I am really tired of the “economy” apparently determining everything. It doesn’t.  Nor should it. There are other measures of life and well-being we need to consider, such as spirituality, happiness and fulfilment or satisfaction. The country of Bhutan, for example, has a Gross National Happiness Index. The index measures sustainable development that is balanced against economic notions of progress, and it also gives equal importance to non-economic aspects of wellbeing.

From time to time, an organisation somewhere tries to address the imbalance. World Environment Day was established by the United Nations in 1972 to stimulate worldwide awareness of the environment and encourage political attention and action.

The United Nations also declared 2012 the International Year of Sustainable Energy for All and the theme for World Environment Day this year is Green Economy: Does it include you?

It is a good question, albeit I am answering it somewhat belatedly. What do the economy and the environment have to say to each other?

In the last two centuries, some unfortunate trends have developed as to how we measure what is good. The natural environment, in the eyes of many, has become just a resource to be exploited, with little thought for immediate and future consequences. Alongside of this, we find people’s value measured primarily in terms of their financial assets. The best way I can demonstrate this is to recommend to you a short video that had a dramatic impact on me. It was filmed in the Niger Delta, an oil-rich place that Western oil companies have been drilling for some years. It is the home to many thousands of indigenous people, who have lived on this land for many thousands of years. They live on it, and farm it for their food. This youtube video shows what most of it now looks like. Amnesty International has produced this clever parody of Shell’s own publicity, to expose their hypocrisy. See it here at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejym4mKelhM&feature=topics

As you can see in this short film, the environment is ruined for those who live there. They will never benefit from the wealth generated by the oil. Their land, their crops and they themselves are not valued in this economy. Shell Petroleum has consistently refused to spend money to clean up the mess they have made. The people of the Niger just aren’t important to them. In this economy, the poor black people do not matter. In this economy, the cost of restoring the degradation and ruin to the environment is not counted.

What is measured as ‘good’ is the price of the oil. If we just look at what we call a resources boom, then the economy looks good. If we count the true cost of getting and using those resources, then we have a large problem. The problem with this standard Western way of judging whether the economy is good is that no one is counting the damage as part of the cost.

You have all probably heard of the World Bank, an organisation which is an international financial institution that provides loans to developing countries for capital programs.

The World Bank’s official goal is the reduction of poverty. According to the World Bank’s Articles of Agreement (as amended effective 16 February 1989) all of its decisions must be guided by a commitment to promote foreign investment, international trade and facilitate capital investment. In 1991, the chief economist at the World Bank, a man named Lawrence Summers, encouraged the placing of dirty industries in developing nations.

The reasons he gave for this were lower wages and lower costs associated with potential health problems workers may develop. He issued a memo saying “I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest waged country is impeccable and we should face up to that”.

This memo was leaked and Summers later issued an apology, but we cannot fail to perceive that this economic vision made one class of people far less valuable than another, and showed a callous attitude to some of the poorest and most vulnerable people on our planet, not to mention the way the environment itself would suffer from the threatened toxic waste. And we can see Summers’ comment played out in places like the Niger delta. Surely those who care about ethics and environment need to find a voice and protest against such injustice.

Humans are part of the web of creation; we are part of life in the biosphere known as planet earth and we are reliant on it. Our health can only be good if the planet’s health is good. Our economy can only be considered good when all people are benefitting from it. And we need to find other ways of measuring what is good for us – the development of the ‘economy’ as we know it in financial terms should be but one measure.

Instead of just having economies associated with ‘growth’ and ‘progress’, we also need to measure things like people’s happiness, their satisfaction with life, how long they live, and how much of what they consume impacts on the life and health and happiness of others.

We need to value the things that cannot be counted, such as the beauty of a wilderness, river or forest. We need to put a price on clean water and fertile soil. Because poor people, ecosystems and animals are not able to pay, their rights and well-being are not seen as important in our current system. Consumer choices and economic growth should not be the only measure of well-being.

The alternative economic system is often referred to as a ‘green economy’. This name recognises that until recently, the only economy we have considered is one promoting financial and material growth. The name ‘green economy’ stresses that a healthy economy is one that is sustainable, benefits all people and respects the natural world. The principles of a green economy include a commitment to the common good, equitable use and distribution of resources, and a belief in the importance of the integrity of creation.

A green economy recognises that unlimited growth on a finite planet is not possible. We need to re-imagine these terms to see ‘progress’ and ‘growth’ as the flourishing of all life, rather than the accumulation of wealth by a few at the expense of the many. Rather than purely economic, progress needs to be seen in terms of a world that is more just, equitable, respectful, compassionate and loving. If poor humanity continues to suffer because some of us are taking too much or many wild creatures continue to experience the threat of mass extinctions, we are not growing anything other than an impending catastrophe on our planet.

The development of a green economy needs to be understood in the context of the understanding that creation, all creatures great and small and their habitats, as well as all people, are equally important. It is essential for us to revise and broaden our definition of economy to include the natural world and defy any attempt to put a dollar-only value on it.  We should value it because of its intrinsic value, not because of its monetary worth.

