Why
this blog?
Hi,
my name is Karine and I am an occasional blogger. That means I blog when I
think I’ve got something to say that might be of interest. Or, in this
particular case, when I think somebody might have something interesting to say
to me!
The
purpose of this blog is that my husband and I want to reduce the amounts of
waste of our household. We are sick of single-use plastic and cardboard. There
are so many of these single-use things, usually plastic: straws, plastic bags,
plastic cups,… take-away food has got a lot to answer for…
Lately,
plastic and recycling have been in the news so often; videos of turtles with
straws stuck in their nostrils go around the world in no time. Every year 8
million tons of plastic end up in the ocean. A couple of years from now, there
will be more plastic bottles in the ocean than fish, they say… awareness-raising
with these videos is good. But is it good enough?
Can
we trust our decision-makers to fix this? Can we trust big companies to do what
they tell us they’ll do, like recycling? Too often, it turns out they are just
lying to our faces. Apparently, the consumer (that means you and I) doesn’t
want to drink from plastic bottles that are not perfectly clear, and recycled
bottles aren’t. So first of all: who dares decide this in our place? And secondly,
is “not recycling” – and therefore producing and wasting more plastic – the
solution? It is time we stopped believing everything big companies and
governments feed us. We are too gullible.
Did
you know that:
· Fifty percent of the plastic we
use, we use just once and throw it away?
· More than one million plastic bags are used every
minute worldwide?
· One million sea birds and 100,000 marine
mammals are killed every year from plastic in our oceans?
·
Plastic accounts for around 10
percent of the total waste we generate?
·
And I can keep going for a
while…
For
my husband and me, spreading videos with shocking statistics on Facebook is no
longer good enough. It is time for more action.
Our
plan
Our
plan is to change our own household waste levels dramatically within a period
of 2 years.
To
start with, we will live “in sin” for the whole month of September 2017. This
means, we will shop the way we have been shopping for years. We’ll buy bottled
water, coffee capsules and food packed in plastic and cardboard. We’ll shop as
if we don’t care about the environment.
We’ll
hold on to all the waste we bring home for a whole month and measure it.
Then
we’ll try to reduce it in 10 steps. We have identified 10 areas where we know
improvement is needed:
1. Bottled water
2. Food packaging
3. Beer cans, fruit
juice and milk bottles and cartons
4. Coffee and tea
(tough one, we love our capsule coffee)
5. Plastic plates, cutlery,
straws and cups (party stuff)
6. Paper
7. Car use
8. Renovation and
recycling
9. Water and
electricity
10. Travel (another
tough one, we love travel)
This
list may change and/or get longer as we go along. It will depend on how we
experience this exercise and of course, on your input.
For
each chapter and each change we implement, we want to calculate:
1. Its environmental
impact: how much waste can we easily avoid?
2. Its financial
impact: if we change our ways, what is the impact on our monthly budget?
3. Its time impact: if
we change our ways, how does it affect our time?
4. Its space impact: if
we change our ways, how much space do we have more or less in our kitchen?
We
will report on the problems we’ve encountered and the solutions we found – or
didn’t find – to overcome them. We may and will have to do some research on the
way. We know you can’t trust everything on the internet, but we don’t have the funds
to do all of our own research. For the sake of this blog, we have to trust
what’s out on the internet to some extent.
If
you are convinced that what we write is absolutely not true, please do get in
touch with us. We want to hear from you. We don’t blog about this because we
want to preach, although we secretly hope to inspire many of you. We blog
because we want you to tell us what we can do to make this work better, where
our calculations do not make sense, which solutions are staring us in the face
and yet we can’t see them.
And
don’t get us wrong: we don’t aim for perfection. We can’t guarantee that we
will stick to every aspect of this exercise. We will still buy the occasional
plastic bottle. We won’t be able to avoid cans of beer at festivals. And, for now,
that’s OK for us.
Are
you in?
You
might want to give some things a try yourself. You might not because your
circumstances are different. Having children or not having children will make a
difference. Living in the countryside or in a city will make a difference. The
size of your kitchen may make a difference. Let us know what works or doesn’t
work for you and why. Other readers might find this useful too.
If
you just think this is all about a whole load of rubbish (which actually, is
exactly what it is) we suggest you click on the upper right corner’s “X” and
leave this page.
Oh,
you are still here! Good! So are you in? Then let’s take this journey together!
You
can share this blog as much as you want. All we ask from you is to keep your
comments friendly, helpful and respectful.
Part
1: bottled water - publication expected by 31 October 2017
