much under-rated resource can help us behave more ethically.

On Sunday 24th February 2008 the world changed... or did it? Certainly there was a 'first'; a jet plane made a short trip with one of it's four engines running on biofuel. A Virgin Boeing 747 flew from Heathrow to Schiphol in Amsterdam using a mixture of coconut and babassu nut oil. Sir Richard Branson hailed this as the dawn of a new era but I don't think we're there yet. This 'new era' isn't going to be easy either.

I do not celebrate or do anything special for St. Valentine's Day. I do remember sending and receiving Valentine's cards when a teenager but since I've been married, and have been aiming to consume as little as possible, it just looks like another way for big business to make money, often at the expense of the environment. However this year I have been approached by a friend doing a media studies degree who wants to interview me about my views or experiences of the day, so as it approaches, I have been unusually aware of all the advertising and activity connected with it, confirming my cynical view.

Recently we've been bombarded with messages about obesity, how any processed meat can increase our cancer risk, food miles and carbon footprints, and there's so many cookery programmes on the box.

So, we can deduce that food, especially your 'five-a-day fruit and veg' is important! Now is the time of year when we can invest a little bit of time and money on getting some really good, fresh, local vegetables later in the year. It's time to plant some seeds and fruit trees or bushes, if you have space.

Some of us are aiming to have a green and cruelty-free Christmas and will not be cooking a turkey or any other bird to eat on the big day. Others may be happy to follow tradition but may have guests or family members who are vegetarian or vegan.