We are at a critical point in history, facing some considerable challenges including the damaging effects of human-induced climate change, the depletion of cheap abundant energy and a global food shortage. These challenges are global and they are connected to each other as both cause and consequence. They are the results of social, political and economic systems that have come to do more harm than good; systems built on values of greed, power and materialism. We have developed a global economic system that is now diminishing, rather than improving our capacity to live sustainably on our planet.

Living in a way that is fair and sustainable is a challenging message to those of us who live in the West. I hope that we can re-image a world where creation is treated with respect and all peoples are seen as equal, and that “green” will cease to a pejorative political word for some and instead be seen as also meaning fair and sustainable and just. And I hope that by doing so, we can ensure the future of our planet, its myriad of living things, and its fragile ecosystems for the grandchildren and great grand children of all the peoples of the earth.

Our electricity bill has arrived for the last quarter. Apparently we are using around 50% of the power of a typical one person household, which our power company tells us is around 1.205 kWh. Our bill before last was 485kWh, a reduction of almost 50% on the same period last year, which was 966kWh. The last bill was 684 kWh, almost half of the 1.234 kWh of that typical one person house for this quarter. Given how power prices have risen, we think this is a pretty good result. We find there is always a slight rise in winter, because we use the electric oven a little more, and find that in wet, cloudy weeks we need the solar hot water boosted or need to occasionally use the drier to finish of clothes that refuse to dry beyond ‘damp’. With longer nights, we use more lighting.

There are various ways we try and cut down on our power consumption. We have the aforementioned solar hot water, which is a big help. Only on the bleakest rainy days do we need the electric booster, and only after we have had a few poor weather days.

Our regular cook top is gas, and we mainly use the wood fired oven in winter, which also heats the house through radiators on the walls in very room. Our wood fired slow combustion stove is an ingenious contraption, sending hot water from its wetback to all the radiators. It keeps our house quite cosy in winter, and as the stove has two ovens and an enormous hotplate area, we also cook on it during the colder months were possible.

We have tried to make the place into as much of a passive solar house as one can an old Federation house. It is fully insulated, and we have installed Smart Glass in the windows that face north and west. Our solar panel consultant has installed an ingenious fan in our roof. It runs off the solar panels by day and on thermal heat at night, reducing the temperature in the roof cavity. We set the thermostat on this fan to a reasonable temperature, and it happily sucks out hot air at no cost to us until the desired temperature is reached.

On the advice of an eco-consultant, we put in outdoor awnings on the western and northern windows, and replaced our vertical blinds with solar curtains. I have been amazed at how much heat these curtains keep out, even when the sun is at its fiercest. We have no air conditioning and use ceiling fans when it is hot and humid. During summer, it is rare for the ambient temperature inside our house to rise above 28 degrees. On the 45 degree days we had last summer, it was 38 degrees in our house. We have consistently measured our household room temperature at around 8-9 degrees less than that outside. People often walk into our house in summer and comment on how cool it is, and think it is air conditioned.

We use the standard power-saving things such as compact fluorescent globes and LED lights. And we turn lights off when we aren’t in the room, and use one of those power boards with the foot switch so we can turn TV, DVD etc off at night and kill the standby lights.

With our electronic equipment, we have agreed with each other to only use the battery capacity at night. We charge up the batteries of laptops phones and ipads during the day when the solar panels are working, and run them on their batteries at night as we Facebook and do our work. Once the battery runs out, that’s it. No more use of the device in question. This has been inconvenient at times, but we figure a rule like this is good for us.

Putting these measures in place has been pretty straightforward. The cost of the glass, curtains and awnings wasn’t a huge amount, and it certainly wasn’t hard to change light globes to those that are more efficient.  I have a built in anathema to clothes driers, only using ours once I have hung the clothes out for as long as reasonable, and it is clear they aren’t going to get any drier due to unpropitious weather. One of the good things about our radiators is we can put damp clothes directly on them, and they dry beautifully.

I have to say our Thermalux wood fired slow combustion stove with radiators is an expensive heating and cooking option, but we are very happy with it. It is Australian made, uses recycled metal, and it is very efficient. In my opinion, it cooks the best pork roast ever. If you are interested, you can find them at http://www.wiseliving.com.au/slow_combustion_cookers_&_stoves.html

The other items which are big consumers of power in the house are the fridge and chest freezer. We buy our grass-fed, organic meat from local farmers in bulk, hence the freezer. It has a good star rating, but still chews up the power. We have it on a timer at night , to try and cut back its energy chomping habits. In our hot and humid summers, going without refrigeration is not an option. The toaster is another energy chewer, though we generally don’t use it more than once or twice a day.

For those looking to reduce their carbon footprint and their power bills along with it, there is plenty of information out there in cyberspace to help you cut costs. Google produced 799,000 results when I asked it to find energy-saving tips.

As well as helping us save money, taking energy saving measures also helps each household tackle climate change. Average Australian households produce around 21 % of Australia’s carbon emissions. This equates to around 14 tonnes of greenhouse gas per household per year, including vehicle use. That is a lot of emissions we could be reducing with a bit more thought.

