Australië: wij zijn allemaal medeplichtig!

Iedereen is ontroerd door de beelden van Australië die ons via de media bereiken. Ik ook, maar wat mij het meest schokt, zijn niet de rode beelden van die vuurzee, het is niet die kangoeroe die tracht te ontkomen, of de walibi die aan de prikkeldraad gegrild is. Het is niet het schattige koalabeertje dat van een flesje drinkt en daarbij de hand vasthoudt van de man die het hem geeft. Wat mij het meest schokt is de totale afwezigheid van het besef dat wij allemaal medeplichtig zijn! Medeplichtig aan het in brand steken van het huis waar we allemaal in wonen.

Ik weiger te geloven dat de opwarming van de aarde een probleem is dat veroorzaakt en gehandhaafd wordt door enkele rijke industriëlen en dat enkel zij hier verandering in kunnen brengen. Aan het begin van elk productieproces staat een consument met een vraag. Aan het einde van de leveringsketen staat een consument met een creditcard. En ja, met consument bedoel ik jou en mij. Als wij niet meer zouden kopen, of minstens duurzamer zouden kopen, dan zouden producenten ook niet meer produceren. Wat niet meer verkocht wordt, zal niet meer geproduceerd worden! Dit ontkennen is iets te gemakkelijk. Het is niet aan die industriëlen om ons te vertellen wat wij nodig hebben.

Om dezelfde reden weiger ik te geloven dat dit iets is wat enkel door politici kan worden opgelost. Dat is ook iets te gemakkelijk. Je moet niet wachten tot er een verbod komt op plastic zakjes of dieselmotoren, of tot om het even wat onze planeet langzaam (of in sneltempo) aan het vernietigen is. Je kunt zelf beslissen om iets niet langer te gebruiken. Politici zijn vaak ook maar marionetten van ….tja…. en de meesten onder hen zijn toch alleen maar bezig met het vullen van hun eigen zakken, of het verzekeren van de volgende verkiezingszege.

Ook het argument dat vervuiling – en massaconsumptie in het algemeen – niets te maken heeft met de opwarming van de aarde is niet waar. Heb je jezelf ooit afgevraagd wat de echte kostprijs is van goedkope kleding, of die online bestelling uit China van dat gadget dat je denkt “nodig” te hebben? Begrijp jij je emissies als je op een zondagochtend in de wagen stapt om die vier croissants te gaan halen bij de bakker? Begrijp jij het ecologische prijskaartje van de plastiekverpakking van die fancy gezonde lunch die bij jou aan de deur wordt geleverd? De meesten onder ons niet.

Ook het argument dat de beslissing van één persoon om anders te gaan leven de wereld niet zal veranderen is te gemakkelijk. Elke massabeweging begint bij één individu …. Kijk maar naar Greta!

We leven allemaal ver boven onze natuurlijke stand en ja, ook Mick en ikzelf. Er is nog veel ruimte voor verbetering, maar we zijn enkele jaren geleden tot het besef gekomen dat we onze levensstijl drastisch moeten veranderen. We worden om die reden vaak bekeken als het geitenwollensokkenkoppel, we worden vaak bestempeld als te naïef als we denken dat we hiermee de planeet zullen redden.

Ik heb geen kinderen. Ik moet me dus geen zorgen maken over hun toekomst. En ik woon in een stad met een laag risico in een rijk land met een laag risico. Ik zou het allemaal aan me voorbij kunnen laten gaan. Maar dat kan ik niet.

Wat er allemaal aan het gebeuren is rondom ons, niet alleen in Australië, maar ook in Jakarta, het Amazonewoud, het Verenigd Koninkrijk, de VS, Mozambique … heeft ons gesterkt in de overtuiging dat wat we doen de enige weg vooruit is, maar het moet nog veel beter ...

Dus neen, ik bid niet mee voor Australië. Mijn gesprekken met God hebben nog nooit ergens iemand vooruit geholpen.

Bewustmaking met deze blogpost zal mijn bijdrage zijn. Het brengt Australië vandaag geen soelaas, maar misschien morgen wel. Want morgen gebeurt dit opnieuw, en op een dag zal het ook aan ons zijn … En dat zal sneller gebeuren dan je denkt.

