How to have an Eco Wedding

1.
Befriend an alpaca farmer with land on the north side of Dartmoor that includes within it not only space for camping but also an ancient, double-tiered stone circle. Then find a pagan/wiccan priestess who can hold a handfasting in said stone circle.

2.
Envision a day in early spring where the sun is going to shine magnificently, even though the days on either side are filled with rain, then create and print your own invitations and mail them to all your friends, preferably including those with hippy and eco know-how, as well those who automatically bring along with them skills in guitar playing, drumming, and storytelling.

3.
Along with finding the standard pre-requisites such as hay bales, a marquee, a turkish tent decked out with comfy cushions, a maypole, and a teepee, recruit a friend to spit-roast an organic pig, then choose a best man with circus skills and bridesmaids who can weave flowers into crowns. Decorate the field with willow boughs in a big heart shape, along with ribbons and paper lanterns.
                                                                                    4.

Source reduced-plastic, compostable tableware such as Green Gate’s PLA lined cups*, wooden knives and forks, and paper plates made from waste sugar cane pulp. Within the celebration field, set up a loudly labelled recycling/waste disposal area to ensure that as little end waste as possible is produced.

5.
Encourage all local guests to bring a plate of food with them to share for lunch, and organise carob brownies, locally baked bread, local cheeses, and a butterbean stew for the evening meal. All organic, of course. Oh, and then pick some nettles from the field next door to add to the stew.

6.
Don’t stand on ceremony and don’t be shy for the handfasting itself. If it’s a little boggy from the rain leading up to your special day, just take off your shoes and get the mud between your toes. Be emotional, and share those emotions and your love with everyone around you. And, if it really is your special day, chances are that a hawk will circle in the blue skies above whilst you’re saying your vows.

7.
Ask your circus-skilled friend and his theatre partner to put on a skit after lunch, to keep the guests entertained, and then get him to do a fire show once it gets dark. Make sure you’ve prepared a big central fire for the evening too, and then scatter cross-cut fire logs and tea-lights in glass jars around the field to create a really spectacular atmosphere.

8.
Party into the night, camp out in the field next door, and be woken in the morning by the singing birds**. As guests part for their journeys onward and outward, hand out little packets of wild seeds and happy blessings for them to sow.

Thanks Rich and Dawn for including me in your special day, for being so loving, and for living true to your beliefs and ideals. You’re an example to us all.



* This is a biodegradable plastic made out of corn starch or other other plant sources and are thus compostable. I'm always a tad sceptical about so-called compostable plastics because - as with most things in life - there are certain strings attached, such as certain temperatures needing to be reached before composting is complete. I've never seen the process in action for myself, and the pictures of this material breaking down always show a collect of small particles left at the end, so I am always left wondering: what happens to those particles? Are they organic? Can organisms eat them? Or are they teeny little plastic particles that will be left in the environment. Natureworks LLC are the main company manufacturing PLA: perhaps they'd like to invite me to their premises to demonstrate for the effectiveness of their technology?

** Ok, I'll admit it, I didn't camp. It was freezing! Plus camping on my own didn't really appeal. But I went back for brunch the next morning and was reliably told that the birds did sing and that it was lovely.

Life's little luxuries

Toilet roll. One of the nicest of modern conventions, yet in some ways another bane of my life. In my bid to be plastic-free, acquiring toilet roll is one of my ongoing problems.

Plastic-free toilet roll just doesn’t seem to exist. At least, not in the dark depths of Cornwall in which I live. Toilet roll is paper after all, surely it wouldn’t be that difficult to wrap it in a thin paper covering rather plastic? What do I do? Give up toilet roll?

The Moneyless Man
I have recently finished reading a new book by Mark Boyle, the founder of the Freeconomy community. Titled ‘The Moneyless Man’, it recounts a year spent – you guessed it – living without money. It’s a really interesting read which I highly recommend. Very inspiring in many ways, it forced me to consider my own views and wants in terms of the type of lifestyle I seek, though the ultimate conclusion I drew was that I couldn’t go as far as he has. Not without ditching Bron, anyway, as he’s made it very clear to me that that is well beyond what he deems acceptable.

So what does the moneyless man use for toilet roll? If I remember correctly, newspaper - for the most part. But more importantly are the issues he raises about the modern convenience that is the toilet. I won’t go into a lot of detail here as I’m getting off topic, suffice to say that using a resource as vital and valuable as water to defecate in is, frankly, a bit stupid. Compost toilets are the more sensible route.

Ecoleaf and Bioplast
So, newspaper. I have yet to suggest this idea to Bron, but I suspect I can already his reaction. ‘No way!’ would probably be the most polite way to sum up what I can imagine his answer would be.

