A near-zero waste lifestyle

Some weeks ago there was a report of a Dunedin woman who claimed to produce just a half a chip packet of household waste a month.  I find this hard to believe, unless she's keeping stuff that we would regard as waste (and if so, what's she doing with it?) or else she just doesn't buy anything that comes in a packet. 

I was thinking about this again today, and decided to make a list of the things that I couldn't recycle, or re-use (and believe me, we're pretty good at both recycling and re-using around here...and hoarding).  Here's today's list, which I don't think is necessarily indicative of what we throw out some days. 

Sheet of baking paper used for cooking scones
Milk bottle lids
butter wrapper
part envelope with cellophane in it x 2
cellophane around The Warehouse advertising
foil package for soup
package of food flavouring
empty frozen pea package.

Okay, perhaps that's not a huge quantity of waste, but if I had a similar quantity each day I'd be hard pressed to get it all in a half a chip packet at the end of the month. 

Ann Dennison, who's become the 'Dunedin City Council's poster girl for waste minimisation,' doesn't buy bread in bags (we re-use ours to pick up our dog's poo when we're out walking). She is 'a semi-vegetarian, [and] takes a jar with her when she gets fish from the supermarket and buys only tin or glass containers.' Okay, that's fair enough. So obviously she doesn't buy frozen vegetables (we usually keep some on hand for those days when we want a change from fresh ones); she doesn't drink soup from packets, or use flavouring that comes in packets. What does she do with the cellophane from window envelopes? What happens to the paper that goes round the butter? It's hardly in a state to be recycled.  

I'd be interested to know more, but the article is very short on details. There's a good deal about the philosophy behind her approach to waste, but not much about how she does it.

I think the hardest stuff to deal with is the packaging that comes round items like batteries, or electrical goods, or tools, or household appliances.  All of these are well and truly overpackaged, and very annoying to open, as well.  But none of these get a mention in the article. 

Photo courtesy of Phillip Jenkins

What I was doing in Christchurch

I've been in Christchurch for the last five or six days (arrived there last Tuesday, around tea-time, and left Sunday lunchtime).  Christchurch, site of New Zealand's most famous earthquakes, considerably outranking the huge ones that flattened the smaller city of Napier back in the thirties.

I didn't go into central Christchurch, an area I previously knew better than anywhere else in the city, because I couldn't bear to see live what I'd already seen on television: the devastation of fine heritage buildings would have been more than I wanted to handle, I think.  Apart from that, I didn't have any real time to go exploring, or sightseeing.  The area I was working in had enough of its own visual demonstration of the effects of the earthquake: a suburban area on the East side of the city where much of the worst damage happened.  Houses here have been demolished completely, are due to be demolished, are boarded up, have boards up to protect them until they're repaired, have wonky paths and driveways, and are situated on streets where your car's suspension is likely to get a hammering.  In fact, the roads are one of the most obvious factors in terms of gauging the city's overall damage: everywhere you go there are roadworks, and changes being made to the layout of roads, and this constant feeling that you're going over a lot more bumps than you're used to.

When you go inside the houses, even the ones that look okay, you see the cracks in the plaster, the corners where wallpaper and plaster has pulled away, the gaps between ceilings and walls, the floors that aren't quite flat.  We were in St Ambrose's Anglican Church yesterday for a service: the building itself doesn't seem too bad - at least not to look at - but the floor is all over the place.  Our base during the week was Parklands Baptist Church, and again, while the building seems pretty much okay, there's a  fair amount of taping up of large cracks in the flooring.

To my great relief, we didn't have any tremors while we were there.   People are still on edge, however; they've more than once got to the point where they've thought quakes and tremors had come to a standstill, only to have another large quake, the sort that's big enough to upset you all over again, bring back all the tensions and fears.