Je mag delen als dit belangrijk vindt…

Foto: Mieke Richart

Australia: we are all complicit!

No-one is left untouched by the images of Australia in the media. I am not either, but what shocks me most of all is not the red images of the flames, it is not the kangaroo trying to get away or the wallaby roasted on the barbed wire. It is not the koala drinking from a bottle, holding a human’s hand. What shocks me most is our total lack of awareness that we are all complicit! Complicit in setting the house on fire, a house we all live in.

I refuse to believe that global warming is a problem caused / maintained / that can only be changed by rich industrials. At the beginning of every production line there is a consumer with a demand. At the end of the supply chain stands a consumer with a credit card, and yes by consumer I mean you and I. If consumers stopped buying or started buying more sensibly, then factories would stop producing. Big industrials will not produce what they can no longer sell! Denying this is just too easy. We don’t have to let them tell us what we need.

For the same reason I refuse to believe that this is something only politicians can change. This too is just too easy. You don’t have to wait for the government to ban plastic bags, to ban diesel cars, to ban anything slowly (or rapidly) destroying this planet. You can stop using it by your own personal decision. Politicians are very often puppets on a string of, … well… and anyway, most of them are too busy lining their pockets, or too busy securing their re-election.

Also the argument that plastic pollution and massive consumption in general has got nothing to do with global warming is not true. Have you ever asked yourself the question what the real cost is of the production of cheap clothes, of that online order shipped from China for that gadget you think you so desperately “need”? Do you understand your emissions when you fetch those four croissants by car on a Sunday morning? Do you understand the environmental cost of producing single use plastic for your fancy lunch bowl that you have delivered on your doorstep, because you want to eat healthy food? Most people don’t.

Also the argument that one person’s choice to start living differently is not going to change the world, is too easy. Mass movements start with one individual….. look at Greta!

We all live far above our natural means, yes so do Mick and I. There is still a lot of room for improvement, but we have realised years ago that we need to change the way we live dramatically. Because of this, we are often regarded as the silly hippies; we are often deemed naïve in thinking this is going to save the planet.

I don’t have children so I don’t have to worry about their future. And I live in a low-risk city in a wealthy and low-risk country. I could get away with not caring. But I do care.

What has been happening lately, not just in Australia, also in Jakarta, the Amazon, the UK, the US, Mozambique, … has strengthened us in our belief that what we are doing is the only way forward, but we have so much more to do to save this planet.

So no, I shall not be praying for Australia. My prayers have never ever brought relief to anyone anywhere in this world.

Raising awareness with this blogpost will be my contribution. It may not bring relief to the Australians today, but it might tomorrow, because tomorrow it will hit them again, and one day it will hit us…. and it will happen within our lifetime.

Please share if you care ….

Photograph: courtesy of Mieke Richart

The bathroom shelf

Hi there, it has been way too long. However, that doesn’t mean that we haven’t continued our efforts to reduce our personal waste.

We’ve done a lot in the bathroom already by banning bottled soaps and shampoos but we can do more. A lot more.

When tackling the bathroom shelf, we had to ask ourselves the question: do we really need this, and if so, can it be replaced by something less polluting? The word “need” is flexible of course. Strictly speaking, I don’t need make-up, but no way will I ever leave the house without my face on.

So which improvements were we able to make?

1.    Shaving cream

My husband Mick replaced his shaving gel with shaving soap and a shaving brush that he got from someone for Christmas. He started using it, because you know, you kind of have to…. if only to tell the person who gave it to you that you have at least tried. He tried it and never looked back.

The soap came in a rosewood box (Arlington Christmas special). It looks very neat in our bathroom and it can be refilled. The soap can be bought in a local shop, as well as ordered online, and it arrives in a cardboard box, no plastic.

In order to be able to compare, someone measured his shaving foam consumption for me because there was no chance Mick was ever going back to that. Both “shavers” have the same relaxed approach to facial hair and shave every two to three days.

