Sue’s World

I’ve bought a new gadget. Well it isn’t strictly a gadget I suppose, if gadgets are things with buttons and batteries or electrical connectors. This is very much a bucket. It’s succinctly named the Bokashi Kitchen Waste Compost Bucket and of course it was sourced by my darling husband.

In our house text input comes via Whizz. He does all the reading – well most of it anyway – while I do much of the output i.e. turning it into burble and passing it on through, among other things, this blog. It’s a good example of teamwork if we can only find the time to talk to each other!

Anyway, this Bokashi thingamajig is the answer to all smelly bin problems because it enables one to turn all malodourous kitchen waste into compost. As well as the usual fruit and veg, it will take cat food, bones, meat, stale bread and cakes, anything, although I haven’t tried cat poo. On top of each layer goes a sprinkling of special bran containing micro organisms, and a derivative from organic sugar to activate them.

The mixture ferments and gives off a liquid by-product that can be diluted for cleaning, clearing drains and feeding the plants. The rest of the bulk is left for 2 weeks in the bucket after which it can be spread onto the garden or put straight into the compost heap.

So far it smells far sweeter than the compost bucket and attracts no fruit flies.

I was worried about the extra output of methane as discussed in my blog On Recycling: http://www.suenicholls.com/2005/06/01/on-recycling/#more-50 and the subsequent discovery that composting does not produce large quantities of the gas unless it is produced anaerobically, as it would be in landfill where it is buried far under the ground. The bucket is pretty anaerobic but I was delighted to find that it ferments the matter within and so does not produce unacceptable amounts of methane.

It seems like the perfect answer but I’ll let you know if I find any problems with it.

The combination of recycling and Bokashi-ing means that the contents of the rubbish bin are only non food packaging. This comprises mainly: bubble wrap, plastic packaging and bags that have contained catalogues – a practise that irritates me unbelievably. It’s bad enough being bombarded by literature trying to sell you things you neither need nor want but to encase the booklet in polythene is infuriating.

I was intrigued today to note that The Week – not junk mail but subscribed to – was in a bag that informed me that it was ‘Made from oxo degradable plastic. Having asked the font of all knowledge what this meant and received a reply indicating bafflement I took to the WWW while The Font joked ‘Let’s take stock shall we?’ I discovered that the product is truly biodegradable plastic. The only problem is that the crops needed to produce it for all our needs would disproportionately add to our emissions of greenhouse gases. Never the less I was delighted to discover that I could put the wrapping into the compost heap with no adverse effects to flora or fauna.

I turned out the bin but could find no other packaging using the same type of plastic; shame.

It will be interesting to see how much plastic we throw away in a week. It’s hard to give it up completely. Bread rolls, for instance: I try and make them but Mavis and Whizz both prefer shop bought burger buns and when did you last see those sold loose. I quite understand why; even the family baker wants to keep them fresh until the end of the day. Grapes are always sold in a little bag as are lettuce and, usually, celery. Then there’s the cat litter; I should be reluctant to do away with the litter tray liners but I can however now give up my plastic bin liners.

The biggest contributor is definitely the post. We do order quite a bit via the internet and every delivery must be packaged. Apart from the number of cardboard boxes we flatten there is also a good deal of expanded polystyrene and polythene. The question is, which should I choose, to go to the shops and use petrol or continue with the very convenient practise of internet shopping? As I write I know the answer. To use my own criteria to decide i.e. 1. support local businesses 2.avoid landfill, I must opt out of all junk mail and take to the road, in a very economical car!

As I have already reported I am keeping an hour by hour record of my activities so that I can try and give up some more unnecessary ones and replace them with fulfilling pastimes such as writing. Unfortunately the very act of writing seems to give rise to more tasks! hey ho.

Of course all this cooking will be adding to our “carbon footprint”. This set Whizz and I on one of those discussions that make me feel like a woolly minded Socialist when in fact I am a woolly minded capitalist. I think!

I am not really doing this Girth Mother stuff for Green reasons but I do think that Green issues are important and I am more than aware that I could do a lot more to reduce our “Carbon Footprint” but is there any point? After today’s debate with Whizz, I don’t think there is.

What I proposed was that the government forced us down a greener route by putting a cap on the CC of motor vehicles and setting a maximum speed limit of, say, 55 mph. Subsidising public transport and expanding the rail network back to the size it was in the 1950s. There should be incentives offered to companies to develop alternative, green fuel and by that I mean truly green and not using products that grow and create greenhouse gases of their own. We should also subsidise and positively drive a move to wind, wave and sun power to create energy. Ignore the NIMBYs, if the situation is as dire as we are led to believe then NIMBYs are unimportant. There should be extra tax on products that are inefficient, making, for example, more efficient white goods cheaper to buy than those that are less green.

We should also ban imports from countries that are developing into the fossil fuel guzzlers of the future such as China.

All the political parties should be in agreement so that this is not a political issue.

Television and newspapers should be used to “indoctrinate” us into the right frame of mind. We will scoff at designer labels and exported-then-imported scampi, our countryside will be covered in wind turbines and our sea views marred by huge buoys generating wave power.

If there is truly a danger that the end of our world is nigh then surely everyone will agree to this.

OK, so now we are all poorer, TV advertising is anathema, we all have few sets of clothing, hardly any electrical appliances and everything luxurious or more foreign than European is beyond our means; so what? Except…

As Whizz patiently pointed out, unless the rest of the world does the same thing then every mobile, educated, valuable person in Britain will move out.

But if we are truly in danger then why can’t the world agree?

“Well, “says Whizz, “China is a developing country, it thinks: Why shouldn’t we have a bite of the cherry? Why should it all stop, now that you in the West have had your fill and done all the damage? In Africa the leader of the poor country suffering horrible disease and lack of education and water has his mind on more immediate problems and the USA is worried about having caps on its output that are too stringent, allowing the poor little African country to catch it up. As if!”

“So,” I ask, “Are we doomed? What can be done to save the world?”

“I think we have to do something to control Financial institutions.” says Whizz “If there were a collapse of the big banks world wide then that would naturally slow the economies of all the big consuming countries.”

So rock on, Northern Rock. Let’s withdraw that tax-payers money and see what happens!