Composting

June 9, 2008 – 5:17 pm

Composting sounds hard, but it’s really not, in fact it’s one of the easiest things you can do at home to get you started on the path to being greener.  There are a few things to decide before you get started, and one or two things to remember as you go along, but after that, it’s really a matter of throw things in and leave them to rot.

First thing you have to decide is if you want a regular compost heap or if you’re going to go for a wormery or a bokashi compost.  A regular compost heap can have all your uncooked fruit and veg added, along with any garden waste you get - weeds, grass cuttings, prunings from plants and trees etc.  A bokashi compost means you can add cooked food waste including meat as well as all the normal things.  However, with a bokashi set up, you have to buy your bokashi powder and remember to add it regularly.  A wormery is generally much smaller and good if you’ve only got a very small space like a yard rather than a garden, as it tends not to smell and so doesn’t matter if it’s right by the back door.

Once you’ve made your decision which you’re going to go for, then you need to decide where you’re going to place it.  Remember with a bokashi set up you get a liquid forming that means you want to set it up on something (a bit like you would with a waterbutt) so you can pop a bucket or watering can under the tap to let you use all that lovely juice for feeding your plants.  With a compost heap you want to put it a little out of the way from the back door ideally as they can get a little smelly although if you buy one of the plastic composting bins then these tend to keep the smells inside much more than an open heap does.

So, you’ve placed your compost heap where you want it, and now all you have to do is add things to it.  For a regular compost heap, you can include:

Grass cuttings (a little at a time mixed with other things is best)
Hedge clippings (avoid putting rose leaves in unless they look totally healthy)
uncooked fruit and veg peelings and offcuts
weeds (except for perennial weeds like dandelions and bindweed - also best to avoid weeds that have gone to seed)
vacuum contents
hair from your hairbrush
hair from your pets
cardboard
newspaper
eggshells

For a bokashi compost you can include all of the above plus any other food waste you produce in the kitchen including raw meat, cooked meat and cooked fruit and veg and dairy etc. (all the things you’d normally have to leave out in other words!).

For a wormery you can add all the same things as are in a regular compost, but in smaller quantity.

If your compost is too moist try adding a bit more brown matter - dried leaves, card and paper etc.  If your compost seems too dry try adding more wet contents - peelings and green prunings etc.   If your compost doesn’t seem to be breaking down very fast you can add something called an activator.  Activators come in all sorts of different forms, but basically they’re things that are rich in nitrogen and help speed the process up.  Urine is a good activator as is nettle liquid which you can make by putting about 100g of nettle leaves into about 1 litre of water and leaving for a couple of weeks in a lidded bucket.  Or you can just add the nettle leaves to the heap, but that’s not as fast as making the liquid with them first.

Over time your garden and kitchen waste will rot down in the compost bin or wormery and become lovely rich compost to use on your garden.  When it does, you can scoop it out and store it in sacks till you want it.

Happy composting!

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Cutting Down On Waste

May 30, 2008 – 9:30 pm

I’ve recently been working on cutting down the amount of waste I create.  One major way of doing this is to cut down on the waste that I bring into the house in the first place.

I started this by going through the post I recieve, even the junk mail, and every time something comes through which I don’t want to recieve again, I contact the people who sent it, and tell them to remove my details from their mailing list.  In this way I’ve substantially cut down on the amount of junk mail, brochures, catalogues etc. that come through my door and end up virtually straight in the bin or the recycling bag.  Obviously most of what I’m cutting down on is paper, but there are all the windows from window envelopes and plastic wrappers from catalogues and magazines etc. as well.  I’ve put up a sticker on my letterbox to say I don’t want to recieve any unsolicited mail or advertising too, so no more ‘free’ local paper - well I rarely looked at it, and no more leaflets put through with the post in the morning either - again 99% of the time I didn’t do more than glance at them.

My other big way of cutting down the waste that comes in to my home is to look at what I am buying when I do my weekly shop.  It’s been my practice for a while now to get my fruit and veg loose, and to bake my bread at home so I’ve already eliminated bread wrappers fruit nets and veg bags from my shopping (flour, sugar, and oil can all be bought in recyclable containers, and salt and dried yeast I buy in bulk so as to create as little waste as possible), so what else could I look at.  I did my regular weekly shop, and then when I got home I looked at it closely and decided what had to change. 

Meat was the first area where there was a lot of waste, all those prepackaged bits of meat from the supermarket that sat in plastic trays or worse still in polystyrene trays with plastic wrap around them. 

So change one… Buy my meat from the butcher to try to eliminate a lot of the packaging. This worked really well, even to the point of me taking along my own containers and getting the butcher to put my Chicken, Mince, Pork Chops etc. into my own containers as he went instead of bags so I can just get them home and throw them in the freezer as they are.  Zero waste achieved!

Cold meat and cheese was the other area where there seemed to be more waste than I thought was reasonable, so how to deal with this… Delicatessen’s aren’t easy to come by in my town sadly (If you have one locally, shout for joy, hug the owner and buy from them to make sure they don’t go out of business, you’re very lucky!).  There are however delicatessen counters in most of the larger supermarkets here.  The biggest problem I encountered here was a total lack of understanding on the part of the people working the counters, and the managers of the shops. 

