Well we’ve just finished a dinner of home cooked hamburgers – 4 hamburgers came out at a total of $7.20 plus electricity costs. I’m happy with that. Once we’ve saved enough money to landscape our property I’ll be able to grow some of my own vegetables and hopefully get the price of my meals down a bit more.
An article in the national paper’s Greenzone section today (Dominion post) was looking at the NZ plastic bag situation. It brought up some points that I have been discussing in the last few weeks regarding what happens when you stop taking plastic bags and therefore run out of them in your house!. The article gave the statistic that sales of heavy kitchen rubbish bags rose 15 per cent last year presumably because of people no longer having plastic bags to use in their rubbish bins. So one form of plastic is reduced while another is increased!
The article also noted that although biodegradable bags are available in NZ they are not available in supermarkets for shoppers to easily purchase. This is something that I have been noticing about a lot of products that are more enviro – friendly. Many of them require the consumer to order from websites or to go to special shops. If we know of good products I guess we really have a responsibility as consumers to start asking supermarkets for them to see if we can bring about a change.
Update on my no plastic bag project: I am still using newspaper to line my kitchen rubbish bin and it’s going great but I think it works well because we have a small rubbish bin so the paper lines it really well forming a sort of paper bucket.