Reduce plastic waste :: PlasticLess.com

It doesn’t slice. It doesn’t dice. I use a knife for that. It crushes stuff and it will do so for the rest of my life without using one watt of electricity. Hey, I already wrote a post about my mortar and pestle. It still makes me happy.

Two other tools that I use to process food are my bare hands. I have recently been on a biscuit making jag and I used them for the whole process. I recently learned to fill a bowl with hot soapy water beforehand so I don’t get the taps all gunky.

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Wooden kitchen utensils beat plastic hands down in my opinion. For on thing, A wooden spoon doesn’t melt when you accidentally leave it in a hot pan. I remember the way the edge plastic spatulas used to deform over time. Wooden spatulas get dull, but I just sharpen them.

I think it is better to buy locally made items. Since the vast majority of my readers are American, I will suggest a site like Handcraftedwoodenspoons.com as a ‘local’ source. Keeping an eye out while you’re in local kitchens and asking questions might lead you to something more local. If you can find them, items made from wood derived from agriculture endeavors like Apple or Olive are great. If you buy inexpensive wooden items that come with no explanation of their species or origin, you might be buying something that was harvested unsustainably. We have several spatulas and spoons made of olive wood. I thought it was a kind of homey thing to buy, but when I Googled ‘olive wood spoon’ I found out that fancy chef suppliers carry them. We paid 1/15 what they are charging. I once bought a wooden spoon at a government funded pioneer village kind of place in the middle of nowhere in Canada.

Most of the mass produced utensils are made of beechwood. I assume that this is because its physical properties make it suitable for mechanized production. It could also have something to do with the fact that it grows in China.

I think disposable wooden utensils are almost as bad as plastic. Disposable wooden chopsticks are a problem in China and elsewhere.

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Photo Credit: idiolector

The BIC® lighter was an ever present item throughout my childhood. I had one parent that was a smoker up until recently. These lighters should be the poster children for disposability. One source threw out the number 1.5 billion per year.

I have four separate uses for matches or lighters in my present home. I need them to light the cooker (that’s what gas ranges are called over here). I occasionally need them to light candles. I sometimes need them to light the water heater (it has a built in static ignition, but it is unreliable). The ignition for the space heater is unreliable and very loud, so I often use a match for that as well.

My bias against plastic led me to make a quick choice in favor of matches. The shop next door sometimes runs out of matches and he generally points out that he has disposable lighters. I say thanks but no thanks and head off to the next closest store.

My recent informal surveys of beach trash reminded me of the issue of disposable lighters. When I started looking for source material on the topic I found that environmentalists say that cardboard matches are a better choice than wooden ones. I have mostly been using wooden matches.

I save a few used matchsticks and I can reuse them once or twice when there is a lit burner on the stove.

It just dawned on me today that there is an even better choice for lighting the stove. I am thinking about getting a torch striker. The gas stove doesn’t need to be lit with a flame. A spark will do just fine.

Update: I asked for opinions on Twitter and I got back some responses suggesting metal refillable lighters as a green option. This seems to make sense. The fuel typically comes in metal containers. I am not sure how much packaging is involved in the flints and the wicks that need to be replaces periodically.

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Bottled water is a defining aspect of the era in which we live. Comedians make jokes about the absurdities of paying an inflated price for water…

I guess it’s true that one of the reasons North Americans buy bottled water is simply that it is marketed to them. I jokingly marketed a line of t-shirts and buttons promoting the candidacy of Dick Cheney for President last year and actually sold a few items.

But marketing alone doesn’t explain the phenomenon of bottled water. I think that insecurity also has a lot to do with its popularity. In the United States, the government is looking out for you regardless of whether you get your water from a bottle or the tap. What is really interesting about this is that the standards and the oversight are completely different. The EPA is responsible for the safety of your municipal tap water and the FDA is responsible for what you get in a bottle. I am too lazy to do the research to see which agency is more reviled by conspiracy theorists, but regardless, the most basic fact is that Americans enjoy access to clean drinking water with very few exceptions.

I have lived in Canada for most of my life. Water is one of the resources that Canada is renowned for but most of us still remember one terrible incident of municipal water contamination. What happened in Walkerton, Ontario in 2000 shook the confidence of the entire nation. I suspect that bottled water sales increased a lot as a result. I continued to drink tap water after the Walkerton incident.

When we moved to Malta we drank bottled water. The municipal tap water was desalinated seawater and the sodium content was pretty high. It tasted awful. I didn’t like buying liter after liter of water in disposable bottles and we switched to a service with returnable 20 liter bottles as soon as we got settled in.

Our move to Tunisia has presented many challenges. Finding a safe and PlasticLess drinking water source had to take a backseat to many of these challenges. I felt like a hypocrite drinking water out of 1.5 liter plastic water bottles while writing a blog about reducing plastic consumption. I couldn’t find a water delivery service. I couldn’t find a Brita pitcher. I couldn’t get any assurances that the tap water was safe for me and my family to drink. We all had a bout or two of GI upset during our first month here. I gave up actively looking for an alternative to bottled water and simply hoped that one would present itself.

