It's Still Not Easy Being Green

There are three reasons why most people residing in the UK know the name Dick Strawbridge. He is:
1. The man with the best moustache on British T.V. (and possibly the world)
2. The man behind BBC hit ‘It’s Not Easy Being Green’.
3. The man who was recently robbed of the winner’s crown on Celebrity Masterchef.

His eco house (complete with compost toilets, solar panels, windmill, chickens, and more) is based fairly near to my own home in Cornwall, so a few weeks ago when he popped into the bookshop where I work, my lovely colleague, L, lynched him and his son James (or, as he is widely known amongst the ladies working in our store, ‘Handsome James’) into doing a signing with us. And into judging our staff ‘bake-off’. And I lynched him into talking to me about plastic.

“We just take it for granted, it’s everywhere,” he tells me. “2010 and plastic’s all over the place.

“I’ve heard arguments where plastic can actually be described as being quite environmentally friendly. It doesn’t take a lot of resources to make something which is really quite capable – there’s not much plastic in a plastic bag, if you look at it as a single entity. Sum it up and we got a bit lazy.

“Nowadays,” Dick reminds me, “packaging is all. It’s the big P word; plastic and packaging come together. And it all comes together at a point where we’ve forgotten that is has an impact – and it’s got a detrimental impact, what we’re doing.”

In the Strawbridge household
The mission of Newhouse Farm, the Strawbridge smallholding, is ‘To live a 21st century lifestyle, but to produce little or no waste, and to remove our dependence upon fossil fuels’. With this in mind, I wondered how successfully he manages to avoid plastic creeping into the house.

“Do you know how it gets into our house?” he says. “The internet.” Yup, that sounds familiar.

“That’s a sort of stealth way of doing it. If I was in a shop and somebody tried to give me something, I’d say no; I just don’t even think about it. On the internet, you buy something, all of a sudden it turns up and you just wonder why the hell it came like that.”

I can definitely relate – I’m rapidly learning that, despite constant temptation, it is generally much safer packaging-wise to simply not buy from the internet – unless you contact the seller first and question their packaging policy, like I recently did with Natural Spa Supplies.

Curtailing the plastic mindset
“At the moment plastic is thought of as being cheap, when actually it’s a limited resource,” Dick comments.

Plastic manufacturers only pay for the resources that go into their product; they only consider this one cost of what they are making and sending out into the world, when the reality is that every given item costs the world – both people and the environment – a lot more than just the value of extraction, and manipulation, of resources. For instance, aside from the environmental costs of extraction, there are the costs for disposal of the product after its use: transportation, landfill or recycling, both in economic terms and environmental ones. Dick suggests that these costs be included in the original cost of the product.

“All the way through, these things have pennies and pennies and pennies added to them. Those costs, the person who doesn’t give a **** at the front end, the person who’s actually making it – charge them for the whole cost.

“There are alternatives, without a shadow of a doubt, to everything that we do, but at the moment it is the economics that are driving it. [Given current economic issues] can we afford to give businesses more limitations and make it more expensive?” he asks.

And: “I think actually we can,” he says.

This, essentially, is life cycle analysis. The producer should consider all the potential impacts of their product, and build the costs of those costs into the product. This may make everything a lot more expensive – but only because the monetary cost of what we’re consuming will more effectively reflect the real-world cost of that consumption. At the moment, what we pay for goods doesn’t reflect this. It makes so much sense the more I think about it. Perhaps by having to pay more for an item, it’ll make me question whether I really need it? More often than not, I don’t need it – I just want it, and that is something entirely different.

Innovation
There’s no doubt that Dick Strawbridge has got a big personality. Sitting cross-legged on the floor of our small staff room, tasting the various cakes and bread that have been offered up by the booksellers for his scrutiny, he makes jokes, tells anecdotes, and discusses ideas; his thoughts seem to travel a mile a minute. But when it comes to issues of sustainability and being green, he’s extremely earnest.

“We need innovation,” he tells me.