It is not easy to compare because shaving foam is expressed in millilitres and shaving soap in grams so I am mostly guessing. I asked shaver #1 how long a shaving foam bottle lasted him. The answer was approximately three months. In one month the shaving foam from an aerosol bottle went down from 128 gr to 107 g. A bottle costs around 4 to 5.5 EUR. That comes down to 20 to 22 EUR/year and 4 empty aerosols.

The shaving soap refill costs around 15 EUR and it weighs 100 gr. Shaver #2 weighed the soap with an interval of 1 month and the difference was 11 grams.  That comes down to 20 to 22 EUR/year.

So there is not much difference but the bonus of the soap is: shaving becomes an experience, no longer a chore. Well, that’s what real men say anyway. Whatever…

Recently, Mick also abandoned the plastic Gillette Mach 3 razor blades that every decent man “needs” in his life. He replaced it with a safety razor.

Financially: no difference

Space: no difference

Effort: no difference

Environmentally: big win

2.    Make-up and Make-up remover

I used to buy make-up whenever I felt like a new colour. And I’m sure I am not the only one. I particularly like the smoky eyes colours. I just opened my bottom drawer; I have loads of half-used make-up.

OK, that’s finished. I have promised myself to use up everything before buying anything new. That’ll probably keep me going for another 20 years.

I also stopped using disposable make-up brushes and bought proper brushes that I clean every week. At first, I bought a “proper” make-up brush cleaning product (just to show that they will sell us anything!). Of course that comes in a plastic bottle. It didn’t take me long to realize that I can clean my brushes with natural soap under the tap as well. So that bottle has to go as soon as it is finished.

Financially: win, because I buy less

Space: win, because all the make-up I have in the bottom drawer will be gone in 20 years

Effort: win, because I will have less stuff to worry about

Environmentally: win because I buy less, therefore throw away less

3.    Cotton pads

Cotton pads come with make-up remover. I used one or two a day. I knew a washable version was available but it was quite expensive and I had just bought a design cotton pad holder. The reusable cotton pads are larger than the disposable ones, so I’d have to get rid of my designer cotton pad holder, unless….

So off I went to the textiles shop to find cotton for cotton pads. I found an off-white honeycomb cotton that I boiled first to make it shrink. Then, I asked a friend of mine to make cotton pads that fit my designer holder. I now have enough cotton pads to keep me going for 3 months.

Financially: win, because I never have to buy cotton pads again, I do have to boil them once every 3 months.

Space: no difference

Effort: small loss, I have to wash my cotton pads every 3 months but I don’t have to go out and buy new ones.

Environmentally: big win because I don’t throw anything away anymore, but I use detergent to wash them, and make-up needs special stain remover.

4.    Cleaning ears

I had this awful habit of cleaning my ears every day. I got this habit from my childhood.

One of friends was not allowed to leave the bathroom without cleaning her ears. I can still recall her mum asking: “did you clean your ears? Where is the Q tip?”

Now, 45 years later, I clean my ears everyday every time I’m in the bathroom… It was ridiculous.

First of all, I stopped cleaning my ears every day. Once a week is more than enough.

Secondly, I started to look for a more eco-friendly version.

I found something online made from bamboo. I am not entirely satisfied with it yet. I still have disposable ones which I’ll continue using until finished (though not every day).

If I find a better reusable one, I will try it.

Financially: win, because I don’t have to buy any Q tips anymore

Space: win, because I now have only 1 Q tip

Effort: win, because I will have less stuff to worry about and never have to buy again

Environmentally: big win because I don’t throw anything away anymore

5.    Moisturising

During a visit to the Lush shop, my husband said he wanted to try a new moisturiser without any packaging. He was using an aerosol bottle from L’Oréal. The lady from the shop gave him something. He tried it.

Every time I kissed him goodbye or hello, the smell of that Lush block just made me want it too. So now, we each have one. No more plastic or even glass containers. The Lush block is solid. You rub it on your skin and your body temperature makes the wax melt. No more packaging!

The one problem with it is: summers like we’re experiencing now: they melt around 37°C. I will still need to buy a container for travelling to warm countries and during hot summer days.

Financially: moisturiser is always expensive. I would like to think it is comparable.