Which leaves me rather limited options, given as I don’t think either he, our neighbours, or our landlady would go for the construction of a human compost area in our tiddly, heavily overlooked back garden either. For the time being, therefore, I have settled on Ecoleaf toilet rolls. The packaging on these, though plastic, says, ‘100% compostable wrap; 100% recycled paper; 100% commitment’.

100% compostable? This brings me right back to the degradable plastics debate started in my previous post, ‘Degradable Bin Bags?’ But, ‘Ecoleaf toilet tissue is wrapped in Bioplast, a plasticizer-free and fully compostable packaging. It will biodegrade TOTALLY under the influence of soil-based micro-organisms without the need for human intervention. Made from potato starch and natural co-polymers, it is both sustainable and renewable. This product has been designed to be fully compostable.’

This packaging sounds like a degradable plastic in the more real sense than the D2W bin bags. The packaging lists it’s manufacturer as ‘Bioplast’, but when I visit their website I find myself incredibly confused - the description of their manufacturing process is so badly written that I could barely make head nor tail of it - which leaves me clueless when it comes to the details behind this particular product. So I decided to email them, to which their response has left me even more confused. Their product isn’t yet on the market, they tell me, so I must be barking up the wrong tree. Humph. So I try emailing Suma, the company behind the Ecoleaf brand, but receive absolutely no response at all from them. Humph again.

EN 13432
The best I can do is extend from the quote on the packaging. Being made from potato starch is an excellent start – a truly natural and easily degraded material - although I’d like to know what exactly the natural co-polymers they refer to are. The packaging also states that the plastic certified EN 13432.

EN 13432 is an internationally agreed standard that defines a plastic’s ability to degrade under commercial composting conditions. The advertisement of this standard on a plastic product is a good sign. However, the key term in the standard’s definition is ‘commercial’. Commercial, or industrial, composting units are much more tightly controlled systems than what the average citizen is likely to have in their back garden, creating and maintaining the most ideal composting environment, from temperature to PH and oxygen flow. This means that the composting process will be much quicker and more thorough than if I use my own composting bin. The issue with this is that once I put my rubbish out for the bin men to collect it, I don’t know whether it’ll be added to landfill or thrown in a composter – and so, even though the process may not be as efficient in my own bin, that’s what I plan to use, because at least I can be sure it is at least being given the opportunity to compost. I’ll just have to view it as a personal experiment to find out what will actually happen.

Read more about EN13432 and the OK Compost standards.

Degradable Bin Bags?

The biodegradability of biodegradable-classed plastics is a subject that I have a multitude of questions about. ‘100% degradable’ plastic products shout – but so often it turns out that this is not exactly true. For starters, they will often only degrade under very specific conditions and, secondly, ‘100%’ seems to be a description that is open to interpretation.

100%?
Take this photo (courtesy of Corbis), which shows how a biodegradable plastic fork disintegrates over a period of months. Cool huh? Ironically, though, the caption for the image on Corbis’ website reads ‘….. completely degrades’. Errr… Sorry to burst the photographer’s bubble, but there’s still quite a bit of visible material left in the final picture there, so I’m thinking it hasn’t ‘completely degraded’ at all. Maybe it’s no longer recognisable as a fork, but its basic materials are still pretty much in existence.

A biodegradable minefield
As far as I can tell, there are lots of different approaches that manufacturers of purportedly degradable plastics can take – some of them, I believe, are genuine; some not so. It’s certainly a minefield, and one that I’m still trying to find a safe path through, so I won’t go into a lot of detail here today. But, there are bio plastics that are completely composed of natural materials (rather than oil-based, though oil is, technically, a natural material). And then there are plastics that are made up of a web of traditional plastic molecules which are held together by degradable materials – the strands holding them together degrade, leaving lots of teeny tiny pieces of non-degradable plastic still floating around in the environment. The difficulty for us as consumers is figuring out which are really degradable, and which are pseudo-degradable.

And so to bin bags
Which brings me to the initial point of this particular post: degradable bin bags.

To be honest, degradable bin bags are a bit of a misnomer. This is because in order for fully biological bioplastics to degrade properly, they really need some good composting conditions: carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, heat and water. Without these, nothing will degrade – think of the permafrost men, frozen forever in virtually their original state. And in your average landfill, where most of our household bin bags wind up, these conditions are severely lacking. So even if you’re good and green and buy those special degradable bin bags, chances are they’ll never have the opportunity to degrade.

Unfortunately, Bron and I have yet to reduce our waste to a zero point – we’re not too bad, all told, but we still have our weekly deposit on the lawn for the bin men to collect, mostly thanks to the cat who, even in the summer weather, still steadfastly uses her litter tray. So when it came to deciding whether to use degradable bin bags or not, I really wasn’t sure whether there much point to it or not. Bron thought “no”, but I figured at least it’s slightly better than a completely non-degradable one. Off to Archie Browns I went, one of my local health stores, where they sell bags produced by Symphony Environmental.