If you are interested in what your household emissions are, you can check them at the excellent Australian Greenhouse Calculator ( http://www.epa.vic.gov.au/agc/home.html ) which will calculate the emissions your create  from your electricity use and your personal transport and any other energy-consuming habits you have. It also has a comprehensive information and analysis section on issues relating to climate change.

Most of us just tinker around the edges when it comes to reducing our carbon footprints.  We surgically trim off some of the fat of our lifestyles rather than taking to them with a Crocodile Dundee-style knife.  We resist making sacrifices that inconvenience us, like unplugging the TV and going for a bike ride. We feel deprived if our towels are not warm and fluffy from the drier.

Apparently more than a third of people who want to help do something about climate change don’t really know how to go about it. The easiest things we can do that are easily within our power to change is to reduce our emissions by driving less and having a more fuel-efficient car, improving how we use and conserve energy in our homes (especially heating and cooling), and to eat less meat. And you might think about changing your power source to include a proportion of cleaner energy from renewable sources, such as solar, wind or hydro power.

It is difficult to encourage people to get involved in social change, which is what is needed if we are to combat the menace of climate change. Personal lifestyle changes like this should not only reduce our own impacts, but also encourage the big social and political changes that are needed across the board. One person changing might not look like a lot, but collectively, this can build to an irresistible force that can begin to change the world.

One of my readers has asked about how we manage waste when we travel. I have to say it isn’t easy, especially when we travel long distances at times for our work. At the moment, I am on leave and on the other side of the country in Perth.  I have discovered that travelling without encountering truckloads of plastic is almost impossible.

When we move around the region we work in, we take cornstarch cups to use for coffee, can pack our own snacks and food, and use our stainless drink bottles. We carry cloth serviettes, enamel milkshake cups and glass straws..

Travel ling by air, however, is a very different proposition. I recently travelled to Perth to visit my daughter and only granddaughter. I rarely see them in the flesh, and am visiting here for a week. Visiting them is a family priority, and I try and work out ways I can minimise the impact of flying.

The first issue I encountered was the amount of plastic in a meal on a plane, and all single use. Some of it looked like cornstarch plastic to me, but I still can’t reconcile all the intensive use of resources producing my cutlery would have meant. And it was intended as a one off use, not for washing and redeployment in another meal. Apparently Qantas recycle and wash their plastic cutlery on international flights, but not domestic.  Ultimately, it is doomed to end up in landfill.

On past flights we have kept and reused the plastic cutlery in our picnic set and to take travelling around the mid north coast, but still the waste worries me, and we have accumulated a lot of plastic cutlery! But it bothered me much more this time. As my level of awareness of the real issues surrounding plastic rises, so does my guilt factor. After all, this was all invented to support a lifestyle that does not tolerate inconvenience well.

I  took my own stainless steel water bottle, and cornstarch coffee cup. As a celiac, I brought my own snacks. But my meal came in an aluminium foil tray with plastic cutlery, cup and a plastic water bottle. Individual muffins, cakes, crackers and other snacky things were all in plastic packaging. The headsets to use the in flight entertainment system were also wrapped in plastic.

Apparently there are around 93,000 commercial flights each day, and at any given moment, half a million people are in the air. That’s an awful lot of waste. http://www.flixxy.com/scheduled-airline-flights-worldwide.htm shows you a display of the flights each day across the world.

We have been trying to cut down our flying time (it is a major CO2 emitter) but there is no other cheap and efficient waste of accessing Perth from where we live. We buy carbon offsets and just hope they are genuine.

Our world has become very reliant on single use plastic utensils, wrapping and containers. It is very reliant on single serves wrapped in plastic, and plastic packaging around our food and everyday items.

While cheap plastics have probably revolutionised various sectors such as medicine in a good way, by ensuring sterility and infection control, it is also true that commonly available plastic has encouraged the people of our planet to expect and indeed, demand, a culture of convenient and disposable plastic. Little or no thought is given to how many resources are needed to produce it, and to the damage it may cause when it is disposed of. We appear to be addicted to cheap, disposable, one-use plastic, and do not stop to think of the resources that went into making it. Many of us may not be aware that plastic takes literally hundreds of years to break down, and then it is into tiny particles that are almost indestructible. It is somewhat ironic that goods which are designed for one-off use and to be completely disposable are going to stay around in our environment for a very long time, wreaking havoc wherever they land in the sea or waterways or where animals mistake them for food.  Plastic needs to be regarded as the limited and indestructible material it really is, and it should be recycled as much as possible or disposed of carefully.

One good example of this is bottled water. According to the website of Cool Australia (http://www.coolaustralia.org/bottled-water-secondary/), Australians spend over $500 million on bottled water annually. The website notes that:

It has to be pumped out of the ground, packaged, transported and chilled before it gets to us. This creates over 60,000 tons of greenhouses gases a year in Australia alone….the manufacture and transport of the plastic bottles for all this water requires over 460,000 barrels of oil. Less than 40% of these bottles are recycled; the balance ends up in landfill or in our waterways…the average Australian drinks 14 litres of bottled water per year [and] Australians buy 118,000 tonnes of plastic drink bottles a year. It takes 8 years to recoup the cost of a bottle of water by refilling the bottle with tap water.