Space: is the same. I have replaced one product with another product

Effort: the same

Environmentally: big win. Apart from the paper wrappers that Lush products come in, we have no more waste.

Next: Clothes, travel or maybe Christmas presents…

Fruit juice, milk and eggs

One of my projects was to figure out the difference in carbon footprint between plastic bottles and drink cartons. But you know what? I am no longer going to because I can avoid both.

In our house, plastic bottles or drink cartons were mainly milk and fruit juice. We don’t drink coke or lemonade. Occasionally we drink wine or beer. Those come in glass bottles. Water we had already taken care of (you can read my blogpost on water here).

I don’t drink milk or fruit juice myself, but my husband Mick likes his daily glass of each, so I had to find a solution for the bottles and cartons.

Fruit juice

Mick likes a daily glass of orange juice. He drinks about 2 litres a week.

The obvious thing to do here is squeeze your own oranges.

So I went looking for a sustainable fruit press for Mick’s birthday. I looked at several electric ones, thinking I didn’t want to make his daily routine too burdensome but then Mick suggested himself we go for the completely mechanical one.

Right, so I bought this beautiful piece of kit that has now been in our kitchen for 1.5 years. Mick now presses oranges every day. After a while I asked him if it was no too much work. He said it wasn’t. The pressing takes just as much time as he needs to wait for his toast to pop out of the toaster.

Freshly squeezed orange juice is more expensive than what he used to drink but, of course, I should compare the price with 100% fruit juice from the

supermarket. Most ‘fruit juice’ is indeed diluted and contains lots of added refined sugar and has little to do with fruit juice.

Milk

Mick also likes a daily glass of milk. He drinks about 2 litres of milk a week.

I knew that some people were getting their milk straight from the farmer. But we live in the city and we have no car. 

How was that gonna work then?

I looked on the internet and found several milk trucks selling milk on weekly markets in Antwerp. I found one on the Friday market and a different one on the Saturday market. The Saturday market is really nearby so that was ideal! We decided to try it.

Mick bought 2 glass bottles and went to the milk truck on Saturday. The milk is – as you would expect – much better than anything you find in the supermarket.

The problem is, the milk doesn’t always last a week. And if I decide to cook something with milk (like béchamel sauce for instance), we need more than 2 litres. I will still need to buy milk from the shop.

Also, the milk truck people are a small local business and they are not always there. But recently, the town council has announced that the Thursday market is going to move closer to home. We will check out if it has a milk truck. If you look for solutions, they will present themselves to you.

Eggs

The egg boxes were also an eyesore. OK, they are not plastic, but most of them are also only used once.

Whilst dropping off some donations at the Oxfam shop, I picked up a sustainable plastic egg box (yes on this occasion I traded cardboard for plastic!).

The milk truck (as well as any greengrocer in the neighbourhood) sells loose eggs. You can always bring your own box. The eggs from the milk truck are also much better than those from the shop.

Environmental impact

We used around 100 litres of milk a year and about 100 litres of fruit juice. That is at least 200 cartons or plastic bottles.

Our new solution brings down the waste almost to zero:

For the fruit juice, Mick buys his oranges when he needs them. They are always available. The orange skins go in the green container.

For the milk, we try to buy 2 litres per week but the mild truck is not always there and 2 litres a week isn’t always enough. Hopefully, we can find another milk truck soon.

For the eggs, there is no more waste. Loose eggs are available anywhere.

Big win!

Financial impact

The fruit press was a one-off investment of 80 EUR. The fruit juice we used to buy was a lot cheaper than freshly squeezed fruit juice. But if you compare 100% fruit juice, or freshly squeezed fruit juice, like some shops now offer, the price is more or less the same, albeit sometimes difficult to compare because the price of oranges varies from season to season. In Carrefour one litre of freshly squeezed fruit juice is 4.99 EUR all through the year.

The glass bottles cost us 10 EUR for two. The milk from the truck costs 0.90 EUR per bottle. The price of milk varies from around 0.60 to 1.50 EUR and even more depending on the type of milk you buy and the shop you buy it in. 0.90 EUR is not too much.