I went up to ChCh with a team of 12 other people from our church, Dunedin City Baptist.  The church has done these local mission trips before in a variety of places, including our home town, and while the leader has remained the same for all of them (they happen once or twice a year), the remainder of the team varies considerably from trip to trip.  They almost always stay in a hall connected to the local church they're working with, and they cook meals together and have prayer times together and 'debriefings.'  They go out in pairs, usually, knocking on doors and asking if the people would be willing to answer a few questions on a survey.  Being a Christian group, the survey naturally leads onto discussing what people feel about church, and about Jesus.  But that's only part of it: they're also looking out for people in need within the area, and once these needs are identified, the local church follows up and does their best to alleviate the situation.  In the process, of course, it makes contact with the people and hopefully they feel comfortable enough with these church people to want to get to know them better.

Of course it has an evangelistic bent; there are enough plain social workers out there without us primarily doing social work as well (although it was the church that began 'social work' to a great extent, two millennia ago.

This trip, however, had a number of differences: firstly we were going to a church that had already done a great deal of door-knocking.  Secondly the door-knocking in question was primarily to find out how people were doing as a result of the ongoing earthquakes, and to put them in touch with people and organisations who could assist them further.  The group overseeing our visit, CCR (Christchurch Community Response) has been up and running for some time, and has a good relationship with groups like the Red Cross.  It has a number of volunteers who are able to assist more quickly than some of the bigger, more official organisations, as well.

Thirdly we were there to help out CCR (it doesn't stand for Creedence Clearwater Revival, or Revisited, by the way) in any way we could.  So, on and off for two days we did door-knocking, and completed some of the streets that CCR wanted covered.  We also assisted at St Ambrose's in such tasks as dropping off free firewood, or taking round care packs and such.  On top of this two of our team got themselves into Bake-a-thon mode, and not only gave away a good deal of the baking we'd brought up from Dunedin, baking that was intended to be part of our in-house food, they made a great deal more and gave that away too.

In fact giving things away was a delight: the leader and I, on Friday morning, went round one long street giving away some sixty fleecy blankets, the sort that you wrap around yourself if you're watching TV, or reading a book in your chair.  The Warehouse used to sell them a great deal, and may still do so.  The sixty blankets we gave away had been donated to the CCR people, but no one had had time to dispose of them.  So we walked from house to the next, and wherever people were home, gave the blankets a new home.  There's nothing quite like someone knocking at your door and asking if you want something free, something which is obviously of use to you.  It's warmed up in ChCh, but it's still not the hottest, so I suspect those blankets will already be coming in handy.   To be continued....

Desperate Retail

Desperation seems to be the order of the day in retail, which makes me yet again glad I'm no longer in it. A bit of Trade Me selling is enough for me, especially now that you can keep on rolling over the same 50 titles without any great effort (or additional cost) until they sell. At present I'm not selling much on Trade Me because I haven't been putting any real time into it (even on Trade Me, surprisingly enough, you have to turn the stock over and provide some new titles) but this morning, having had a bit of time, I've done some shuffling around, put about ten new books on (when I say 'new' I mean new to my part of Trade Me) and shifted some of the 'older' stock over to sella.co.nz. They don't sell much on sella, which bought out zillion.co.nz, where they didn't often sell either. These small scale websites have a huge job to compete with Trade Me, and the main reason I use them is to 'store' stuff until I copy and past it back onto Trade Me again. It saves me having to start from scratch each time.

Books aren't one of the top sellers on any of these auction sites - but they do sell. Which brings me back to retail in general. Nowadays around Christmas we have the pre-Christmas sales, which start about November, then the December sales, and then the just-before-Christmas sales, which smacks of desperation. And if that wasn't enough we have the Boxing Day sales starting the day after Christmas - and reducing the Christmas sales still further.

When these Boxing Day sales first began, they were a way for the retailers to get rid of some of that unsold Christmas stuff. Now they're just part of the whole ridiculous sales-surrounding-Christmas period, which goes on for virtually a couple of months. There are so many sales that no one's buying anything at full price. In spite of the accountant at work who says that the retailers will have bought stuff at really low prices, and can afford to sell them off, I suspect that this isn't entirely the case. There may be big retailers, like Farmers, or the Warehouse or Briscoes, with their endless special weekend sales, that can do this - it's part of their ongoing modus operandi. But the small retailers, who don't have the benefit of mass buying, just have to discount their goods and cut their losses, and from my experience, the more you discount the more you have to sell - and sell fast, in order to keep ahead of the cash flow difficulties that then arise.

