Here's a little conundrum: is it "zero waste" to buy knock off food from the supermarket that might otherwise have been thrown away? Let's assume that you're buying an item just before closing time that nobody else would have bought, and it's wrapped in the usual excessive packaging. The supermarket aren't allowed to sell it after midnight, so they throw it out. The food goes uneaten, and rots, and the plastic ends up in a landfill, the sea, and maybe even, as the news reports this week, in our tap water. Definitely not zero waste. Or, maybe, a perverse kind of neo-ecosystem. (See below).
But now it's yours, and you've eaten the contents (well done) but you're left with packaging you wouldn't otherwise have bought. You've accumulated a waste deficit, so to speak. So this isn't zero waste, either.
The solution? Reuse or recycle. Simple? Let's think.
Today I'm left with these plastic trays, that until very recently contained vegetable spring rolls. "Best before" today. They tasted average. It occurs to me they could make handy little seed trays for the greenhouse in spring. I've amassed quite a collection of such receptacles, and though next year I intend to grow as many plants (edible or otherwise as I possibly can) on my allotment, as well as indoors, sooner or later I'll reach a personal "peak plastic".
Perhaps a way to think might be as if we each have a "waste quota". I'm beginning to explore permaculture and the idea of biomimicry, and the adage that's rattling in my head is how "nature wastes nothing". It rained sporadically yesterday, so in between allotment tasks I took refuge in the shed and pondered this. It appears to be true.
The rain falls and is soaked into the soil, where the worms chew and poo. Plants grow, bees pollinate them drink the water and eat the soil, and grow into food for humans and other animals. When the plants die, they rot into the soil again. The water evaporates, and swirls in the air, and falls again, elsewhere. This and many other eco-cycles continue as they have for billions of years, forever adapting and adjusting to tiny changes, natural or otherwise. It's actually one of the first things I remember learning at school. These truths are all around us, but we barely think about them. We should. Nature wastes nothing. We waste almost everything. We are young, and nature is very, very old. We have so much to learn.
Again, my thoughts turn to the individual, and how limited s/he is. The individual wastes easily: the group, less so. Might we start sharing our waste and excess? "One man's trash is another man's treasure". A library of plastic? Such things might be the future.
Every day now I gather any food scraps into a bag and nip over to the allotment to add them to the compost. This week I freed most of the wooden crates from the clutches of the bindweed and set them up to hold organic matter removed, to be added to my compost bin as space emerges. Through I definitely wouldn't sit on it (blackberry brambles in my bum, no thanks) it is in all other respects more beautiful than than my plastic-stuffed sofa, changing every moment, returning to the earth, making itself useful. I daydream of weaving airtight packaging from bindweed, or hollowing out thorn-plucked brambles into drinking straws. The sofa never changes. The walls between us and the world are mostly bare. And on the other side...
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