Plastic-Free Public Servant?

Leonie challenged me recently to imagine what I would do with my life if I never had to work again. Not work again? But I like what I do!

It's true that working full time and working out when I'm not working doesn't leave me with a lot of free hours. There are loads of things I would do if I had more time (and if I weren't careless with what time I do have). I would read and write more poetry. I would meditate regularly at the Wellington Buddhist Centre. I would learn how to make patchwork quilts, how to paint and how to make my own clothes. I would spend more time at the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary. I would probably, predictably, spend even more time at the gym, running and on my bike. I would hopefully spend some quality time in the pool. I would almost certainly go to more art exhibitions and concerts. I would grow my own fruit and vegetables, plant out my garden with more natives and eliminate the various noxious species flourishing in corners. I would redecorate our house.

Of course I would travel. The travel answer is too obvious. I haven't been overseas in nearly ten years (I'm embarrassed to admit that) and it's about time I did. However, even if I never have to work again I can't travel forever.

If I REALLY never had to work again, if I were able to make a lifestyle change that wouldn't just be about finding more THINGS to do and more about fundamentally changing the way I live, there is something I would really like to do. I would like to stop buying anything made from plastic.

Beth Terry, of Fake Plastic Fish has pretty much already said anything I could hope to say on this matter, but I thought it might be useful to try to spell out exactly why eliminating plastic from my life has ended up being number one on my list of 'things I would do'.

Here is my reason number one for wanting to stop consuming plastic. Welcome to the Plastic Stew. This is a huge area of the Pacific Ocean where ocean currents and environmental quirks have led to a not very appealing collection of plastic. The problem though isn't just the plastic bags, the can rings wrapped around birds' necks, the bottle caps in dead sea creatures' stomachs. Those are just the more visible side effects of plastic pollution.

Unfortunately plastic doesn't just disappear. Instead, it breaks up into smaller and smaller particles. In this stretch of ocean the water contains six times more plastic than plankton. So what happens to these particles of plastic? They get eaten as though they were plankton. Those creatures which don't starve as a result get eaten by other creatures, who then get eaten by other creatures, who may well then get eaten by humans. Fancy a little plastic with your sushi? Now about a little endocrine disruption with your chips? Work out for yourself what the side effects of consuming all those toxins might be doing to you, let alone the planet's biodiversity in general.

Don't think that recycling lets you off the hook either. Chances are those bottles in your little green bin won't end up being recycled anyway, or will end up being turned into products that will eventually end up in a landfill anyway, or will accumulate in a polymer mountain in a country like China, where the Western world can tuck its environmental guilt away out of sight.

So, what can I do? The Green Party does, of course, have some good ideas, and Hamish and I have been involved in several music festivals based on Zero Waste principles. However the logical place to start is at home. How can I start eliminating plastic from the things I buy each week?

Let's start with food. Here I have unashamedly played the no-time card. It's easy and quick to park in a supermarket carpark and grab a week's worth of groceries. Fruit gets slipped into plastic bags. Meat comes wrapped in plastic wrap, resting on polystyrene trays. Inside the cardboard cereal box the cereal is sealed in plastic. Bottles have plastic sealing their lids closed. Frozen food comes packaged almost exclusively in plastic. Milk, yoghurt and cheese - all stored in plastic. Alison Holst's face is printed onto the plastic bags used in the bulk bin area. Don't even get me started on the pleasures of fresh pasta - presented, of course, in plastic. Even if I bring my environmentally friendly organic cotton bags the checkout person will still try to wrap the chicken and the cat food in plastic bags.

At the gym - the sports drinks and protein bars - all packaged in plastic. My beloved running shoes - non-biodegradable. My shampoo bottle - also plastic. At work polystyrene cups are set out next to the coffee plunger at morning tea time. The dishwashing powder comes in a plastic bottle, as does the environmentally friendly dishwashing liquid. Even the environmentally friendly laundry powder comes with a plastic scoop.

My iBook - largely plastic. My beloved Tivoli radio - plastic. Pretty much any of the toys I would like to buy will come packaged in plastic. My medication comes in non-reusable plastic bottles. Even the plastic Snapper card I bought to replace my bus pass came encased in its own little plastic wallet.

