What a waste

One of the peculiarities of writing this blog is that I receive comments and emails from people who accuse me of wanting humanity to return to living in a cave, as if looking to the past for inspiration or reminders is somehow perverse, cranky or irrevocably detrimental to the future.

Well, I’m about to do it again so the naysayers can dust off their keyboards and chastise me for being a Luddite without having to read any further.

With that out of the way, I’m going to turn my attention to household rubbish, what we do to reduce our contribiton, how we re-use and recycle as much as we can, and how our off-croft disposal is limited by the options open to us.

When I was a child in Australia in the 1960s and 1970s, rubbish collection was usually fortnightly or monthly—despite the summer heat.

We had had one or two steel rubbish bins, which took our breakfast cereal cartons, the brown paper bags from the grocery shopping, newspapers, cooked food scraps, uncooked meat scraps, a very small amount of plastic packaging and, following the birth of my brother, the odd disposable nappy as these started to become common.

I collected any steel and aluminium cans, taking them to the “Cash for Cans” centre, which generated quite a good income to support my model collection and parts for my bike. With the Cubs and later Scouts, I’d also scour the streets for cans to raise funds for the pack.

Milk was delivered in glass bottles, with the empties and rinsed out for the milkman to collect.

Soft drinks (soda pop) were delivered in capped, glass bottles by the wooden case of 12. At the end of the month, the empties would be put out in their case for collection and a new case left. (I particularly remember these as a bottle of lemonade exploded once as I picked it up, leaving my leg embedded with glass that I was still picking out 20 years later.)

Vegetable scraps and peelings went into my Dad’s compost heap for later inclusion in his vegetable beds.

Some family members still had pit or pan toilets. The former was a hole in the ground with a thunderbox and outhouse above, with wood ash or sawdust tipped in to keep things sweet, while the latter was a toilet with a pan underneath, which was removed every few days by the dunny man.

If we’d had paper and cardboard recycling at that time, it would be considered very environmentally friendly by modern standards. (Well, perhaps not the pan toilets!)

On the downside, the houses we and family members lived in often had coal fires (particularly those in colder areas), hot water for the laundry was heated in an open copper over a gas burner or a coal fire, the factories where some family members worked were powered by huge coal boilers or coal fired generating plants, and sewage from house that were on mains sewers was either given rudimentary treatment and dumped in rivers, or pumped out to sea untreated.

On top of that, the rubbish that did go into the household bins was taken to unsealed land fills and dumped.

You always knew when you were driving past landfill because of the stench and the vast amounts of paper caught in the surrounding fences.

Western society has made major gains since then on the industrial side—factories are generally cleaner, sewage plants are vastly more sophisticated and most sewage is treated (in Western countries) to very high standards, the reliance on solid fuels, particularly coal, has been curbed dramatically (and clean air legislation brought in), and environmental legislation has reduced or stopped many of the “out of sight, out of mind” excesses.

But we’ve gone badly wrong on the domestic waste front with households throwing out between four and six times more rubbish now than they did in the 1950s. (It’s hard to find a more definitive amount as every council in England, Wales and Scotland has its own figure, as do various Government departments.)

In July, the BBC reported that the UK produced about 330 million tonnes of waste a year, a quarter of which was from homes and business.

Open University figures for 2006 reveal the contents of the average domestic bin were: 34.3% kitchen scraps (council figures range from 20% to 35%), plastics 18%, card/paper 8%, sanitary 10.6%, metal 4.7%, glass 3.7%, dust/ash 2.7%, garden 1.7%, textiles 1.1% and other 15.5%.

While an increasing proportion of that rubbish is recycled (21.5% in Wales in 2006, 23.8% in Scotland and 26.7% in England), the bulk of it still goes to landfill or is incinerated.

The figure that I find shocking is that 34.3% of domestic rubbish is food. I expected a high proportion of plastic, but not of food as we eat almost everything we prepare and any peelings or raw vegetable scraps go on our compost heaps.

And it gets worse, the Guardian reported that “British households are in effect throwing away every third shopping bag of food they buy, most of it ending up in landfill at huge environmental and financial cost”.

The newspaper reported “people throw away 6.7m tonnes of food a year.”, of which about half was edible while the rest was made up of peelings and meat bones.

Cooked food was more likely to be thrown away than raw ingredients, bur fresh fruit and vegetables were the most common uncooked food to be discarded, followed by bread and cakes.

Here on the croft, we’re fortunate in some ways as we have the space for compost heaps to take raw vegetable scraps, tea bags, coffee grounds and the like, but many of our other waste reduction strategies were equally effective when we lived in the city.

We try to grow or buy as much fresh produce as possible, and to ensure that the fruit and vegetables we do buy is in minimal or no packaging.

We cook meals from scratch, avoiding the plastic packaging that comes with processed foods (and eating more healthily into the bargain).

We look for store cupboard staples that have minimal packaging.

We either cook only enough for the meal, or cook sufficient that the leftovers can be frozen and kept for another occasion. We serve just enough for a person to eat comfortably.

We try to buy foods in glass jars than can be re-used for jam, pickle and chutney bottling, as garden cloches, for storing dry foods such as peal barley or lentils, or as household storage. We try to avoid unusually shaped bottles, ones that don’t use standard lids, and ones with plastic inserts that can’t be removed.

Jars that can’t be reused are cleaned and taken to the recycling centre in the village where they’re disposed of in the appropriate skip.

Beer and wine bottles are cleaned, sterilised and re-used repeatedly for our home brew and cordials. (In fact, we collected beer and wine bottles from other people as well.)

Steel cans are cleaned and re-used around the croft—either as storage containers for everything from coins to pencils to nails and more, or as flattened sheet metal.

Aluminium cans, not that we have many of those, go to the village recycling centre.

We don’t use plastic carrier bags. We have half a dozen unbleached canvas bags that we take with us when we go shopping, plus a couple of small rucksacks.

High-quality paper and white card goes in the only recycling collection that Aberdeenshire Council offers. Other paper-based materials are either composted, used for starting fires, or are taken to the recycling centre.

Cooked food scraps and bones go into a Green Cone biodigester that’s positioned between two of our apple trees, providing them with nutrients.

Where we find ourselves hampered is with things like batteries, Tetra-paks and larger plastic items, such as milk bottles. (And yes, we minimise our use of items that take batteries, we use rechargeables, we minimise use of Tetra-Paks, but some of these things are inescapeable.)

We can take these to the recycling centre, but there’s no separation for items like these so they’re simply thrown in a skip and crushed. We might as well save ourselves a trip and put them in the rubbish bin.

I’d like to have an empty rubbish bin on collection day, but modern packaging makes that nigh on impossible.

Still, by refusing as much as possible, reducing as much as possible, re-using as much as possible and finally recycling as much as possible, we’ve managed to keep our rubbish well below the levels of the average UK consumer.

If we could just get around the plastics issue, then we’d almost certainly be producing less waste than we did when I was a child and recycling more, but as things stand I think we’re doing quite well.