Apples!

I bought some English apples yesterday! I've been waiting for ages for them to turn up in the supermarket again - I think that, living in a country and a county famous for it's apples, it's bad form to buy apples from abroad. But the only ones available over the summer are Bramleys (I guess not many people are baking pies, haha). They were Worcesters. Can't wait to see pears now!

Greenwash: Don't Believe The Hype

I hate bloody greenwash.

Degradable bags - the word "degradable" is plastered all over these products, making it sound wondefully sustainable. It isn't. This doesn't mean they compost, they just break down into tiny pieces of plastic that sit around in the environment for hundreds of years, inveigling themselves into the ecosystem.

Organic brazil nuts - brazil nuts aren't cultivated, they're harvested from the rain forest, so they're always organic. It's good to buy them as it encourages rainforest conservation and provides income for rainforest communities, but don't pay more than you should for them.

Misleading adverts - there's been a whole spate of these, with advertising companies jumping on the green bandwagon and trhowing as many environmental buzz words at people as they can. My least favourite two are Shell's "CO2 into flowers" advert, showing a factory spilling out clouds of flowers; apparently they divert CO2 to flower cultivation instead of contributing it to the atmosphere. What utter tripe. Also, EDF's "recycled" advert, made from clips of old footage - the environmental advantage of using film already shot pales somewhat when you consider that EDF is an energy company, with the industrial carnage that implies. (EDF also charges twice the price for energy in this country than they do in their native France!).

Rainforest: Global Ownership?

Just read a sweet story about Guyana - the president was talking about working with nations around the globe to protect its rainforests. (This is obviously a major concern for a country with 80% forest cover.) OK, it may not pan out as described - politics will always get in the way - but I think the fact that a world leader is talking about it shows a vital shift in from piecemeal and ad-hoc to a more holistic approach to environmental issues; it shows a more profound understanding that global systems can't, and shouldn't, be dealt with by just one country acting alone. The problems are caused by all of us, they affect all of us, and need to be tackled by all of us together.

Gosh, what a hippy I am.

Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7603695.stm

The grocery hierarchy

Getting the weekly groceries used to be simple, you'd just buy what you needed and go home. Now we have so many choices available it takes me ages to choose what to buy, so I developed an ad-hoc hierarchy of product traits to measure against:

Organic:
Always buy organic, unless it's really expensive. I've got a budget to stick to.
I see Tesco has started to sell organic veg boxes in the store; pah! You don't know where the veg are coming from, so I'd rather support local delivery services. I haven't subscribed to a service yet, but as we spend about £40 a month on veg anyway, a weekly drop costing £10 would be beneficial.

Local:
Always buy local if possible as this reduces food miles. There's no point buying organic fine beans if they come from Kenya, or Cox's apples - a quintessentially English fruit - from New Zealand. Most supermarkets will show where food comes from: always read the label!

Fairtrade:
But only if the item comes from a developing country. I suspect that fairtrade items from developed countries are a gimmick.

Price:
I don't mind paying a little extra,but some organic / fairtrade / even local items are priced way over my budget. We have to be a bit sensible about it.

Seasonal:
likely to be cheaper and local, though not necessarily organic. The trick is to know what's in season (and I'm no expert).
I wanted to buy strawberries all through the summer months, but they were so expensive I only did this once, and then they were British but not organic; I heard strawberries are VERY pesticide-intensive, so it was quite a guilty pleasure.

Bonuses:
Yeo Valley is organic AND local!
Thatchers cider is made four miles away from me!
I've been informed that tomatoes grown in warm Mediterranean climates are more pesticide-intensive than those grown in polytunnels in the UK, where biological controls are more widely used - but the double bonus of less chems and being locally grown is possibly offset by the fact that polytunnel plastic has to be replaced every five years or so.

Exceptions:
I ALWAYS buy organic root vegetables ever since I learned that the root of a plant is suffused with the soil solution, so any nasty chemicals sprayed on the crop will be right there in the food. If there's no organic choice, I don't buy it.
I suspect that organic mushrooms are a gimmick, but buy them just in case.
Always buy organic kidney / haricot etc. beans, as the non-organic variety are apparently consitently high in residual pesticides.
Never buy cut flowers. It's a chemical-intensive industry, often air-freighted and who wants a handful of corpses anyway? You're better off buying a live plant.
Organic brazil nuts are a fraud! ALL brazil nuts are organic as they have to be harvested from the rainforest. This is a piece of greenwash. Harrumph.