The price of eggs is mostly the same, whether you buy them with box or without. The egg box cost me 0.50 EUR at Oxfam.

Space impact

The oranges may take up a bit more space in the fruit bowl than the fruit juice carton, but we have less waste and it looks pretty.

The milk bottles take up just as much space as the carton as do the eggs and we have less waste.

Time and effort impact

The weekly trip to the milk truck is an extra effort. The oranges and eggs we buy during our weekly shopping. The oranges can be carried in the reusable vegetable bags.

So overall more effort but better quality and less plastic, hardly any financial impact. I consider this to be a win.

Next: the bathroom shelf, stay tuned.

Benchmarking: I dug into the bins again.

The production and recycling of plastic is heavy on the environment. I am not talking about plastic in general but single-use plastic. Plastic is a very useful product for all sorts of applications.

But it is not just the production and recycling that is heavy on the environment. I just learnt that plastic waste releases greenhouse gases whilst decomposing. So those of you who think plastic and climate change are separate things are wrong!

And that is just about the greenhouse gas effect, let’s not forget the horrible sights of waste on beaches and all animals suffering from plastic that has ended up in their habitats.

The good news is that reducing our consumption of plastic (especially single use) is something we can all do, and I am about to prove that to you.

You may remember one of my first blogposts, a snapshot of all our household waste that I had measured in September 2017.

Well, I did it again. I held on to all of our waste for an entire month. I wanted to measure the impact of our efforts. We haven’t finished yet. There is still so much more to do, but I wanted to know where we stand at this moment.

Again, I didn’t keep all waste. For instance, I didn’t hold on to food leftovers, Q-tips, kitchen towel, tissues and well… toilet paper.

Furthermore, this is just a snapshot, rather than an average. Different seasons produce different waste and sometimes you go through unusual circumstances such as exam periods, lots of work in the office, preparing for holidays and renovations. These periods can come with more waste, just because, for instance, buying ready meals is more convenient than having to cook for yourself!

While I was collecting waste and saw this amount of plastic growing every day, I didn’t expect the impact of our efforts to be as big as they were.

If you want to know what exactly we did and you don’t want to read all the blogposts again, there is a bullet point list of things you can do at the end of this blogpost.

OK, here we go:

	2017 kg/month	2019 kg/month	Difference in percentage
Cardboard and paper	9.28	2.2	-76.29
of which unsolicited mail	3.1	0	-100.00
plastic	3.7	0.8	-78.38
food packaging	1.6	0.5	-68.75
bottles	2.1	0	-100.00
drink cartons	0.7	0.39	-44.29
Cans	2.8	0.09	-96.79
coffee pods	0.34	0	-100.00
Other	0.3	0.5	66.67
Total	17.12	3.98	-76.75

This time, all of our unrecyclable waste of one month fitted into one (1!) 45 gram bin bag. That is 540 grams/year (12 bin bags) instead of 2,340 grams (52 bin bags).

So this is the result of what exactly?

·         Food leftovers are kept out of the bin and are being composted;

·         We have tackled and will keep tackling all unsolicited mail;

·       We don’t buy bottled water anymore. We filter tap water with carbon sticks and we bought a soda stream for soda water;

·         We don’t buy fruit and vegetables in plastic anymore; meat and fish remain a challenge;

·       We squeeze our own fruit juice and fill our own glass bottles at the milk truck every week. In January the truck didn’t show up. That’s why there were still some drink cartons in the statistics. I am looking for a second milk provider;

·         We stopped using coffee pods, at home and in the office (just me);

·       We don’t buy beer cans anymore. We buy beer in glass bottles and take the empties back to the shop.

The two cans in the January statistics are cans I found on my doorstep. They were in fact not ours. I also used 2 cans of corn, which I normally buy in a glass jar, but they were not available when I needed them. Well, I say “needed”. We mostly only think we “need” stuff. Very often this  is actually just “want now”. I could have made something else instead.

So step by step, over a period of 16 months, we have managed to reduce our waste by more than 75%.

And there is still so much more that we can do. I am being fed ideas by people who read my blog - thanks for that! You know who you are.

If you want to find out what these are: stay tuned!