Grow Your Own Magazine

"will the driver just tip everything loose onto the lawn?"

Our driver piles all the trays up on his sack-barrow and wheels it straight through the house into the kitchen and then helps us unload.

But I suppose he'd tip it all onto the lawn if I asked him nicely

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K's Garden blog last update 3rd August 2008

What makes me really mad is individually shrink wrapped veg - like swede, for goodness sake they're dug out of the earth and dragged around in a trailer and then someone thinks it's a good idea to wrap them up! And just recently I've seen supermarket peppers individually wrapped - grrrr

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I am Nobody
Nobody's perfect
Therefore, I must be perfect

I actually had my recycling box stolen last Friday, i put it out for the binmen, and somebody stole it away after they had emptied it.

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I wish i could make a yo-yo work.
http://www.guerrillagardening.org/

I'm expecting a Tesco Delivery next Monday Evening.
But it is 2 case's of wine. The wine is in Glass bottles in cardboard boxes, both recyclable.....You see clever thinking.

Live off wine...save the Planet.

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I wish i could make a yo-yo work.
http://www.guerrillagardening.org/

I normally save up my plastic that I have been handed without asking for or because I haven't enough space left on the buggy and so have to ask for a bag somewhere, and then give it all the tesco delivery chap / chapess when tthey come. They take any bags you give them

janeyo

We take our own bags to the supermarket when we go & refuse the placcy ones, but have found we have now have to buy bin bags, which I never did before ...obviously I started off buying the biodegradable ones - which ALWAYS split on the way to the big bin...but have switched to the nasty non-bio ones...

Does anyone have an alternative solution? (Other than bringing the wheelie-bin into the kitchen?!)

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How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being.”

We have the bags for life and reuse them when we go to the supermarket.
When I worked on the home delivery dept as a picker we had to keep things seperate so smelly stuff in a bag, fruit and veg in a bag, tins in a bag etc you get the picture, but some of the younger ones took this to mean one item one bag lots of complaints, now as some of you have said you can tick the no bag box. If they leave you with any bags keep them till next time and give them back or complain to the store.

I couldn't understand how anyone could refuse to re-cycle - and still can't, I'm the eco-fascist after all - but on Saturday I did suffer extreme frustration at our local dump-it site. They re-cycle everything possible, which is great, but we had agreed to take a car full of stuff there from my mum's church. Basically the church has regular fund raising events and Saturday was the annual 'Cream Tea'. Anyway many people seem to think that any church event equals jumble-sale and use it as an opportunity to dump their rubbish in the porch. So, with boxes full of grubby lamp-shades, chipped china and even a plastic microwave egg-poacher that hadn't been washed since last used, we headed off for the dump. - how people expect the church to sell this stuff is beyond me, but that's another rant - Once there we were forced to sort it all into various re-cycling skips. It took us well over an hour and a half. Had we been someone pushed for time, or the sort of people with less commitment to environmental issues, we may well have been tempted to drive away and fly-tip the lot. Sometimes the very people trying to do something positive are the ones who cause resentment and may force a backlash. After all, doing someone a favour cost us a precious Saturday afternoon.

Hi Sunbeam,

We too use our own bags for shopping and at first we struggled with the whole bin liner thing but the combination of a change in our habits and facilities offered by our local council has meant that we have the opportunity of disposing of just about everything without bin liners. I hope this helps.

Veg waste goes to chooks or composter. We have a composting caddy in the kitchen and a bucket for chook food in the garage. Neither of them have liners but are rinsed out when emptied at least once a day. We try to use the water from the butts where possible. There's certainly no shortage of rainwater at the moment!

Meat waste including bones and sensitive documents (receipts, statements, etc.) goes in woodburner. This goes straight in from plates or whatever as necessary.

Plastic, glass, tins, foil, cardboard and other paper is collected fortnightly by council. Again we have an old swing top bin in the garage for everything but the paper and cardboard which go into bags supplied by the council which are emptied and returned after they collect. Because everything has to be rinsed and clean before it is thrown, there is no need for a liner in the bin. It just gets rinsed out if necessary.

Anything else is given away, sold, taken to local recycling facility or as a last resort, goes into an old builders bucket in the garage and then out to the general waste bin, again collected fortnightly (we actually have a weekly collection but one week it's general waste and the next week it's recycling and garden waste). We generate at most a bucket of general waste per week and again, it is rinsed out if necessary.

None of the separating "bins" are too heavy or large to be a problem carrying outside to bin or wherever and it's something we do at our convenience. If the kids want to score brownie points with us, they offer to do it! Except for the composter, they really don't like that.

It's easy when your local council provide you with a service such as ours, our garage is accessed from a door in the kitchen and you can burn or compost. I realise that our routine is possible because of this. It came home to me when we were on holiday last summer on a campsite without recycling facilities. It seemed so weird to just put everything in a bin liner after a year of separating our waste and it made us realise how much our habits had changed in a short time.

Good luck!

TGR

I never thought about a bucket - DOH ! we also have chooks who get all the goodies leftover from the table -and I recycle as much as poss (cambs has finally got off their butts and are collecting plastics from October - we take a car load down to the recycling point every two months or so) - our black wheelie goes out 1/4 full...(because we recycle - not because the bag's split and I've left it all on the kitchen floor!!

Will hunt out a suitable bucket asap!

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How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being.”

I have a green caddy supplied by the council for food waste but I only use this for cooked food everything else goes in a large square tub with a snap on lid and a handle cost me a couple of pound or less.

We have been buying black sacks for the kitchen bin for a long time, as we have a large kitchen bin (but really, we could do with a smaller one at this stage). And long before the bag tax came in.

We were also using the reusable bags long before the tax came in - unfortunately, some shops then changed their policy (I think they had no real way to avoid it) from a once off payment and replacing the bag if ever necessary for free, to payment for each bag whenever it was needed.

Our favourite supermarket also has paper bags for tomatoes and mushrooms, and a larger one for spuds. So we use those, and tend to not use bags for other fruit/veg unless really necessary (we can weigh ourselves still in this one, and we also do the self scan thingy so pack the fruit/veg straight into our reusable bags, so no rolling around for cashier). If I am in my other almost favourite supermarket, I tend to bag a little more (the cashier has to weigh everything), but I still often leave most non-messy things loose, and they only have placcy bags for everything.

But there are lots of folks around who look at you strangely for doing things in a non-comformative manner. I think I am acknowledged as the green nut in our office, but being mainly civil servants of an older vintage (I am the baby of the group), they are more tolerant as most of them remember growing their own at home during the 80's, and have parents etc who grew lots around the wartime and "emergency" afterwards.

I can believe the green backlash at the market eventhough its crazy, I get very funny looks when I'm forced to go to the supermarket, I leave all unessasary packaging at the till, it takes forever and really pisses the cashiers off but who cares.

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Yo an' Bob
Walk lightly on the earth
take only what you need
give all you can
and your produce will be bountifull