Recycling and My Sandwiches

Recycling is one of those things that, in my experience anyway has been drilled into me from a young age. It is something that as I grew older I became complacent with. I went to a primary school which had a green flag and a secondary school which had a strong recycling policy. I won’t sound very academic when I say this but I never really questioned any of it I just recycled because I was told to and admittedly was a bit scared of the consequences if I didn’t. Putting your yoghurt pot in recycling the bin seemed like an easy alternative to a detention.

Now that I am in college and have left all the fear behind I have continued to recycle out of habit but it was only really when I started the living sustainably course that I began to assess what  impact  recycling  can have.  Just looking around college, we as students are producing a lot of waste. I know for me any way I would throw my drinks bottle and paper wrapper from my roll straight into the nearest bin, whether it be recycling or not. Generally speaking it is not!

One of the tasks on this course was to examine the contents of a refuse sack at home.  I live in my family home so as a whole we would produce more waste than the average group of students living in rented accommodation.  This was a seemingly basic task, I remember doing the same in primary school and proceeding to harp on at my mum for her lack of awareness about all things green.  This time I was approaching it in a new light with the understanding that we as a community of inhabitants of the earth really do not look after what we’ve got.

On examining the bin I found a number of things and I have mentioned this in my assessment. Firstly, the general waste bin I found cling film and then aluminum foil. These are both very commonly used household products. Even for those who but lunch when they are in college many sandwiches are wrapped in such packaging.

This may sound silly but I wasn’t sure whether or not these could be recycled. I took it upon myself to check. (This course really has made me interested in the world around me!). It transpires that cling film cannot be recycled everywhere and neither can aluminium foil.  I was shocked at this! Cling film is something that I would have always choses over aluminum foil simply because I believed it would be recyclable and more ecofriendly than aluminium. I’ll admit, this seems like a very small and insignificant discovery but if it were not for this module I wouldn’t have checked.  So my answer is to get a lunch box.

Although a tiny thing I am now more aware of the small changes I can do to avoid contributing to landfill. Something as small as what I chose to wrap my sandwiches in everyday.

I realize I have picked up on a very small issue however out of the whole module I feel it is one thing in particular that felt very relevant to my life and I felt it was something I could deal with straight away.

Naomi Gibson

Plastic makes the world go round...But can we do without it, when we are buying food?

 Once, I was at the airport at a time too early to be mentioned here. So, there was plenty of time to pass before the buses ran again. I decided to sit down at one of those airport restaurants, which already served breakfast, and I bought an on-site prepared smoothie, which was filled into a tiny, resealable plastic bottle. Of course, an unnecessary wrapping for me, because I finished the smoothie there, and a drinking glass would have done an even better job. Then I thought of how much unnecessary plastic wrapping there is, and how many things I just buy to throw them away again.

Back home, what I did next was to check my fridge for the last grocery purchase, which turned out to contain more plastic than I would have dreamt of, and more than was required. A sinister amount of plastic gathered in my fridge, and suddenly it struck me, why our recycling boxes are always full: not because we are so good at recycling, but because we buy so much waste, because we think that it is convenient to get six plums nicely wrapped up in a plastic basket.

But plastic is more difficult to recycle due to impurity and the mixture of different types of plastic. Therefore it is more likely to be burnt in order to generate energy than it is used to create things. Even worse, it is scarcely reused.  Paper and glass seem to be better wrapping alternatives, because paper is easier and more often recycled than plastic and glass does not lose quality, no matter how often it is recycled.

 That’s why I went down the road to the store and tried to get food without wrapping, or at least with less wrapping which would be easily recyclable. And, oh yes, I was quite successful.

As pictures paint a thousand words, just have a look for yourself.

The difference is striking: The food with less wrapping looks much nicer, and is more appealing to my appetite

There is less unnecessary waste, which does not leave me with a “Big Mac feeling“ of having eaten bad food and having created a lot of waste. Instead, buying food more consciously makes me enjoy my meals much more.

 

Within this comparison, the icecream seemed to be the most controversial. The first coming in a robust plastic box that could be reused, which would have saved me a lot of money on food containers. The latter came in thin cardboard only, not even foil on the inside.

