Recently in recycling Category

Over the past few years there's been a lot of noise about the evils of plastic bags.  They've been blamed for filling up landfills and inflating people's carbon footprints, mimicking jellyfish and confusing turtles, even being labelled 'witches knickers' when blown into Irish hedges and trees.  Now, in the grand scheme of things, plastic bags are not the biggest of our consumption 'wrongs', despite a million being given out every minute.  But every little thing we do to improve the problem helps us go in the right direction.

Food is responsible for the largest part of our individual carbon footprints, more than transport or household energy and heating.  So when it comes to greening our lives, reducing food waste is one of the top issues.  Obviously there are things we can do in our own lives which will cut our individual and family food waste... such as getting portion size correct, learning how to re-use leftovers, and, initially, taking a shopping list to the supermarket and sticking to it!!!

Buying and consuming goods is a large part of our carbon footprint, so make things last longer, says John Cossham

Much of our carbon footprint is hidden within the manufacture and transport of everyday items we buy and consume.

People like me do go on about how big the problem is.  We often use numbers to prove a point.  Sometimes it's difficult to envisage how many, or how much when it comes to climate change, resource use, waste etc, but I've found an excellent website which gives us an insight into some of these figures.

Last Sunday was the second York Green Festival, and I am pleased to say that all our hard work paid off and it went really well.  I may now have more time to get back to my regular weekly blog which has suffered slightly over the summer...  Now, one of the most popular  places at YGF08 was the clothes swapping tent.  One of the volunteer organisers, Sarah, had got some of her friends to donate some outfits, tops, blouses, leggings, hats, unidentifiable garments etc and create a 'bank' of clothes.  Festival goers brought their own unwanted but re-usable garments and added them to the ones hanging up... and took away something which appealed, something new to them..... all completely for free!  What a good idea!  If I was more into clothes, I'd say it was brilliant, but I'm a bloke so it remains just a good idea.

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'!

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.

Regular readers may know that I started York Rotters, which is a 'Master Composter Scheme', training volunteers in the art of home composting, and enabling them to go out into the community to spread the word, to help their peers to start composting or to learn how to compost more successfully. One of the activities we do to engage peoples' interest and to get young people involved is to participate in the World Worm Charming Championships, York Heat.