Of course there are ways around all of these problems, as Beth is discovering. However truly abandoning plastic also involves surrendering a lot of the consumption-focused middle-classed and privileged lifestyle I and my peers are used to indulging in. And I feel like a petulant, spoiled little child saying this, but it also involves giving up a lot of time and risking becoming viewed as a right oddball.

I enjoy farmers' markets, but it takes time and energy to stop off at the market after a Sunday bike ride. Yes, I know how stupid that sounds. It takes time to drive to the Island Bay butcher and request that meat be wrapped in paper, not plastic, and then to stop off at a bakery for packaging-free bread (although I love bread fresh from our breadmaker). I would feel like an idiot taking my own recyclable containers to Kana Khazana for my Indian takeaway. I would miss the convenience of buying a serving of Pasta Fresca chicken ravioli, even though I know I would enjoy making my own pasta and that it is perfectly possible to make up a large batch and freeze the extra.

The cliche is that Rome wasn't built in a day, and nor will Pip's plastic-free world happen overnight. It's not just the obvious plastic products either. There is also a huge problem with processed food (let's not even open the corn debate here or mention the genetically modified food problem) and petroleum-based or dependent products. The more I read the greater the issues I feel compelled to address become.

I can start small. The obvious first move is to stop being so lazy and do the farmer's markets and shop small and local. I can look for organic or sustainable products. Where possible I will seek out glass or cardboard. This summer I WILL establish my fruit and vegetable garden (if only because I grew up with fresh produce out of the garden and miss it badly). The money I save won't hurt either! I can make steps towards a more sustainable life in general, and until the day comes where I really no longer have to work, that will have to be enough.

Unbelievable

I just couldn't believe my ears when I heard an advertisement for this product.

Do we REALLY need individually wrapped dried plums? The counter on the site boasts that over quarter of a million 'Ones' are sold every day. That's 250,000 individual plastic wrappers littering the environment.

Time to take a leaf out of Fake Plastic Fish's book and stop the lunacy.

A Poem and a Green Consciousness

Photo courtesy of Hamish - Labour Weekend Kite flying at Queen Elizabeth Park

I haven't been posting to any of the post-Poetry Thursday sites lately. I have been a bit lackadaisical when it comes to dedicating time to my writing. My current focus seems to be on environmental issues and to educating myself by reading many of the excellent greenie blogs. I've also been getting back into my training and enjoying making use of my physical, rather than my mental energy.

Two poems wrote themselves this week. One was a simple mind-blurt, a way of releasing some of that physical energy via a mental process. It was a gorgeous spring day and I was itching to be outside moving around, instead I was stuck at my desk.

The other poem was a response to a Writer's Island prompt from a week ago. Neither have had any real editing, and neither are that good, but at least I'm creating again. I will have to wait tomorrow to post my 'message in a bottle' poem, because it appears I forgot to email it to myself after I wrote it (as usual, I was composing poetry at my desk).

So for today, the mind-blurt:

Buzz

When you’re dancing

on the tips of your toes.

When you’re singing

the same bar over

and over and over

again because it’s the

same tune that’s been

stuck in your head for

days. When you have to

shout because it’s all too

much and it’s pouring out

of you and if you try to

hold it in you will burst.

That’s when we want to

touch you, to feel that

energy fizzing from you,

to borrow some of that

love of everything and

anything and to feel

young by proxy because

you have never worked

out what it might mean

to grow old.

And still on a green note, I was depressed today by the National Party's apparent promoting of a New Zealand "Think Tank's" recommendation that the country be a follower, rather than a leader in meeting its Kyoto commitments. At a time where all relevant experts are saying that carbon dioxide levels are increasing faster than predicted, at a time where the ice is melting at phenomenal levels, at a time of wild weather and climactic records, when the consensus seems to be that we are already at a tipping point, to argue that business sustainability will be threatened if we act quickly seems irresponsible to say the least. Sticking one's head in the sand is self-defeating when the sand is thermal-heated and scalding.