I could replace most of the plastic by paper and glass, although many products can not completely refrain from using plastic. And even if you can not completely refrain from buying things wrapped in plastic, because there are no alternative products, you can reuse some of the plastic boxes, not forgetting to recycle them in the end.

Jasmin Grossmann

Is cooking up insects for dinner an answer to increasing food shortages?

 Would you eat a seasoned and fried cricket or locust? Most of us would recoil at the thought. However, after a bit of research into enantiomophagy (the consumption of insects as food) it dawned on me how common it is around the globe to consume insects as a cheap and adequate source of protein and nutrients. Some of the most popular insects are mealworms, crickets, locusts and various beetle grubs, particulary so in developing regions of of Latin America, Africa, Asia and Oceania.

I believe that the worlds population today consumes and produces too much meat, especially beef. The raising of livestock is slowly but surely destroying our planet’s biodiversity and natural beauty. Animal livestock is the largest anthropogenic user of land and apart from the animal cruelty that takes place, apart from the destruction of native forests to grow animal feed crops, and apart from its contribution to global climate change, it saddens me to think of the volume of meat which is wasted by us in the Western world, while 870 million people worldwide still do not have enough to eat.

The consumption of edible insect species as a food source has been suggested by many scientists and others alike as a more sustainable way of eating. Professor Arnold van Huis, an entomologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands and the author of the UN paper, says eating insects has advantages. "There is a meat crisis," he said. "The world population will grow from six billion now to nine billion by 2050 and we know people are consuming more meat. Twenty years ago the average was 20kg, it is now 50kg, and will be 80kg in 20 years. If we continue like this we will need another Earth.” Van Huis is an enthusiast for eating insects. "Most of the world already eats insects," he points out. "It is only in the western world that we don't. Psychologically we have a problem with it. I don't know why, as we eat shrimps, which are very comparable."

So why is enantiomophagy a more sustainable way to eat? In analyses of particular edible insect species, it was found that ectothermic insects can have an energy input to protein ratio as much as 12 times that of endothermic vertebrates. Livestock also contribute hugely to the production of greenhouse gases whereas insects produce very little in comparison despite a higher relative growth rate. In relation to another environmentally damaging practice, some people argue that the use of harmful pesticides is economically damaging and insufficient due to the fact that the insects killed by this practice can contain up to 75% protein, while the crop being protected by their destruction often contain no more than 14%. This strikes me as a typical example of a human activity which doesnt make any sense economically.

I realize that it could also be of some concern that if insects became globally more popular as food, their populations may decline, a common outcome of human exploitation, such as with the decline of fish in the sea or threat to the survival of the honey bee. It cannot be denied however that farming insects would be a lot more sustainable than farming cattle or pigs.

An interest in entomophagy is slowly growing in the developed world in parts of the US and Europe. It seems that its novelty is catching peoples attention and time will tell as to whether it will take a stronger, more permanent hold or if the novelty will simply wear off.

A good website  ia all that is required to find out which restaurants are currently offering insects on their menus and if you’re feeling brave, it also has some recipies for people to try out. 1,462 insect species worldwide are currently recorded as edible. So why not give it a go?

Danae Wollan

A sustainable Kitchen

The average kitchen is much akin to a crime scene. It’s not necessarily a conventional crime which has occurred in it though, but a crime against the planet. This is a crime of waste, a rampant problem in the average kitchen. Like a crime scene the kitchen is full of evidence, evidence of this vast waste. It can be seen in the rubbish bin containing uneaten leftovers, and taps that are left running.

Anybody can and everybody should make a step towards sustainable living and this initial step does not have to be a newsworthy gesture. The small things count and if everybody is willing to make a small change for the better soon enough we’ll see a large change for the good. So what better place to start than in your very own kitchen.

A sustainable kitchen is a simple and achievable concept. Food can be saved by avoiding buying items that you know will not be eaten and by eating any leftovers rather than letting them go to waste. Energy can be saved by minimising the use of electric and gas ovens and of electric appliances such as the kettle and microwave. Water can be conserved by not leaving the tap running and secondly by swapping the dishwasher for hand washing, if you were to do this even two days a week you would save 70 litres of water a week, that’s 3640 litres a year! Everybody should make a step towards sustainability, why not step into a sustainable kitchen?

Bébhinn Maguire