Much of this information was gleaned from the rather good New Green Consumer Guideby Julie Hailes :-)

Wiggly coolness

I have a WORMERY! Big w00t to my family for ganging together to buy it, and big w00t to Wiggly Wigglers for supplying me with the little oligochaetes (as well as having a sublimely silly name). Our garden is too small and concreted over for a compost heap, but this little beauty is free-standing. You put your kitchen waste in - excluding citrus fruit and onion skins, they're too acidic - and over time the worms munch it up and poo it out into a lovely rich compost. It has a tap at the bottom to drain out the ganky fluid that falls through, which is a also a rich fertiliser you can dilute and put on your garden; in our British summer weather, however, it's been coming out ready-diluted and I've had to leave the sump tap open to stop the whole thing filling up and drowning my worms. There's also a very robust population of Drosophila fruit flies and black flies infesting it, and every time I lift off the lid a cloud of insects erupts forth. The wet weather is keeping the numbers down though, and I've placed some strategic fly paper around it to try and decimate their population. Theyr'e not harmful, just bloody annoying.

It also means that we're lowering our waste stream to landfill, and our contribution to methane outgassing will be lower as well. We put out one black bag every fortnight! More about rubbish in a later post though.

Meat is Methane

Methane is a worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and ruminant livestock like sheeps and cows are huge emitters. It's pretty sobering to think that the methane output of New Zealand accounts for half of their greenhouse gas emissions (though it's understandable, when you think about their sheep:human ratio).

Anyway, methane is bad stuff when let into the atmosphere and the global emission is not only rising, it's accelerating. There's quite a few factors blamed for this, including melting permafrost in Siberia and increasing demand for meat. Well, it's increasing in developing countries but it's always been high in the West, with all those extra cows and sheep burping (not farting, apparently) extra methane in the air. Also the issue of energy efficiency - more energy can be extracted per hectare from crops than from animals. I've heard of schemes to get round this such as trapping the methane as it's emitted by strapping apparatus over the animal's face. I bet it's a really funny sight, but how practical is it, really? I've also been told about a way to kill the bacteria in ruminants' guts that create the gases. Sounds promising, but I can only imagine it has an adverse effect on the animal - which would be a rather large economical stumbling block. The latest I heard of was switching to kangaroo meat. I guess they're successful in partially arid conditions - good news for agriculture, slightly less good news for the kangaroos. Rice fields are huge methane emitters too, though I think finding a suitable alternative staple crop for most of Asia could prove somewhat taxing, lol.

I envision a bleak solution; enclosed sheds packed with cows, and the exhaust air is passed through a filter that extracts the methane, which can then be added to the output from the biogas generator (fed by cow poo). I don't know how you'd filter it though, and this would be pretty intensive, with the disease implications that brings. Not nice.

I'm not saying we should all become vegan, there will always be animals reared as some environments aren't suitable for growing crops, and we need some animal nutrition and products (e.g. milk, eggs, wool, leather), but in the face of the oncoming food crisis we would surely be better off eating far less carcass.

Something to think about next time you're chomping into a Big Mac.

The Lesser of Evils

OK, I don't drive. I hate to drive, it's stressful and miserable and I'm rubbish at it, not even mentioning the carbon impact and immense cost (UK petrol prices post coming soon). I made a pact with myself when I was 16 that I would never learn to drive. fourteen years and almost £1,000 of driving lessons later, I still don't have a full licence. Is this success in the face of self-imposed adversity? (Did I tell you I was perverse?) Whatever it is, it's seriously limited my choice of job applications as many state "full / clean licence essential". This is especially true of environmental jobs where much of the day involves visiting various sites.

All I want to do is get a decent job that I can live on and that in some way decreases our impact in the environment, but I'm peeved that doing this seems to equate to being shackled to one of these ugly, dirty, four-wheeled death machines of doom. but further self-denial means I'll never get get ahead - any other applicants who can drive will already have a significant advantage over me. Gah! So that's my dichotomy: learn to drive and get a good job, or stick to my principles and flounder in dross. Humph.