Change two… I decided to try taking my own tubs in when I went and asking them to put the sliced cold meat, and the lumps of cheese into these containers rather than wrapping them in their plastic sheets and then bagging them.  This met with some rather odd reactions.  Most of the counters near me look at me oddly, but do as I ask, even if they secretly think I’m cuckoo so again zero waste achieved here too!  One or two however have refused point blank and made me have to call on management to try to get them to see that there is not a problem with putting my meat or cheese into my tubs and then sticking their price label onto the lid.   The worst store I had a manager who also refused to see any sense - apparently in that store, the staff HAVE to use pieces of plastic because it’s their store policy that they don’t touch the produce with their hands. (And they don’t use gloves because…?!) - eerrrr yeah ok and they think I’m cuckoo?!  

Overall it’s been successful though, and I’m now producing less waste because I’m bringing less in.  I’ve still got to figure out how to cut out the non-recyclable packaging on a few items, plasticised paper that cereal comes in - as well as a box!  I still can’t work that out, why on earth do I need both for goodness sake.  The few frozen items I still buy also come in plastic bags like peas - I could buy tinned, which would mean that the container would be recyclable, but they just don’t taste the same to me.  Tea is another issue, I can only drink decaf, and whether I buy loose leaf, or teabags locally I seem to have to buy them in a box which comes wrapped in plastic to seal it. 

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Going Green in the Bathroom

May 24, 2008 – 2:48 pm

Stand in your bathroom and just take a look at what you see there.  Shampoo, soap, toothpaste, maybe some makeup, body lotion, cleanser, toner, some cleaning products, toilet roll sanitary products, all the normal things you could expect to see in a bathroom.  But how green are they?  Could they be greener?

Like most people, I don’t want to live in a world without nice products to clean my face with, I want toothpaste and soft toilet paper.  I even want some fancy smellies to put in my bath on occasion.  However, I want to have all these things AND be green.  So can it be done?

Yes it can, it’s not as easy as it should be, and the more of us who demand eco friendly products, the easier it should get.  At the moment walking into your local supermarket or chemist and buying things along with your everyday shop isn’t always possible yet, but I’m sure with a little pressure from us, the consumer, it will be.

Brands such as Lavera, Lush & Logona who make facial, body & bath products, Moom who do a range of natural hair removal items, and Natracare who make natural tampons and towels (as well as nappies), are going a long way towards making it possible for the modern home to be stocked with all the goodies you’d expect to find in a bathroom, and still be green.  Add to these, environmentally (and people) friendly shampoos, conditioners, hair dye and hair styling products that are all becoming available and all you have to think about is which one you want to use. 

Where can all these things be bought?  Well a few places you could look are:
Lush
Spirit of Nature
Lavera
Ethical Superstore
Naturally Thinking
Forest Soap Factory
Nigels Eco Store
Cellande
Fresh Face Cosmetics
Calm N Comfy
These are by no means all the online stores that sell this sort of product, but just a few of the many that are out there.   

Prices vary a lot – just as they do with non eco friendly varieties of the same products, so you’ll have to evaluate which ones are best for you and in terms of value for money, but it is nice to know there is a choice.  One thing I always try to remember is that I could well be not only extending the life of the planet, but my life also by using less chemicals on my body, so even if something does cost me a few pence more (and many of them don’t cost any more anyway), then I think it’s worth it.

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Hosting a Green Coffee Morning

May 21, 2008 – 3:01 pm

Sometimes we look around us and think well I’m doing my bit, but what are others doing?  Is there more that I could be doing? and how can I find out about it?  Who can I share my ideas with and who will share their ideas with me?

One thing you could do would be to host a green coffee morning.  Having just done this myself I’d definately recommend it.  It gives you the chance to get together with like minded people who may have experience of different things to you, and with whom you can share information.  It can be a good way of finding out about new things - or even old things that you might have missed.  Even if none of you have any real expertise it’s still worth while doing as you can think of things you’d all like to know more about and put your heads together to each find something out to share with the group for example.

If you’ve never organised anything like this before it can be a bit daunting to begin with, but it can be as complex or as simple as you choose to make it and the more experience you gain the easier this sort of thing become, believe me.  Maybe grab a friend and organise one between you if you think going it alone would be too hard.

I chose to host my coffee morning at my own home being lucky enough to have a reasonable amount of space so I could do this.  It also saved on the cost of hiring a hall so I didn’t need to ask people who came along to pay anything for the privilage.  I advertised it on various forums on the internet and on our local freecycle cafe site too.  I also put a poster and leaflets in SUST (our local fair trade and ecologically friendly store in town).  You could advertise in similar places or even in your local paper, or on your local radio.

I settled on a very relaxed open chat for my event, but you could make it more formal with a speaker or something if you wanted to, however if you do this it is worth making a note of how much a speaker might charge and how you’re going to re-coop the costs or if you’re going to foot the bill.  I also decided to try for goodie bags to give my guests, and to do this I contacted various companies and websites who sell environmentally friendly products, told them what I was trying to achieve, and asked if they could help me.  Not all of them were willing or able as some are very small and just can’t afford to do this, but a few were kind enough to send me out some things to include and so I was able to offer people a bag (paper of course!) with some cleaning products, body products and personal hygine products in it to take away with them and try later on.

We had nine of us at my event and I’d say that was a pretty good number to be honest, it was enough to get two or three conversations going, but not too many so you couldn’t hear what was going on. 

If anyone reading this would like any more ideas or info on setting something like this up, I’d love to hear from you.  Ditto if you’ve already done something similar, it would be great to hear your experiences.

 

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