I don't think this whole business of sales all round Christmas are helping retail in the slightest. All they're doing, for the most part, is helping retailers cover their costs. It's likely they're not even covering their costs any more. They can't be making any real profits. Discounts, when they aren't your normal way of selling are just a killer. You can't keep giving away your stock. The more you encourage people to look for sales and bargains, the more money you are going to lose. It's a fact of life. I've been there.

I'm happy to stick to Trade Me, selling books that I bought at nonsense low prices in the first place, or which have been donated, or which I no longer need on my own shelves. These don't cost me anything, effectively, so any profit I get is a gain. And I don't have overheads...

A genius at your own level

The other day, Seth Godin wrote: If you're waiting for a boss or an editor or a college to tell you that you do good work, you're handing over too much power to someone who doesn't care nearly as much as you do.

We spend a lot of time organizing and then waiting for the system to pick us, approve of us and give us permission to do our work.

This somewhat ties in with something I've struggled with a good deal over the years: a kind of self-criticism that says what I do isn't good enough - because so and so does it so much better. The fact that so and so is some kind of genius has never impressed the self-critic in me. Because so and so is great/good/capable, I must therefore always be on a lower step on the rung.

It's nonsense of course, and what's worse it makes me criticise others, both those who really are better than me, and those who plainly aren't (though of course the critic doesn't let me say that without feeling guilty).

I realised the other day, after having discussed this at length with my supervisor on several occasions, that there really isn't some kind of magical 'bar' just out of reach that I'm always striving for....one that someone else has placed there. The only bar I need to worry about (if worry is the right word) is the bar I'm prepared to climb up to. If what I'm doing isn't good enough the bar is the one I set in place myself to make sure that what I do is good enough.

I need a bar, a kind of level to strive for. Otherwise, 'okay' is good enough - and of course it isn't; it's usually second-rate. But the other side of this is that when I do do well, or write something that's good, then that sets the standard for future work, and also satisfies the inner critic.

Furthermore, as Godin says, I don't need 'permission' from someone else, approval that says what I've done is good. Of course we all like to hear that other people appreciate what we create - equally we don't like to hear other people saying they don't like what we've done. However, reliance on that approval (or disapproval) is, in the end, counterproductive. It tells us nothing except that someone liked or disliked something.

The person who needs to like or dislike it is the creator of it. Ultimately I'm the judge of the work. If I think I've done my utmost with it, then that's the place to sit and be satisfied. If I realise that I can improve it (see the previous post) then I need to knuckle down and improve it. Until it's at that 'level,' that 'bar' I was talking about, it will make me feel dissatisfied.

But at least that dissatisfaction is within my own sphere, not 'created' by some false sense that someone else would/could do better, and that I'm a fraud to pretend I can do as well.

On an entirely different note, because different notes give variety, and monotonal music/writing is a bore, I have just discovered what pop displays are. I thought they must be something to do with pop-outs. Nope. The 'pop' stands for 'point of purchase' - that's not what we call them here in NZ where the term is more often 'point of sale display' - and it means all those little things you (or worse, your kids) can pick up at the last minute and throw into the bunch of stuff you've just spent an hour buying around the supermarket, or Bunnings, or The Warehouse, or wherever.

Bunnings opened its new store in Dunedin a few days ago - tonight they had about five minutes of full-scale fireworks blazing throughout the night sky, the second such display in a few weeks - the last was for the last match at Carisbrook, the famed sports ground that has been dumped in favour of the new Stadium Dunedin is building at enormous cost to the ratepayers - even though initially we were told it wouldn't cost us a thing! That ridiculously long sentence, with its muddled syntax and cluttered phrases is a prime example of something that should be fixed up (my inner critic is doing a poor imitation of weeping), but since the bar for this paragraph is just where I'm sitting already, I'm not going to do anything more about it!

[Picture of Mozart - a genius - for those who didn't recognise him.]

Second Chorus

I have no idea why this 1940 movie is called Second Chorus, since no second chorus is mentioned that I noticed, and, if it has some other meaning, I've missed it.

