On Waste (part 3) If there’s one positive to 2020 and this year that keeps trickling past, Earth Overshoot Day has shuffled back by a month (for a quick overview, have a squizz here, but the basic gist is every year humanity uses up all the stuff we can reasonably sustain for the year, and pretty much every year its getting earlier and earlier). This year was August 22, last year was July 29. This is good. It’s a positive trend. But the fact that it took a global pandemic and the complete shutdown of most of the world’s economy for a brief period of time to accomplish it is pretty worrying. There’s a set of absurdities that co-exist around this space. Amidst the ongoing famine that keeps occurring and reoccurring in various parts of the world there is a constant flow of excess food into landfill in others. Obviously the solution isn’t as simple as just shipping excess potatoes from the US to Sub-Saharan Africa, and there are many more brilliant minds on the case than mine but I thought it would be interesting to examine the issues from a folk singer’s point of view. Continue reading “On Waste (part 3)”
On Waste (part 2) *Quick note: the pic above is from Glasgow, circa September 2014. How time flies! This was just after I’d bought that hat. I’ve worn that hat most days since. Great investment. OK, on with the show… … A kid at school questions why I’m constantly bringing half a banana in as my snack. I tell him this story: Imagine you had a beautiful chocolate cake. You spent ages mixing it, filling it with chocolate chips, baking it and it looks absolutely incredible. Well in the process of moving it from the oven to the bench you drop it, and it lands neatly on its side on the floor. What do you do? Do you throw the whole thing in the bin? Or do you cut it in half and discard the floor side, keeping the delicious non-floor side for your tummy? How close to the floor-side do you cut it? Are you happy to have a 95% non-floor cake? I think we can all agree that taking a kitchen sponge to the floor side of your cake to scrub off the little bits of ick is a step too far (or is it…?) So most people would happily eat most of the cake, as long as it hasn’t been in direct contact with the floor. Well at home I have a big bunch of bananas. The only problem is one end of each banana has started molding, just ever so slightly. Resourceful me cuts all the bananas in half, throws the moldy bits into the compost and brings the other halves to school for my lunch. Delicious. A seven year old’s perspective… that makes sense. Continue reading “On Waste (part 2)”
On Waste I’ve been dwelling on waste since around the time I was born. Not in an academic way, merely as a reflection on the steps my parents took to minimize our impact on the earth. There were many things we did when I was kid that I took as commonplace, that now resurface as perhaps being a little odd, but the acorn seldom falls far from the tree. In my ongoing desire to understand who I am, I start to note the things I do that others could possibly point to as eccentricities. My foibles becomes follies, exaggerating as I age. There were the ‘standard things’, character traits that probably point to Dad’s working-class upbringing: keeping a toothpaste tube far beyond the point where you could squeeze any toothpaste from it, then chopping the end off with a pair of scissors to gouge at the creamy inside. Tie this in to the two or three jars of Vegemite left in the cupboard, each with the tiniest scraping of Vegemite down the sides. The rest of the family would feast on the shiny new jar of Vegemite while Dad would keep eking out meal after meal from the previous jar. Continue reading “On Waste”