When did we stop drinking water that was free in favour of expensive water in bottles? Why is it now OK to use something once and then throw it away – especially when logically it has to go ‘somewhere’? “Away” may be landfill, or it may be the bush, or roadside, or the sea. Either way, it has not disappeared, it has gone to a place where potentially it can cause even more harm to wildlife, marine life, and to the soil.

I must also just mention the now infamous great plastic garbage patch. According to Wikipedia, “the Great Pacific garbage patch is a gyre of marine debris particles in the central North Pacific Ocean located roughly between 135°W to 155°W and 35°N and 42°N. It extends over an large area, …and has exceptionally high relative concentrations of pelagic plastics, chemical sludge and other debris that have been trapped by the currents of the North Pacific Gyre.” Discarded plastic waste from various parts of the world end up here, where it breaks down and is easily ingested by marine life and birds, leading to choking, starvation, and death.

Many people treat us as if we have moonstruck madness in our bid to live a live with far less plastic. Educating people about why this is indeed a good idea can be a complicated process.

Replacing one use plastic does have its challenges. When we travel, we carry stainless steel drinking bottles, use cornstarch coffee cups, and have a set of sandwich pockets which eliminates the need for plastic bags and cling wrap so we can eat our own food instead of take away.  We carry reusable glass straws with us to use for smoothies, ice coffees and milkshakes purchased as we move around for our work – and this has led to some quite interesting conversations when people are curious as to why we have glass straws. 

We buy things in bulk from our health food shop, and make our own bread and biscuits to eliminate commercial plastic-wrapped biscuits, etc. We have replaced cling wrap in the kitchen with a stylish set of different sized “mob caps” for use in covering dishes in both fridge and microwave (from 4MyEarth.com). Our cats are feed fresh mince with appropriate nutritional additives, purchased in our own containers from the health food shop. We make our own toothpaste. I buy Lush’s solid shampoo and conditioner bars that come wrapped in recycled paper, and make my own washing detergent or use fair-trade soap nuts.

Setting this up does take some time and money initially, and one does need to be very intentional about it. But we have very quickly got used to this way of life, and to using our various reusable containers. We also do find at times when we are travelling for work that avoiding disposable plastic all the time is not possible, and we accept that. We accept that we will be offered various plastic items by family and friends and co-workers, and we do not lecture them, as research has shown this is not going to change their minds.

Susan Freinkel in her book Plastic: A Toxic Love Story, offers some observations about plastic use we that we should be taking seriously. Our world has apparently produced nearly as much plastic in the last ten years as for most of the last century. She notes that in the space of one generation, the average American has moved from consuming around 13kg of plastic a year to ten times that. In Australia, most of us use around half that amount.

Freinkel also notes that because of the amount of plastic in our society and our food chain, most of us are “just a little plastic now”. “Just as plastics changed the essential texture of modern life, so they are altering the basic chemistry of our bodies,” she says in her book.

It is nigh impossible to live what we understand to be a normal life in the Western world and avoid all plastic. Even if we avoid all packaged food and goods that come in plastic, for most of us there remains essential items we need for everyday life and work, such as telephones, plastic banking cards and electronic devices such as computers and tablets. I also require daily medication, and that is all packaged in plastic.

But we can be much more intentional about how much plastic we can accept in our lives. We can use reusable items such as steel water bottles, we can refuse to buy or accept one-use plastic items, we can write to manufactures and companies to request they use different packaging. We can rediscover the delights of making fresh homemade biscuits and bread. We can consciously commit to recycling our plastic waste. Though at times it seems like we are drowning in an endless array of convenient, plastic wrapped consumer goods, every plastic bag we refuse, every bottled drink we don’t buy, and every take away coffee we purchase in a reusable cup does make a difference.

Such individual actions do have power. They are a catalyst for changing our habits and our thinking. They help make us more aware of our environment, and of the resources required to sustain what is basically an unsustainable way of living. And larger entities are also taking up the challenge. The southern Highland town of Bundanoon has gone plastic bottle free (http://www.news.com.au/national/nsw-town-of-bundanoon-votes-to-ban-bottled-water/story-e6frfkp9-1225747578818). Macquarie University in Sydney is working towards a plastic bottle-free campus (http://mq.edu.au/about_us/strategy_and_initiatives/sustainability/what_is_happening_now/plastic_bottles_on_campus/ ).

If you want more incentive, think of the money you will also save by not buying bottled water  or drink or lots of takeaway or convenience food.

It is important to remember that we can positively impact the future well-being of our planet. We can demonstrate responsible buying habits and dispose of our waste thoughtfully. And just maybe, we will cause a quiet reduced plastic revolution among our friends, family and work colleagues.

The phrase “food miles” has been bandied around a lot over the last 15 years or so. I had no idea of the type of fierce debate this concept has apparently raised. It just seemed like common sense to me, to support local food production and keep carbon emission used to store and transport food as low as possible.

