Day 3 of a week trying to generate the least amount of long lived rubbish by buying renewable or compostable things. My rules are:
- Focus only on things I buy or consume directly.
- From Monday 20/05 till Sunday 26/05 evening.
- Document what I do buy and questions that arise from this experiment.
For previous days:
Day 3: Wednesday
Commuting by train, tube, bus and taxi(boo)
It seems like I need to find out about the environmental impact of the taxi ride. I guess this goes in the questions section.
Today’s hot drinks was all leaf tea, no sugar in sachets.
Update Someone mentioned you can request electric taxis (I hailed a cab on the street because I was lost and late) but this is a good idea.
Lunch time:
Had lunch at a place with table service. So no waste here. The napkins were paper and they were not the hard kitchen towel type, so I think I can count that as compostable.
I also had table service for dinner.
Later and other questions
After lunch I ordered a coffee and it came with this chocolate coated coffee bean that was wrapped in plastic so I asked if they could put it back and explained why (I don’t mind if they though I was weird, but I just wanted to make sure they didn’t bin it), so I am not counting that as rubbish for today.
Today I bought a potted plant as a gift, the plant had a plastic container. I will count this as my rubbish. On discussing this with a group they made the point that this plastic has a long life of use, and that since it contains a plant, it carbon offsets itself.
Long lived Rubbish for today
- One plant pot.
- Taxi ride (approximately 2+ miles, 25 minutes on the vehicles)
Today’s questions
- Correct ways to calculate the environmental impact of car rides.
- I assume plastic plant pots are not biodegradable, so what is their impact.
- How can one calculate the environmental impact of eating out?
TL;DR
- Taxis and car rides in general, I need to understand their impact when it comes to polluting the air (I see this as my rubbish too)
- Hot drinks seem like a very tricky thing to get whilst being environmentally friendly.
Conclusions from today
Three days into this experiment, the most impactful thing seems to be getting people to about it their everyday rubbish. Many seem interested in improving on this, so when I finish this week I am going to do a summary of the actions that one can take that would reduce the most rubbish, at the same time I think there is nothing like trying it yourself. Also, I am not trying to beat myself up for doing things that I need to do. The experiment was about learning, and see if I can do better, learn, adapt, repeat. If you think doing the experiment would be too hard for you, try to do something you think you can do, or even talking about it helps because it gets people thinking about the rubbish they generate.
Thanks for reading.