waste not, want not

We are on the fourth week of the new recycling regime.  It has been interesting to see how much does go into the council's food recycling bin, and the answer so far has been reasonably low.  According to the Love Food Hate Waste campaign brought to us by WRAP (a not for profit organisation) the average family wastes £480 of food per annum.  Their website doesn't say what constitutes an average family, but families with children waste more, £680 worth.  The photo on Love Food Hate Waste's homepage did cause me a scintilla of annoyance by including two banana skins in the pile of wasted food, since not even the most fanatical anti-waste campaigner is suggesting we eat those.  It looks as though the average household size in the UK is around 2.4, and on a falling trend, but I'd like to know more about this average family.

In week one our family of two threw away the bone from a joint of lamb.  That doesn't really count as waste any more than banana skins (not that we have had any bananas in the past month).  There were the scrapings from a stew, and a couple of burnt pizza crusts.  It is probably better for the Systems Administrator not to eat those anyway.  Week two saw a bona fide wasted piece of Cheshire cheese that I discovered green and evil in a bag in the fridge, net weight around 50 grammes (I didn't weigh it).  In week three we threw away another piece of cheese, this time a small goat's milk round bought for the cheeseboard when we had friends to supper, that wasn't eaten on the day and then slipped under the radar.  Clearly we must be more careful with our cheese management.  Chelsea week saw the demise of a packet of six mini scotch eggs, that we didn't have room for after the pork pies and didn't fancy after they'd spent the day touring the flower show.  That was a shame, but the scotch eggs were on special offer, and taking our own picnic was a lot cheaper than buying food at Chelsea Flower Show prices, even if some did get thrown away.

This week the bin contains some skin and bones from a chicken stew and the shells from four hard boiled eggs, again not waste in the sense of food that we could have eaten but didn't, plus half a jar of pesto, that is waste.  I don't know how that ended up in the fridge, except that we must have had pasta when it was the sort of weather when you feel like having pasta with pesto, and then it wasn't again for six weeks.  Plus, we have discovered that the farm shop sells pots of pesto that are infinitely nicer than the Tesco's jars.  I'm not sure how to count the three pots of dripping carefully saved from previous joints and not used for cooking.  They were potentially edible (before the meat juice under the dripping went green with age.  The dripping itself looked fine), but by-products of roasting beef rather than something we'd paid for directly.  Given the attitude of modern medicine to cooking with beef dripping instead of olive or sunflower oil we probably weren't supposed to eat it anyway.  There were three shrivelled spring onions this week, but they went in the bin for our compost heap, not the council one, and there was nothing to be done about the spoonful of cooked courgette, since courgettes only come as whole vegetables, and if two were too much for two people, one wouldn't have been enough.

The chickens help us out by eating any surplus boiled potatoes or rice, and stale bread.  As a mechanism for converting waste carbohydrate into nutritious high quality protein a chicken is hard to beat (OK, they mostly live on bought grain and layers pellets, but stale brown bread is never thrown away).  People without the option of shovelling the unnecessary extra couple of spuds they erroneously peeled and cooked into a chicken run are going to have a heavier waste food bin than ours.

I reckon that food thrown away that could have been eaten if we'd been more organised has come in at about a pound a week in the first month of the new recycling regime.  We are quite assiduous at making the most of food.  Today's lunch started off two meals ago as a tomato and onion spicy side dish to go with curry.  It was reborn as tomato and mixed bean stew to go with barbecued burgers, by adding a tin of mixed beans in tomato sauce.  I bulked up the remains of that with a red pepper and four rather tasteless large tomatoes that were sitting in the fridge, and once it was nicely melded scooped depressions in it and cooked four eggs (from the chickens) in the sauce.  (This was loosely based on Middle Eastern methods that I'd read about in Claudia Roden, and seen in passing in No One Knows about Persian Cats).  I suppose the risk with all this reheating is that we'll give ourselves food poisoning, but we haven't yet.  Get leftovers you plan to keep into the fridge pronto after the meal, even if they're still a bit warm, and bring to a proper simmering boil each time.

It's around a five mile round trip from home to any shop at all, so the cost of petrol to nip out to buy a pint of milk is about the same as the milk.  When you live in the country you need to keep a certain amount of perishable food in stock, like cheese, bread, and milk.  Actually, if you live in the average suburb it's probably a couple of miles to the shops.  The time wasted, and aggravation, of discovering as you are about to cook that you don't have some basic vital ingredient like an onion make it sensible and rational to keep a supply in the kitchen cupboard.  If occasionally you misjudge and one or two go soft before you can use them, that's an acceptable trade-off for most people.

