It's not easy this zero waste business

Cold and snowy here this morning, although it doesn't stop the cats, who have been shooting in and out since 7:30am. Sometimes I wish I had the zest for life that they do!

So I went to Morrisons early one morning to do the weekly shop and endeavour to practice some zero waste principles. It wasn’t that easy this week it has to be said; a lot of what I bought had packaging because there was an absence of anything else to buy that had little or no packaging. For example, I buy Knorr stock pots, which come in small plastic pots, because they are gluten free and have recyclable packaging. I’d like to hunt down a large bottle of concentrated stock or find a gluten-free stock cube that has compostable packaging and not foil. Using my own homemade stock is fine for recipes requiring large volumes of liquid, but not for adding concentrated flavour in dishes like chilli or bolognese.

I did make several good decisions that I'm pleased with. I put back two organic chickens that were half price and going out of date. I put them in my basket but realised as I was walking round that I already had a whole chicken, two chicken crowns and a roasted chicken in the freezer, and I was just buying them because they were a bargain not because I needed them. That was £12 saved.

Martin asked me to get some flowers for Audrey’s birthday, which I did and I made sure they were in paper wrap not plastic, however, that decision bought its own issues - the price label was not peel off and tore the packaging. 

I bought bacon from the butcher’s counter instead of off the shelf like I usually do but I had stopped short of taking my own containers as I felt too self-conscious about doing it. I knew that I could wash reuse the thin plastic bag a few times but I could not reuse the plastic container that comes from the pre-packaged stuff on the shelf.

Audrey had asked me to buy some individual creme caramel’s for her but for the second week running Morrison’s had run out. I realised I had a packet of make from scratch caramel in the cupboard and thought I could make them up into individual pots (paper inner bag and a carboard outer packet). However, I lacked small containers at home to do them so I made the conscious decision to buy six small plastic storage containers with lids so I could make a pint of caramel and then dispense it into individual pots. Yes, I bought plastic but it is highly reusable and stops 6 individual pots going out the door each week. I may have to buy more as Martin often has individual trifles as well, and that's another 6-7 pots a week out the door. Give him a whole trifle and he will eat it - at one sitting  - so I will try and make up some individual ones for him too. 

We had roast lamb (all of the ingredients out of the freezer and fridge) for Audrey’s birthday and Martin asked me to pick up a Pavlova and a birthday cake. I decided to make them both myself. The pavlova was very easy, I had eggs from my chickens, sugar/ cornflour/vanilla extract in the cupboard and bags of frozen pre-prepared summer fruits in the freezer. The only thing I had to buy was whipping cream which of course has a plastic pot, but those pots are quite a convenient 9-inch size and I often keep them do use for seed pots. I used a Hairy Biker's recipe for the base, and it was lovely.

The cake was a different matter. OMG, the icing! I forgot how hard it is to do writing! I had all the ingredients to make up a Victoria sponge in the cupboard but I didn't have, and what I ended up buying, was marzipan and soft icing for the cover, and edible flowers and icing paste for the decoration. Of course those have got their individual packaging too. I had a complete brain failure in front of the shelves and ended up buying the lot. I could not remember how to make up a thick enough paste to do the icing, whether or not I had the colouring for the writing, and where on earth my icing kit was. It’s been that long since I’ve done any icing at all! I was standing there, blocking up the aisle, lost in thought so decided to just get those items on this occasion before I was on the receiving end of any more dirty looks and tutting from masked shoppers. 

But, in reality I’m not going to need to make proper occasion cakes that often as we only generally tend to have iced cakes on our birthdays and Christmas, so a maximum of, say, five cakes a year. This is one of those scenarios when buying a cake may be more zero-waste than making one, and something to consider in the future. It won't be as personal though, which perhaps is more important. 

I was very pleased to only put out one bag of recycling this week, although before I could get a picture the local litter womblers picked up all the recyclable litter from the neighbouring lanes and placed the bags outside on my drive for the dustman as they went past! So everyone walking would have thought I had THREE bags of waste. The Womblers normally put a printed group 'Womble' sticker on them so the dustman know they are not someone's personal rubbish but these bags didn't have a sticker. 

Oh, how I gnashed my teeth when I saw that!

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Steel Kitten

How near ‘Zero Waste’ (Nearo Waste?) can we get?

A few weeks ago I went out for an uncharacteristically early morning walk. I couldn’t sleep and thought it would be nice to go for a walk just before the dawn came up. I took a bag with me and picked up a few bits of litter on the way. It was bin day and I walked past lots of houses with all their rubbish bags outside waiting to be collected. I noticed a lot of the houses in my area seemed to only be putting out one bag of rubbish and one of recycling, and one of my closest neighbours had only one recycling bag approximately a quarter full with mostly dog food cans. Then I got back to my house and saw two full bags of recycling waiting on the roadside (and none of it from litter picking) and, to be honest, it wasn’t a good feeling. That’s an awful lot for just three people. I remember when it used to be one bag, and usually not a full bag either. 