I found the movie amongst the bargain DVDs in The Warehouse (which is rapidly becoming my chief source for lots of old movies on DVD) and thought, because it had Fred Astaire in it, there would be some dancing. Well, yes, there is, but it's slotted in a couple of rather odd spots in the movie and that's it. The film also stars Paulette Goddard and Burgess Meredith (who became Goddard's third husband - the marriage lasted only six years) neither of whom were ever known as hoofers, although Goddard does pretty well as a substitute for Ginger Rogers in a brief dance near the beginning of the movie.
And it has Artie Shaw, who was probably a lot more pleasant than he appears in the movie, where his looks make him seem as though he's perpetually rather fed up with things. Shaw's band plays a few times, and Astaire and Meredith both pretend to be trumpet players on a few occasions - quite well, in fact - but the thing is a hodgepodge story-wise, and it's only the energy of the actors that holds it together.
When Astaire dances the thing has all that life he brought to any dance he ever performed; otherwise it's seldom funny or anything, really.
Charles Butterworth, who performed in endless movies, usually as someone rather pompous, has an awful part in the movie as a rather dull man with plenty of money, a man who plays the mandolin badly and is led around by the nose by Astaire and Burgess.
Someone on IMDB has written a mini-bio of him: Popular supporting actor in 1930's Hollywood, often portraying effete, waffling types, even though he was not a professional politician in real life. Very neat.
There are two interesting things about this movie: it has a very long outside tracking shot of Astaire and Meredith talking, and walking towards the camera at all times. Yet there's not a sign of any tracks that the camera might be riding on. And Astaire, who was 41 at the time the movie was made, and Meredith, who was 33, are supposed to be college students. Admittedly they've purposely flunked their courses several times, but even so, you have to wonder at the casting.

Bargain Bin at The Warehouse

The Warehouse has a marvellously eclectic range of DVDs for sale. Most of them, as you’d expect, are the top-runners in the scene, and go at the top price. But alongside these they sell, particularly in their bargain bins, dozens of DVDs that you’d never find in a hundred years anywhere else. (Well, I expect you wouldn’t have found them over the last hundred years, anyway, given the age of the DVD as a piece of technology.)
When I get a half hour to spare, I like to fish amongst the randomly-binned DVDs to see if I can turn anything interesting up. The other day I came across the following:
The Lady Vanishes, one of Hitchcock’s most delightful suspense pieces, with a marvellous cast, and Hitchcock’s black humour that predates the classic Cary Grant/Hitchcock combinations. I've seen this at least three times previously, so haven't watched this particular copy yet; just added it to my growing Hitchcock on DVD collection.
The Dresser, with Tom Courtenay and Albert Finney – I’m yet to watch this, but I suspect that the performances will be top-notch.
The Vicious Circle (also known as The Circle) with John Mills. This is a murder mystery/suspense thriller piece, written by Francis Durbridge, who relies on adding something out of left field in almost every scene in order to keep the thing humming along. It’s absurd, but fairly watchable, though John Mills never quite looks at home as a Harley St specialist. Wilfred Hyde White, as always, plays Wilfred Hyde White.
And lastly, Timelock (also known as Time Lock), which was made in 1957. The packaging for this is a bit of a failure under the Fair Trades Act: it lists Sean Connery in large letters, as though he was the star. In fact, he has something like three or four lines somewhere in the middle of the piece, is a relatively unimportant character, and makes little real impression. That’s no mean feat, given the nature of this movie. It’s directed by Gerald Thomas, who went on to direct some thirty or more Carry On movies. His direction is bland in the extreme, and in a piece where tension is required, he manages to elicit almost none. His cast, taking their cue from the director, play the whole thing in such an off-hand way that you have to wonder whether they’d all decided the thing wasn’t worth the candle, and they’d get it over and done with as quickly as possible. As an amateur reviewer on IMDB says, even the child who gets stuck in a time vault at the bank and is the cause of all the fuss is awful: he has no acting ability whatsoever. Fortunately he has very little to do, and he does most of it early in the piece, and is then seen no more until the end, when he has to play virtually dead.

The piece is set in Canada, by the way. The only shot in the movie that actually shows Canada is the opening one; the remainder was shot in England, with some US actors involved.