The D2W additive
‘Fact,’ the packaging on these bin bags states. ‘This plastic really is 100% degradable. Fantastic!’

How? I wondered. ‘Our d2w® additive put into the plastic at the extrusion stage will make the finished product "oxo-biodegradable" so that it will degrade and disappear in a short timescale, leaving no fragments, no methane and no harmful residues,’ explains their website, www.degradable.co.uk

‘The degradation process is initiated at the time the polyethylene or polypropylene is extruded by the inclusion of a small amount of a special additive.’ So they still contain traditional polymers then? They’re not made from corn starch, or a similar alternative.

But wait, this is a good thing, they say, because it means the bags do ‘not need a biologically active environment to start degrading - this will happen even if the plastic is left in the open air! … For this reason in particular, d2w™ 'totally degradable' plastic is superior to 'bio-degradable' which requires the plastic to be in a biologically active environment (for example, by being buried in the ground) before the degradation process is initiated.’ Which gets us over the compostable-plastic-doesn’t-compost-in-the-landfill issue I suppose.

I’m really not sure what to think at this point. Is this stuff good or bad? Apparently the additive used speeds up the natural degradation of plastic that would otherwise take tens or hundreds of years, so that the bags quite quickly break down into flake-sized pieces. At this point, because the polymer chains have been reduced in length, oxygen is able to bond with the carbon in the chain, forming CO2. Is this just theory or does it actually happen in the environment? The next bit I don’t quite understand – the formation of CO2 further reduces the flakes in size which makes them ‘water wettable’. Water wettable? What does that mean? Despite my science degree, my biology and chemistry knowledge, I have never heard this term before. Apparently being water wettable means that micro-organisms can access the chemicals in the polymer chains.

Am I any the wiser? I still don’t know. It all sounds quite reasonable, yet I can’t help having my suspicions. Or am I just being negative? After everything I’ve read about how difficult it is for polymers to break down, this just sounds a bit too easy. I believe that the bags will break down into flakes, but I wonder how persistent those flakes ultimately are in the environment? Even if the bags don’t need composting conditions to get to this stage, thanks to the D2W additive, if the flakes then need micro-organisms to further degrade them, that does imply a composting situation – which, I mentioned earlier, won’t be found in a typical landfill situation.

The debate continues
Perhaps these bags aren’t the ultimate solution, but are they better than the standard bin bag? Is this ‘100% degrading’? What about the microscopic bits of plastic that wind up in the environment waiting for some happy micro-organism to munch on? When exposed to wider ecosystems, these are arguably more damaging to wildlife than more solid forms of the material are, as Professor Richard Thompson can attest. I am yet to be convinced by the eco-credentials of this particular brand of degradable plastic.

A Mobile Quandary, part 2

I wrote a few weeks ago about my mobile quandary: my current mobile phone is on its last legs and, as hard as I try, I can’t envisage my life without a mobile phone these days. Especially given as my landline has, for no apparent reason, randomly decided to give up the ghost.

The Bamboo Alternative
I mentioned before that I didn’t think it was possible to get a phone that wasn’t plastic. It still isn’t possible for me to get one, but a little further research has revealed that such phones do exist, thanks to the wonder of bamboo. In fact, it seems that there are several different versions of bamboo phones out there in the internet ether. There is the wind-up bamboo phone which won the 2008 Greener Gadgets design competition, or the Chute Smartphone by Michael Laut. Problem is, there doesn’t seem to be any way to actually buy one of these, though I’m sure it would cost me a good chunk of my month’s rent even I could. But they’re very pretty and sound like they have excellent eco credentials, so if anyone knows how I can get my hands on one please do tell me.

Eco Options
It also turns out that Sony Ericksson are not the only phone manufacturers testing out the eco waters. Nokia, Samsung, and Motorola have all been up to it as well. I particularly recommend taking a look at the Nokia site, if only for an example of a beautiful piece of marketing and presentation. And it does the job: I want one of these phones. A pity that it’s several years old and now appears to be obsolete. At least, no network I can find lists this particular phone, the 3110 Evolve, as being available.

But…
What each of these phones have in common is the use of bioplastics, plastic engineered from plants, such as corn, rather than from petrochemicals. While this is generally a good thing, bioplastics have their own problems too, and are not as clear-cut environmentally friendly as many people would like to think. Perhaps the most obvious of these is the use of what would otherwise be a food crop for constructing technology. Is this ethical given the number of people in the world who don’t have enough to eat?

Either way, the question I asked before has changed slightly. If everyone has the capability to produce mobiles that are at least slightly more environmentally considerate – as a mobile phone goes, anyhow – then why not apply this technology to all phones?