Spare a thought for the monks

One of the positive things about a week on the couch is the time that it has given me to slow down and think about things again. It's fair to say that life this year has been little more than work and exercise. I've been able to spend the last few days rediscovering my social conscience. Primarily that has involved reading blogs such as Tree Hugger, Celsius and Gristmill. I've been following up on the local Wellington Green movement, deciding how to vote in the local body elections, and just becoming more aware of the world outside of the gym in general.

However there's one news story that is weighing heavily on my mind today. Spare a thought for the monks in Burma (Myanmar). This story puts the current conflicts into context.

If my lungs are still too full to run on Monday then I'll probably be at the Wellington Buddhist Centre instead. It feels like the right time to rediscover myself in a puja and to send out a little loving kindness to the Burmese monks..

How many planets?

This is one of the best ecological footprint calculators I've come across. For a New Zealander it's still not entirely perfect. I had to do a lot of conversion from metric to imperial, we have no idea how many kilometres our car does to the gallon, and it was difficult to work out how much of our power company's generation is renewable. That said, I did a bit of surfing around the company's website, and was pleasantly surprised to see that it seemed to be mainly hydroelectrical and geothermal. It is also supportive of individual consumer power-generation, and it seems to be exploring wind generation options. Hydroelectrical generation has its own problems here, where there have been attempts to dam valuable South Island braided river ecosystems. Unfortunately I can't add the word 'pristine' to that description, as most of those rivers are now infected with nasty Didymo. I think we're past the point of large-scale hydroelectrical schemes now. Wind turbines are far more beautiful, and I wish the Makara wind-farm could finally get underway.

We were actually doing ok until we got to food, as I knew we would. My weekends were so busy last year that it got to be too difficult to do anything other than dash into a supermarket on the way home from volunteering at the Karori sanctuary. From now on it's farmer's markets, the local butcher and growing as many of our vegetables as I can. The price of tomatoes has gotten to be ridiculous!

I'm not sure that our transport energy consumption is as bad as our score might suggest. We own one small fuel-efficient car. I either car-pool to work with Hamish, or I catch a bus. Most of the buses here are electric, and we only live around 5km from my office. I sold my other car recently because it just wasn't getting used, and I'm planning on buying a scooter.

At home we have the usual villa single light bulb in the middle of the room set-up. We've replaced nearly all of our lights with those fuel-efficient bulbs. We have thermal curtains in the lounge and main bedroom, although we probably still lose a lot of energy through the other windows. I've blocked up the unused chimney in the lounge, but it would make a huge difference if we had under-floor insulation below our wooden floorboards. We leave too many appliances on standby, and we do use our gas central-heating over winter, because it just gets too cold here otherwise. We keep it turned really low, and most of our visitors do rely on a heater in their bedroom to survive.

We're not big consumers really, but it would still take 2.7 planets to sustain our lifestyle. Room for improvement, obviously.

In other news, the head cold from hell is still persisting, and we woke up this morning to the sound of a steady stream of water dripping through the ceiling hatch in the kitchen. I've since had a crash-course in how to obtain a roofing quote, and how much can actually be wrong with the roof that your building inspector told you three years ago looked to be fine. The things you learn when you own a villa that was built in 1913! In the end the lovely old guy who drove out from Wainui and walked around on the roof in the rain, and who then ordered me to go back to bed, will probably get our custom. There's something about good, old-fashioned service and courtesy that seems appealing. Now to convince the home loan company to shell out some of our equity.

A final, revolting post-script. I've been wondering off and on all day how many calories I'm taking in through the rather persistent post-nasal drip that has accompanied this cold. I think I remember reading somewhere that the associated mucus is mostly glucose. It probably doesn't bear thinking about in too great a detail! On the positive side, my temperature as of a few minutes ago was 36.8, so no fever, despite feeling so rotten. I am wondering though what kind of virus brings with it an all-over body rash, which kicks in any time my skin comes into contact with something. Perhaps spending so much time at home has unleashed a sudden alltergy to the cats. I was considering a reaction to our laundry powder, but I think it's one we've used regularly in the past. Odd ...