Fighting styro-bloat

It's been a while, but I am looking for ways to encourage companies to eliminate polystyrene, AKA styrofoam packaging from their supply chains.

Even according to this guide, hosted by the British Plastics Federation, and trumpeting the virtues of Expanded Polystyrene, recycling facilities for this material are few and far between

Practically speaking, people are not able to recycle polystyrene from consumer packaging, or insulated boxes for refrigerated food deliveries, because there are not widespread recycling services available for it.

I have contacted Inverawe Smokehouse to complain about their boxes, because every year, we receive a food box around Christmas time, and then in the New Year, I toil to try to find some further use for the big white box.  Apparently, some people use them to incubate reptiles, like bearded dragons, but often nobody seems to want the box, and we end up having to send it to landfill.  As I told them, there is an alternative to polystyrene, called woolcool, which several food suppliers use to package similar food hampers for gift deliveries, and I am awaiting a response from Inverawe about changing their packaging.

Here in the UK, Oxford has banned take-away containers made of polystyrene, following the lead of several major U.S. cities, including San Francisco, so I'm proud and happy to see things changing somewhat.

Beachapedia has a good, brief summary of polystyrene and its problematic uses.

Please get in touch if you have any comments about this issue, if you've seen the plastic beach in Hawaii, for example, or think of ways to cut down on polystyrene wherever you are.

Brazil, post-carnival.

We've lived for about three years in an area that has no municipal recycling program for polypropylene (code 5) plastics, and my approach has been to avoid buying products with this type of packaging as much as possible, and stockpile all the containers from yogurt, cream, ice cream, cosmetics, etc that did end up in our household, waiting for some future opportunity to unload them.

Thanks to the Recoup website, I found a local, private company that handles this kind of plastic, and yesterday loaded myself up on our folding bike, with its helpful little pannier rack on the back, and took it six miles or so to the forbidding mechanical gates of the center, which opened for me on my bike with a few jerks and shudders.  I saw many stories-high stacks of various containers along the warehouse space, some broken and some new-looking, suggesting that the recycling process actually took place there, rather than just sorting, as is the case at local household waste locations.

The man who met me was really helpful, and told me which of the motley load of old containers were usable. He seemed pleased to see some labels removed in advance, and a good 90% or the plastic qualified for recycling.  The one category that turned out to be practically non-recyclable was code 6, polystyrene, a white, brittle material used for the small, single-serving yogurt products like Activia.

It was a huge relief to clear it all out, although I suppose the future for these materials is likely reuse as polypropylene containers, perhaps in food service, after which, the difficulty of getting them to a recycling center will probably lead them to be dumped in landfill after all.  In this sense, I may be just passing the responsibility on to the next consumer.  Southampton Council's website indicates they take code 5 plastics, but many councils exclude it, and I don't know if there is any movement to expand the service to include these containers.

People are lucky in the U.S. in this sense, as there are collection points at Whole Foods for PP (see earth911).  The larger solution, I feel, would be to cut down on the original use of plastics in so many food packaging processes, as has been done in Himacahal Pradesh.  India has a pretty dizzyingly frugal recycling system in certain slums, where people specialize in a certain class of plastic collection, use a kind of rough teamwork to process, from what I've seen in a report on Channel 4, virtually 100% of plastic waste, and, unsurprisingly, suffer various health problems related to their work.  Here's a CNN page about recycling in Mumbai.

I hope we, in well-off Western countries, can find ways of following India's lead in waste practices.  In the meantime, I'm enjoying the void left by an absent heap of plastic in our grubby recycling bin (which is itself almost certainly polypropylene as well).

Happy 2014

Happy New Year.  The weather hasn't been friendly, but waking up in the morning has been much better since we stopped listening to a certain local radio station on the clock radio and switched, instead, to BBC 6 Music on the DAB.  The morning guy started his show off with Debaser the other day.  My favorite show is Tom Ravenscroft's Friday evenings, and I just managed to get an old computer to play the clip from last week, which I'm happy about.
6 Music: http://www.bbc.co.uk/6music
One caveat is that American college stations (which I do miss sometimes) have their own ramshackle charm, and more freewheeling, deep-cutting shows, but for a very professional station, with lots of convenient features (playlists with sample audio clips of the songs played, for example), 6 Music is excellent, and unlike BBC TV features, it streams outside the UK.

New bag deal!

Good news:
We heard last week that England will soon adopt a mandatory 5 pence charge for plastic shopping bags, and applauded the news.  I believe most of Europe had already rid itself of free plastic bags (in food stores, at least) some years ago.
Although plasticsindustry.org claims the impact of plastic bags on landfill mass is negligible, less damaging than paper, etc. I know that even in our local area, bags frequently get thrown out by the roadside.  As far as the claim that plastic shopping bags are "100% recyclable," Wikipedia indicates that while HDPE nags (recycling code 2) are useful for post-consumer material, LDPE ones are much less useful.  The latter is used mainly for making plastic bags, so I don't think we can accept that shopping bags are all 100% recyclable, let alone that they are generally getting recycled in practice.
It seems reasonable to expect that paying for these bags will encourage more people to find other ways of carrying groceries, for example the old-fashioned backpack or wheeled trolleys, both of which also carry the weight with less physical stress.
What was strange was seeing the Daily Mail claim that this policy change resulted from a Mail campaign to reduce plastic bag use.  I suppose that end of the political scene does feel invested in protecting the countryside, and we can agree with that.  Shopping bags seem to be another thing that end up largely taken for granted, but were never really needed (a future post on carpeting will be forthcoming, someday).

It's what's for dinner

I realized that in planning a meal, I tend to start with the starch part and build around it, which might not be the best approach.  Not eating meat adds some difficulties, and England doesn't always offer a great range of produce, but wild greens are helping out a lot right now.

Nettles have a lot of protein and grow all over, and they work really well mixed with some other greens, like sprouting tops, broccoli or wild garlic (which takes much less heat to sauté in a pan).

This evening, what I had available for dinner was some pretty sad leftover noodles with corn, out of which I picked the slices of supermarket chorizo, and since the late afternoon was so nice and someone had recently tipped me off to the lime tree leaves growing nearby, I decided to have a heap of salad, mainly, 80% foraged--I also used a bunch of wild garlic flowers and leaves, and some chestnut mushrooms for variety.  It was crunchy and tasty.

The bonus of gathering leaves to eat is also that I've never, ever found them growing packaged in plastic, with some questionable recycling code that might not be accepted, requiring that I stockpile them at home for months (years?) in the hope of finding a legitimate recycling spot.

Sorry for the low-res photos.  I'll be less lazy and use a proper camera next time.

Enviromotional issues

Thinking about the environment can be difficult, because the concept and the stakes involved are vast, but we can't help feeling something about it.