According to various articles I have read, the “food miles” campaign has not gained a lot of traction in Australia. It has been labelled simplistic, protectionist and even anti-free trade.  It is “successfully rooted in a blind ideology about man’s contribution to global warming – a popular obsession” according to Australia’s Institute of Public Affairs. Food miles is nothing short of a greenie plot to stop economic growth, it would seem.

Two other considerations are what impact low “food miles” would have on third world economies and populations looking to raise themselves out of poverty by exporting food, and how  they would effect the worth of Australia’s international exports.

A study done of New Zealand lamb has become famous for showing that there is four times less CO2 emissions created by a NZ grown lamb than a lamb grown in the UK. Apples and onions produced in the UK were produced in hothouses heated by electricity, which also increased CO2 emissions at the production stage of the product.

As the average basket of food purchased by Australians has travelled over 70,000 kilometres before it gets to the local supermarket, I find it difficult to believe that food miles are not a significant contributor to greenhouse gases.

I understand that food takes energy and water to produce. CO2 emissions are produced at every stage of the food life cycle, from planting seeds to harvesting to processing to storage and to the place of sale.  But surely one of the issues of ‘food miles’ is not only should it be reasonably local, but also seasonal. It is pointless demanding tomatoes in the dead of winter that require hothouse production, even of they are local. The UK’s Department of Food, Environment and Rural Affairs has not unsurprisingly found that it is more energy-efficient to import tomatoes by road than growing them in a hothouse. It is simple. People: if they are not in season, don’t eat them.

Of course, eating seasonal, local food means one’s eating choices are restricted to fruits and vegetables in season. Well, how dreadful. Fancy us in the Western world having to eat what is seasonal and come in line with the majority of the world’s population! We seem to think we have the right to eat tomatoes and apples and pineapples all year round. Why?

There are other arguments made against sticking to local food production which are many and varied and not all are created equal. One is that local food costs more, making fresh fruit and vegetables too expensive for some people.  I find this mildly astonishing. I buy from our local farmers’ market, and the plant produce there is cheaper than the supermarkets. The farmers bring the stuff there themselves, and sell it at stalls with low overheads. It is seasonal, grown locally, much of it is organic, and it is cheap. I don’t get how this is possibly creating more emissions.

The claim that sticking to local food can damage economies of developing countries which rely on food exports is a fair criticism. In our six month experiment, we agreed we would still use certain fair-trade products for this very reason.

As for the claim that low ‘food miles’ is a ruse to justify protectionism, I treat that with the contempt it deserves. I hadn’t even thought about it until I researched this. My understanding is that it makes local economies more resilient by protecting small farms, local jobs and local shops. I am not a fan of large corporations planting large monocultures, such as we see with canola. My understanding is that biodiversity is a much better protection against drought, pestilence, disease and locusts. Surely we don’t want the equivalent of the Irish potato famine again.

I have read any arguments against keeping food miles low which look at this particular problem. Many small holdings have been forced to sell  and their properties have been amalgamated into increasing large farms, increasing run by large corporations who not only control the growing of the crop, but also the storage, transport, processing and retail of products. Increasingly, food security appears to rest in the hands of large corporations.

Even growing our vegetables and fruit comes in for a serve.  A CSIRO expert claimed that “even home-grown vegetables, with ”zero food miles”, do not necessarily have a smaller carbon footprint than those bought in the supermarket. “With my veggies, I drive to Bunnings to buy fertiliser, and I go away for the weekend and forget to water them, and in the end I only harvest a few things that I can actually eat. By contrast, big producers, who can invest in the latest energy-efficient, water-efficient technology, and make use of all the parts of food, can be much more efficient,”’ he says.

Are you serious, Mister Expert?  Are you really saying that driving to the nursery and back with some seedlings and soil equals the emissions of thousands of miles of food being trucked? Oh, please. And what I don’t eat, my worms or chooks do. So nothing is wasted here either. And I use rainwater that is captured free off our roof, which costs nothing. I can’t believe that you think my garden may emit more CO2.

We are now in an era where easily accessible fossil fuels are over. As oil becomes scarcer, local production of food is going to become a necessity, not a luxury. Communities need to become more self reliant in a number of ways.

Maybe the concept of ‘food miles’ is overly simplistic – but increased local food production is going to be the reality in the future. The real  question may therefore be whether we are forced to adopt that course out of desperation, or whether we plan for and embrace the reality of global warming and diminishing oil. 

I am sitting here, with a month’s worth of rubbish. I am in the process of tallying it, to see what we really are accumulating, particularly in regards to plastic rubbish, plastic being more of a problem and more insidious in our environment, not to mention more disposable.

In terms of average household rubbish I am guessing it is a fairly small pile. We have a plastic shopping bag sized bin behind the sink cupboard door, and most weeks we don’t fill it. It mostly consists of packaging, from food wrapping such as bread, soiled cat litter (we compost the wet stuff), and plastic wrapping from mail, especially magazines. We also cleaned out the cupboards and a few items of expired food also made the garbage.