Last week I took the family on a trip to Florence, Italy. I was very pleased to find that our favorite hostel provides its guests with cold drinking water from a filtering dispenser. We refilled the water bottles that we brought from Africa about a dozen times. This great alternative to bottled water reminded me of our predicament at home. I was able to buy a Brita pitcher at a pharmacy in Florence.

We are still a bit worried about micro flora in our tap water. We did a taste test of boiled, cooled and filtered water. It kinda sucked. We are now executing plan B. Catherine and I are drinking water poured into the Brita straight from the tap. The kids are being supplied with bottled water while we wait to see if our guts are sufficiently acclimatized to the local bacteria.

As far a plastic consumption goes, the plastic pitcher and it’s recyclable filters will reduce ours by about a dozen bottles per week depending on the weather.

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The elimination of trays at a number of university cafeterias was a green initiative, but it wasn’t about plastic. It was a simple idea that has been reducing food waste in several schools in recent months.

Some diners are upset, but most institutions are happy with the result. Students who are on full board at a university tend to experience weight gain. It will be interesting to see if taking the trays away puts a dent in that statistic.

Food waste is a huge environmental and social issue in the USA and elsewhere. There are some great blogs out there that are devoted to this topic.

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Eating locally has become a very popular goal for people who are striving to reduce their carbon footprint. Eating local also provides a lot of opportunity to reduce plastic consumption. When we were living in Canada, we were members of a CSA. This involved paying a flat fee to the organic farmer that was operating the guild. Members were given a wooden bushel basket to take back and forth to the farm gate each week. The weekly harvest was on display in the cold room with explicit written instructions on how much of each vegetable to take.

Meat eaters can also reduce plastic packaging when they eat local, I think. Butchers paper is still widely used for a variety of purposes, but I am not sure if it is still used by your local butcher. Some delis use something that looks like it’s just paper, but is actually a combination of paper and plastic.

If you want to try some alternative form of meat storage, I’m sure there are farmers who would provide you with the raw material in a cardboard box. I grew up on a beef farm and that is how our meat came back from the butcher. My parents placed it all into plastic freezer bags. Actually, I remember being given that job in my later childhood, including the job of sucking the excess air out of the bags with a straw before closing them with twist-ties. Now that I am not living on a farm, I just buy fresh meat on an as needed basis. If you want to try wrapping meat for the freezer using paper, here is a How To Page.

My recent move to Africa has required quite a change in diet in order to eat local food. Forgoing unpasteurized milk as a precaution was a bummer. Eating lots of couscous has been great. The only hiccup was finding out that we didn’t actually know how to make it correctly.

One day, the kids came home from school with some couscous that their teacher had prepared. It was vastly superior to what we had been making over the previous month or two. Catherine spent the evening reading about the tradition process and eventually gave it a try. The result was met with much approval. Eating a healthy local diet has been very easy for us so far. Our pots and pans are even made locally.

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Go and have a look in your fridge. Seriously, go and do it, I’ll wait right here…

So, are there any items in your fridge that you have been saving since back before Americans elected their first black president? Are there any items that you could not identify?

It makes you kinda wonder why you bother using those magical storage containers that keep your food fresh long enough to forget about it.

Making a conscious decision to avoid plastic has changed the way I think about leftovers. They go in a metal salad bowl with a glass plate on top. I will need that bowl within a day or two. I buy produce by weight and if anything goes to waste I always make a point of buying less the next time.

Soupmaking is a special kind of magic that I myself don’t practice, but I am an apprentice to a master who (almost) always remembers to look carefully around inside the fridge for those extra items that work as toss ins.

I have come to the conclusion that plastic containers and plastic wrap don’t end up ’saving’ that much food in many households. Careful management will save a lot more.

NOTE: That’s not my fridge, it’s from Wikipedia.

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I’m not a big fan of modern food processors. That might stem from the fact that I have usually been in charge of cleaning the things after someone with actual culinary skills and/or ambitions had the pleasure of using the ‘time-saving’ appliances.

This mortar and pestle is not an all purpose machine, but I love the name of its only purpose… PULVERIZE

If you decide that you need one, look for unfinished wood. Wood from old grapevines is sometimes used to make small sets for handling salt and pepper at the table. Since wood is highly absorbent, you should limit the use of a mortar and pestle to a range of spices and foods that will not cross contaminate each other in an unpleasant or unhealthy way. We use ours for cloves, pepper and other strong warm spices.

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I was reluctant to say that wooden cutting boards are safer than plastic. Luckily, somebody else did a great job of assembling the conflicting research and concluding that it is inconclusive.

The bottom line is that careful food safety is vitally important regardless of your choice of materials. Wood is a better choice for the environment. My choice is this great board made from olive wood. I am lucky to be living in an area where olives are grown commercially and the wood is a byproduct of sustainable agriculture.

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I have been having a hard time avoiding plastic since I have moved. Most of the shopkeepers and street vendors are very eager to provide me with plastic bags. I am not a fluent speaker of either local language. Telling them that I just want them to put my stuff in the fabric bag that I brought with me in what must be very bad French/Charades isn’t working very well.

That is why getting a 1/2 pound of butter wrapped in a plain piece of paper felt like a victory.

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