The non-food part of the recycling is still worrying me.  The council's waste contractors will not accept a large range of plastics that are described on them as Widely recyclable, and since the new regime came in the volume of our black bins has probably doubled.  The rationale for this is that plastic wrappers and trays aren't worth much, so it's not worthwhile to collect them.  Should the market value of a given material at a particular time be the determining factor in whether it is recycled, or is the reason for recycling plastics to reduce the volume going into landfill?  In the latter case shouldn't we recycle them anyway, rather than cherry picking our bins to donate the profitable bits to industry?  And where do my black bins go?  The council leaflet just said they would by now be tiny (they're not, they're bigger).  Somebody I met who lived in Switzerland for 15 years said that the efficient way to do recycling was in bulk, of clean uncontaminated material in factories during manufacturing, and that the Swiss don't fiddle about but send all of their consumer waste to incinerators with proper filters to avoid air pollution, and simply harvest the energy.  In the UK people tend not to like the sound of incinerators, so that would be a hard sell here.  But I do find the idea of those black bags mostly full of recyclable material going to landfill rather depressing.

it's hard to be green

Tendring District Council has gone over to segregated instead of co-mingled recycling.  Their contractors have been delivering extra colour-coded recycling boxes, a chart to let people keep track of what has to go out each week, and an optimistic little booklet.  We got ours a couple of weeks back.  I was initially all in favour, since waste paper seems more likely to arrive at a depot somewhere as a material capable of being made into something else useful (cardboard?  egg boxes?  loo roll?) if it has not previously been chucked in the back of a lorry with people's washed out cat food tins, and the new regime includes food waste collection.  A lot of energy has gone into producing that food, and I liked the idea that the left-overs could be fed into an anaerobic digestor and yield up some of that energy, instead of going to landfill and yielding up methane to add to the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

I am a bit disappointed.  I am worried about the paper collection, because our new red box, for paper, did not come with a lid.  Paper has to go in a closed container, because otherwise it will blow all over the garden and down the lane in any sort of a breeze, and I am not spending an hour a fortnight litter picking my own recycling.  Materials have to be placed on our boundary by 7.00am for collection, and in practice the dustmen get here pretty early, so as I'm not going to set the alarm for six on paper Thursdays so that I can rush to put the red bin out, it is going to have to sit out by the boundary all night, giving plenty of time for it to blow around.  I found the lid of the existing green bin, and the red bin is slightly larger, so the lid will not sit snugly on the rim of the box.  In a gale I'm not sure a brick is going to hold it all night.  In the past I've managed by only leaving paper out for recycling on still evenings, and putting it in a bag, but under the new regime they will not accept bags.

More irritatingly, they will no longer accept quite a lot of sorts of recyclable plastic.  Magazine wrappers, shrink wrappers from multi-packs of catfood and soft drinks, punnets that fruit or vegetables came in, margarine and yogurt pots.  All of these have the little recycling triangular symbol on them, but under the new contract the waste company don't want them.  They only want milk and soft drinks bottles (without lids).  I know that milk bottle plastic lids are recyclable because someone was collecting them for charity in one of the local shops.  Tendring seem to have done a deal, and allowed the waste company to cherry pick the most valuable bits of plastic waste, consigning the other recyclable materials to landfill.

They haven't given us an extra green box.  The leaflet says that in future only the council box may be used, and that recyclable material placed in bags will no longer be collected.  I know from driving around on days when people's recycling is out for collection that many households use bags as well as their box, because they generate too much to fit in a single box.  I rang up the number at the council given in the leaflet and asked how I could get another one, given that I had four cats and there was no way that a fortnight's worth of cat food tins plus our tins and plastic bottles would go in one box, and was told I could go on the waiting list for one, as they didn't have any at the moment.  They should really have worked that out in advance, given that if I can see how many people overflowed their green box before then so can somebody from the council, or the waste company.  In the meantime I am allowed to use my red box for tins and bottles, as long as it goes out on the correct day.

That still leaves me with the shrink wraps and all.  I asked at the dump, when I was dropping off some bags of nettle roots and other nasties, but the dump is run by the same firm that has the collection contract for Tendring, albeit the dump is an Essex County facility, and they don't want polythene either.  It's true that we could partly solve this problem by buying less wrapped stuff, but there are only about two flavours of cat food in Tesco that don't come in multi-packs (quicker for them stacking the shelves) and the Systems Administrator is partial to diet coke and diet tonic water, which likewise come in packs of six.  I'm a tea drinker myself, but  if the SA prefers sugar-free soft drinks then denying them on the grounds that the packaging is not fully recyclable in Tendring seems harsh.

The food bin comes in two parts, an outside bin with a lockable lid to stand at the boundary, and a little caddy to go in the kitchen.  Since getting our bins we haven't actually had very much to put in them.  There were some cheese rinds, and some burnt pizza crust, and some Value onions that I bought and the SA was rather slow to cook with, some of which began to go off in the bag, so went into the council bin in case it was any sort of an onion disease I'd rather not have in our compost heap.  Then there was the carcass of a chicken after it had been boiled for stock (having yielded a roast, a pie that did two meals and a retro curry) and had the remaining meat picked off for the cats.  There were two slices of ham that slipped through the net in the fridge, contrary to our self-image that we don't waste much food.  But we don't.  The ham was an aberration.  If we have boiled a bit too much rice or potato the chickens eat it, along with any ends of brown loaves.  I haven't tried them on left-over pasta, because there never is any.  Raw peelings and cores go straight on the compost heap, and the council certainly isn't having them.  The kitchen caddy will be an interesting discipline, obliging us to notice things like the ham, and the end of a packet of butter that was never used for cooking before it became rancid, but I doubt we'll fill more than one caddy a week.  The contents will look rather pathetic, rattling around in the bottom of our enormous sealed top outside waste food bin.

The leaflet from Tendring District Council said, smugly, that our black bin of non-recyclable should by now be tiny, but in fact it will be bigger than before, trading off one chicken carcass and some cheese rinds against all the plastic wrappers and grape and mushroom punnets.  I'm disappointed.