The rubbish consists of plastic meat wrappers, recycled paper towel wrapper, medication cards (Panadol and prescription drugs), plastic bags from the free local paper, used aluminium foil, plastic bags accumulated over several years that we have reused until no longer usable, cat litter and chicken bones. It weighs around 4.3 kg in total.

The recycling is mainly paper, from envelopes and mail debris, some junk mail catalogues, the local newspapers, cardboard packaging from milk and beer four packs; glass bottles, bottle tops, and discarded mail and envelopes. We have ten small boxes full – there is a lot more than the rubbish.

Why are you bothering, I hear you ask?

I am bothering for a number of reasons.  Firstly, it is useful to see just how much rubbish we accumulate. Whilst our weekly rubbish-holding plastic shopping bag that is two thirds full of what is mainly plastic packaging may not seem much, times it by 52 and it becomes a small mountain over the course of a year. That’s a lot of non-biodegradable stuff heading for landfill. It is sobering to contemplate it. It is even more sobering to think of the resources that went into making this plastic. If you are wondering what this means, have a look at Hungry Beast’s life cycle of a plastic bottle at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B19zvES7RC8

Secondly, looking at it and counting it reminds me we live in a disposable society. I am amazed at how commercially produced food portions are getting smaller and smaller and more and more packaged. There seem to be far more individually wrapped processed food products on the shelves of the super markets now, things like single breakfast bars, chocolates, biscuits and even single-serve cereals. Cheese, yoghurt, rice pudding, soup, tuna and baked beans all come in single serves, to name but a few. Apparently we have lost the will to drink tap water, needing instead plastic bottles of water and gaudily coloured products for allegedly increased stamina. Buying in bulk is getting harder and buying in cardboard, paper and glass is becoming more of a challenge.

Thirdly, it appears almost impossible to send a magazine through the mail without a protective plastic bag. Why? It is not like plastic is the only protective covering. In our household, only The New Internationalist arrives in a recycled paper envelope. The Open Road, our Diggers’ Garden catalogue, the local free newspaper and a few other catalogues that have followed me to Wauchope all come plastic wrapped. Some are OXO plastic, but this is still only compostable in a commercial facility.

Lastly, I realised how much we rely on plastic to keep food fresh. Gladwrap (or its equivalent) has insinuated itself into our lives to such an extent that we depend on it to keep food fresh in the fridge, wrap our sandwiches, cover our cut fruit and in our case, package cats’ pet mince for freezing. It is also a useful thing to cover food being cooked in the microwave oven.

And this is just the waste. Looking at my cupboards, I have plastic storage, plastic crockery, plastic furniture, plastic bowls and plastic utensils. My cleaning products, medications, and my bathroom products all come in plastic. There are plastic bits and pieces in our garden equipment. And the list goes on. How on earth did my great grandmothers manage without the stuff? It is everywhere.

Over the last year I have become more and more aware of the damage that plastic does to our environment. Millions of tonnes of plastic enter our environment every year. This plastic pollution finds its way into our water ways and then into our oceans. It then hitchhikes on the ocean’s currents until it ends up either in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch or is eaten by marine life. It lasts longer than nuclear waste, taking up to a thousand years to break down in the environment, and turning into smaller and smaller pieces that don’t disappear. Unlike cardboard, paper or glass, plastic just doesn’t go away. It is stubborn stuff, and it is lethal stuff.

According to Clean Up Australia, every piece of disposable plastic that I have ever used is still hanging around somewhere today. Their statistics are sobering:

• Almost 90% of the marine debris found on Sydney’s beaches is plastic, mostly bottles, caps and straws.
• Australians buy 600 million litres of bottled water a year.
• We use 10 million plastic bags a day (that’s 3.9 billion plastic bags a year)

Planet Ark makes the point that the time we use a plastic grocery bag can be counted in minutes – however long it takes to get from the shops to our homes. But only an estimated 3% of Australia’s plastic bags are currently being recycled, despite recycling facilities being available at major supermarkets. Why? Are we lazy, or do we find many new uses for these bags – such as collecting household rubbish? And while this is commendable to reuse these bags, what happens once I dump them into the red bin and they trundle off to the Council tip?

Having asked this question, I needed to answer it. I discovered that we are not off the hook by disposing of our plastic bags in garbage bins. Approximately 30 to 50 million plastic bags enter the environment as litter in Australia annually. Of that litter, 47% is wind borne plastic litter escaping from the landfills where our garbage ends up.

Once windborne, it ends up in our oceans and in our environment. In the marine environment plastic bag litter is deadly, and kills many sea birds, whales, seals and turtles every year. And due to its longevity, when an unfortunate beast is killed by plastic it decomposes much faster than the offending plastic, which is then released back into the environment where it can be ingested and kill again.

One example Planet Ark gives in regard to the deadly nature of plastic as litter was a Bryde’s whale which died on a Cairns beach after ingesting 6 square metres of plastic – including plastic bags. This is potentially making my mind implode. Six metres? How did it find six metres of the stuff so readily?