So over the course of a week I had a look at some of the stuff that went in there. It probably won’t come as any surprise to you that the vast majority of what’s there is food packaging. My first instinct was to simply say right well let’s get rid of the plastics and cardboard, try practising some zero waste techniques and reduce the footprint a bit more. But the more I look into this more I can see the problem is a complex one that just buying unwrapped stuff won’t fix. 

The first thing is that plastic is a very useful product, especially when it comes to keeping things fresh for longer. If you shop every few days, the chance of non-wrapped produce starting to go off before you use it is slim. I prefer to go to the supermarket as little as possible so any fresh produce in my fridge will start to look a bit shady by the end of the 7-10 days. On the other hand only 9% of the plastics we throw out in this country ever gets recycled so cutting down on its use is the best plan. For me to go as close to zero waste as possible, I’ll have to employ a lot of different techniques besides buying ‘naked produce’ and there will be trade offs. For example, I would love to try buying food and household items from a bulk buy store with loose containers but the nearest one to me is Lincoln. Even without the Lockdown complicating everything it is not worth my time and petrol to do a two hour round trip for only a few scant items. There’s no delivery - obviously - and even if there was that’s generating more packaging waste. 

A lot of the issues are discussed in depth both online and in books. One book I particularly liked (that my local library had as an online loan) is Bea Johnson’s book Zero Waste Home. I like the fact that she considered the pros and the cons and accepted that zero waste is not achievable but as close to waste-free is and it’s a worthwhile thing to strive for. Do whatever you can do because something is better than nothing. 

So, this week I started a ‘time and motion’ study, looking at everything I did, what products it involved and how I could improve what I was doing to move towards a zero waste approach. The biggest area is grocery and household shopping. 

During lockdown I’ve been getting shopping delivered, partly as I’ve stayed in to shield Audrey and reduce Martin’s exposure to COVID and partly for convenience. Now, in the supermarkets you can opt to put loose items into your own bags, but you don’t get that with online shopping. Yes you can specify that you don’t want carrier bags, but they will still use them for frozen food and household chemicals while loose fruit and veg will be put into a plastic bag complete with a sticker. Also, I realised I have been ordering certain products in multiples wrapped in plastic for convenience. For example, peppers or avocados I order as a two or three pack in plastic packaging. 

So I’ve been working out a better way of buying these products that has minimal packaging to try and reduce what we throw out. I started off by going back to shopping outside so I can regain more control over the process - Audrey had her first vaccination last week and I feel more comfortable going out now.

This week’s shop was only a small one and there wasn’t a massive amount I could do but I did what I could - I bought as much ‘naked’ as possible. I was pleased to see that Morrison’s had brown bags for fruit and veg but at first glance I felt that there wasn’t a large amount of produce that was loose. There was no loose broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, pears, apples or salad items apart from spring onions so I had to forget about those. However, I found bananas, sweet potatoes, courgettes, onions, avocados, Brussels sprouts, sweetheart cabbage, peppers (only red available loose), oranges and mushrooms. That’s plenty. Out of the 10 items I did buy, four were not seasonal. If I could have bought everything I wanted, three of the items would have been out of season (I would not have bought the courgettes). 

As for the rest of the shop I tried where possible to make different choices to bring me closer to being less wasteful. Instead of the Fajita meal kit I opted for a packet of fajita spice and wraps separately, which eliminated the salsa packet, which rarely gets finished, and the outside packaging. Audrey and I usually have ours with rice and the leftover wraps are frozen to use for Martin’s lunches. In time i could look for large bulk packs of tortillas and the spice mix, or make some tortillas or maybe even get rid of the tortillas and just serve it with rice.

Instead of buying a large pack of cheaper chicken breasts for 2-3 easy meals, which I’ve been doing more and more during lockdown out of boredom, I bought just two good quality free range chicken breasts for one evening meal for the three of us. And this is where it got a little complicated, because I could’ve gone to the meat counter and got two chicken breasts wrapped in a plastic bag that I brought from home for that purpose but the chicken was not free range or organic and I want to move away from cheap chicken this year towards higher welfare animals. I had to decide on the spot what was more important to me. My choice to buy free range chicken breasts meant I will have plastic packaging to recycle at the end of this week.

While this is a start, it in no way accounts for the majority of stuff in our recycling. Most of the plastic packaging on the fruit and veg goes into the black bag, and that goes to an incinerator that powers a local electrical plant. Our recycling is mostly foil cat food tins and cans, cardboard, paper and plastic dessert/yoghurt and single portion pots with the occasional glass bottle or jar. 

That’s the stuff I need to tackle.

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Steel Kitten