And it isn’t just the ocean. Planet Ark also reports the story of a calf on a farm near Mudgee NSW, which died unexpectedly. The farmer carried out an autopsy and found 8 plastic bags in its stomach. The loss of this calf cost the farmer around $500. One has to ask how 8 plastic bags found their way onto the calf’s pasture.

The worst thing for me though was Hungry Beast’s clip on albatross chicks.  I was searching for something on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and I came across this little documentary on Chris Jordan, who is a Seattle based photographer. He photographed the most heart breaking pictures of dead baby albatross on the Midway Atoll (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7vHrMsnRFA). All of them had died from being fed plastic litter by their parents, who are unable to tell the difference between pieces of plastic and small fish. I sobbed the first time I saw it. It still makes me cry. The death of all these small chicks just tipped me from knowing that plastic was a problem to doing something about it.

The 15 to 1000 years that plastic takes to break down in the environment seems a high price to pay for my convenience. Recycling is not enough, and rescue is not enough anymore. Time to actually change our habits and banish the demon plastic from our shopping as much as possible.

Planet Save has a helpful infographic at http://planetsave.com/2012/08/26/life-cycle-of-plastic-bag-infographic/ and a good factsheet on bottled water at http://www.cleanup.org.au/au/Whatelsewesupport/avoid-bottled-water.html

Plastic pollution is a global problem, but it can have a local solution. That local solution is me. In the coming weeks, we need to consistently and doggedly work at turning our plastic addiction around here at Shenstone, our sustainable house and garden. Today’s garbage tally makes it clear that this will not be easy, and some things, like our medications, can’t be replaced. The plan is to keep recycling those we can, and thoughtfully disposing of those we can’t. I will be following up with our local Council to find out what happens to such recyclables, and enquiring how I make sure my litter doesn’t fly off and kill a nearby calf or whale. But widespread plastic use surely can’t be sustained in a world where oil (the basic ingredient for plastic) is growing scarcer, and where climate change is threat enough to our birds, fish, animals and creeping things.

The bottom line is that it is unsustainable for all sorts of reasons. Time to really change habits and not just tinker around the edges. Less convenience, and more mindfulness of exactly what the consequences of our throwaway plastic society are is called for. My great grandmothers would be proud.

I offered the MOTH (Man of the House) the opportunity toi contribute to this blog as we rumble along. As we still need to drive for employment purposes (there is the small matter of our mortgage and very little public transport in the large region we cover in our work), we have adopted the technique of hypermiling when driving. The MOTH has always been fond of numbers, and has taken to hypermiling like a duck to water. Below is his contribution for this month, on the delights of hypermiling along.

We have had a rather lengthy journey towards this six-month experiment with trying to live a lifestyle with a much-reduced carbon footprint.

About four years ago, when we began seriously considering a move out of the city and I became serious about looking for a different kind of job, we realised that we would need to purchase a car once we moved (and I lost the work-supplied car that I had enjoyed for the previous two decades).

After exploring options and considering various possibilities, we decided to purchase a hybrid, a car that ran on both petrol bought from the bowsers and electricity generated from the battery in the car. Not the upmarket option, the Prius, but the “poor man’s hybrid”, a Honda Insight.

We’ve been running this car for the past 42 months. It came with its very own Eco Assist^TM system, offering all sorts of hints, prompts, and rewards to encourage environmentally responsible driving (which may itself be an oxymoron, since every time we make a trip in a car we are adding to the pollution that is pumped into the environment and contributing to the degradation of the environment that is taking place all around us). 

In the early days, I had fun with the “eco” facilities that appeared on the little computer screen in the middle of the steering wheel. By driving carefully, not accelerating fact, and not speeding excessively, we were able to “win” first one flower (bit by bit – first the stem, then one set of leaves, then a second set, and finally the full three-leaved flower). Then, over the kilometres of the ensuing weeks, with continued careful driving, a second flower … and ultimately, a third flower. Hooray! We thought … we are careful drivers.

Then the next level of the system kicked in. Depending on how the car was being driven at the time, anywhere up to five small flowers would be sitting at the top of the little computer screen. Driving like a hoon, accelerating rapidly and braking suddenly, with air con on full speed and radio blasting, would see the number of flowers reduced to two, one, or even none. (Or so I am advised … I have not tested this empirically!)

At the other end of the scale, turning the air con off and not accelerating rapidly, would ensure that four, four-and-a-half, or even five flowers on the screen. But a minute or so of unthoughtful driving, and the number of flowers would start to reduce. An incentive, you see, to revert to cautious driving and to recapture the full five flowers.

To encourage the driver in this task, other options could be called up on the tiny computer screen in the centre of the steering wheel. One screen identified how far I might be able to drive on the amount of petrol left in the car. Another announced how long we had been driving since ignition. Another showed whether it was the petrol or the battery which was supplying the power at the particular moment. And so on …

Of course, this then raised the issue of safe driving … and my penchant for pushing the button and tracing through all the screens and seeing what they each had to offer. “Keep your eyes on the road”, “stop playing with your little computer”, were the injunctions that came from  … (well, someone else in the car, I guess … I was concentrating on the screen, I mean the road).

Three of the screens actually provide a collection of data that helps the driver to refine their driving practices and develop a more “eco” style. One screen identified the current amount of litres per 100 kilometres that was being consumed. It took the average over the distance from when the button was set at zero, and so provided a commentary on the driver’s habits during the current trip. Usually, trips around town would provide a measure of about 5.4 to 5.8 litres per 100 kms. On trips that had more short stop-start segments, the rate went up (more litres of petrol used). On trips with longer segments, the rate would decrease. Once or twice, I recall, I had dipped down to 5.2 l/100km.

On one occasion, when there appeared to be a problem with the transmission, I drove from Goulburn to Sydney on no more than 80 kph. On this trip, we dipped below 5.0 for a while. (And it turned out that the warning light was simply a warning that time was drawing near to have a service —  not a warning that something had actually gone wrong in the transmission. Phew!)

Another screen provided a short history of ltr/100km rates – the current trip, and the last three trips (each trip starting when the ignition is turned on). This meant I could look at the petrol rate on long trips on the motorway – 5.3, 5.2, sometimes 5.1 – as well as trips around town, short and sharp – 5.8, 6.2, even 7.5 (this was a drive from our house to a spot just a block away).

The third helpful screen showed the immediate rate of ltr/100km, second-by-second. This was the frightening one. Start up, push the accelerator, drive (slowly) onto the street – the rate was over 15ltr/100km. Drive for a kilometre, and the rate varied according to whether brake or accelerator was being pushed … and the overall rate would slowly lower. This screen was worth careful attention!

But all of this was a long, slow prelude, to the most recent aspect of our attempt to develop driving habits that were (relatively) environmentally friendly. (Or that should be, that lessened the environmental damage that I was doing with each trip in the car.)

Recently, we discovered HyperMiling. This is a phenomenon that has developed in the past 15 years, to foster energy-efficient driving. There are various elements to driving that effect fuel economy. Some factors are maintenance matters: tyre pressure, type of fuel used, etc. Other factors are under the control of the driver: choosing the right gear, braking carefully, coasting or gliding, accelerating at a regular rate rather than in short bursts, and anticipating the traffic ahead of you.

One factor that is of great significance is driving at the speed that provides the best economy of fuel (and by extension, thereby provides the least pollution into the air). Apparently the 2005 US Fuel Economy Guide declared that the optimum speed was between 50 and 55 mph (80 and 90 km/h). That is, travelling in the 80s would result in a better fuel economy, than travelling at higher speeds.

Elizabeth and I decided that we would do an experiment with our trips to Sydney in June and July. We were due to travel to Sydney, with our work, twice in June, and once in July. Travel along the motorway is relatively unimpeded, and we can motor along at the speed limit of 110kph for much of the 360 kms of this trip. Indeed, especially as we approach Sydney, we can go with the flow and find ourselves zooming along at 115kph, 120kph, or even more!

So in our Sydney trips, we travelled as was our custom – setting the cruise control for 110kph (or 110kph in designated areas) and only accelerating past this when overtaking. On some of the steeper hills, to save the engine, I would cut back to a slower speed until we hit the summit of the hill… but basically we followed the speed limits, along with many other motorists on the road.

The result? The first trip averaged 5.4ltr/100km, whilst the second trip averaged 5.6ltr/100km. Both of these figures were above the advertised “optimum performance” that the car’s manufacturer had provided, of 4.5ltr/100km on the “open road”.

Then, in July, we travelled the same trip, for the third time, but with the cruise control set at 90kph for the stretches on the motorway where the limit was 10 or 20 kph higher. This meant that we scarcely passed many cars – but that hundreds of cars sped past us at the speed limit (or higher, in many cases). Once again, on the steeper hills, we slowed … indeed, I tried to ensure that there was no excessive acceleration for the most part on these hills.

The results were quite striking. By travelling at no more than 90kph, we achieved an average of 4.4ltr/100km on the trip to Sydney, with the computer showing a stretch in the latter part of the trip when the reading dipped to 4.2, then 4.1, and (briefly) to 4.0ltr/100km. This was very exciting! A quick calculation indicated that, if this was the regular driving pattern, over the course of the year, not only would less pollution be spewed into the air, but somewhere around $250 would be saved in petrol costs.

The return trip was a rather different one, with less motorway time. It was a split trip, with overnight stays at Stockton (north of Newcastle) and the Stroud, meaning that we were on the M1 for much less of the overall trip. The readings were 5.4ltr/100km for the leg from Sydney to Stockton (we left Penrith at 4pm on Friday, so traversed 40km on Sydney traffic in the peak hour), and also 5.4ltr/100km on the leg that went from Stockton to Stroud to Gloucester and then to Wauchope.

The overall rate for the whole of this trip (totalling 1140km) was still 4.8ltr/100km, still a favourable comparison with the June trips (with readings of 5.4 and 5.6). So we are convinced of the benefits of HyperMiling. Better fuel economy. More intentional driving habits. And better environmental impact (just a little, but better than nothing).