“In October I’ll be launching at St Austell Asda the first paper two litre milk bottle. It’s got some plastic in it, but it’s mainly compressed paper, from the Green Bottle Company. I’m getting involved because I reckon that in four or five years the plastic milk bottle and plastic bottles could actually be on their way out. Because if this functions the way it should do, if it does the job properly, how do you justify using plastic? Very exciting sort of move. We need something like that; we need innovation.”

And finally… the three R’s
“The old mantra, ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’, it’s not very sexy anymore.”

Do they still teach this in schools, I wonder, or has it fallen by the wayside? Innovation is important, extremely important, finding new ways of making things, but perhaps more important than new technology is to change our habits.

“Reducing what we use in the first place is much better than saying, ‘Ah, I’ve got this compostable bag’. We have to get into the frame of mind where people are actually using less. We don’t need to come up with another technical solution, just don’t use as much. That’s the way forward.”

Learn more!
Dick and James Strawbridge's newest book, Practical Self Sufficiency, is out now. And if you want to learn hands on about making your own home more sustainable, the Strawbridges are running a selection of courses from Newhouse Farm, or have dinner cooked for you!

Bron Gets the Message?

‘I bought this entirely based on it’s packaging,’ Bron tells me, holding up a six pack of beer.

Yes! I think. Does this mean he’s finally starting to get the idea?

‘Well, and because they were cheap,’ he adds.

Ok, I guess that was inevitable, but at least he still chose the plastic-free ones. He goes on to tell me he had three options, going by the price: a four pack of cans, which were held together with those horrid plastic rings that are always pictured in the news getting wrapped around some poor creature’s neck. Or there was another brand, which was entirely cased in plastic and so even worse.

So, congratulations to the company whose beer comes in green glass bottles, the pack held together by cardboard. And congratulations to Bron for thinking through his options and actually going for the plastic-free choice. Maybe there’s hope for him yet.

Bron's Breakfast

In the three plus years that Bron and I have been together, I’ve never known him to have more than a banana for his breakfast before going to work in the morning. Actually, neither of us have ever really bothered with breakfast, as that little bit of extra sleep has always won out over food. But suddenly, since being made redundant in August, he’s discovered the power of breakfasting.

It sounds like a good thing – and it is a good thing, I suppose. That mysterious ‘they’ always say that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, after all. Except that Bron’s new breakfast fetish means he - or we - have started buying three key ingredients we never really bought before: milk (plastic bottle), Kellogg’s Special K cereal (cardboard box, but plastic bag inside), and walnuts (plastic bag). Not exactly reducing our plastic intake.

How did this happen? I can’t exactly stop him, but I must admit I feel somewhat annoyed about it.

And then I find myself pouring out a bowl of cereal when I get home from work, ‘Just to tide me over until tea is ready.’ Damn! So now I’m helping him get through this plastic badness even quicker. Besides which, I’ve been reading Felicity Lawrence’s book ‘Eat Your Heart Out’ which has some very bad things indeed to say about cereals. I feel so wrong on so many counts, but temptation is such a hard thing to conquer.

I must try harder to convince Bron of his evil plastic and breakfasting ways, except my track record on this count is rather slim to date as he seems to have developed immunity to my charms. I guess he knows me too well and can see what’s coming… I’ll have to think up some new tactics.

Cut Plastic: Get a Veg Box

Caterpillars? Yummy, just what every good diet needs.

Or not: I now feel a little scared to eat my broccoli without completely mushing it up to make sure it really is just broccoli. But, that said, caterpillars are the only downside I’ve come across with ordering a weekly veg box.

Riverford Farm is my new big thing. Bron and I have been ordering fruit and vegetables from them since the start of summer, and they are amazing. Each week a beautiful cardboard box almost miraculously appears in my shed, full of organic vegetables that are so fresh they still have the earth on them. Oh, and the occasional caterpillar.

Even better than the vegetables (and eggs, and bread, and wine) is Riverford’s packaging policy. Send the veg box back each week and it gets re-used. Tomatoes and mushrooms arrive in lovely little cardboard punnets that can go in your recycling, or can be re-used as seed trays, for storage, or for your child to make that robot they’ve been going on about for the last three days. Bananas, apples, courgettes, and that caterpillary broccoli all come in paper bags.

I’ve never received that bane of vegetable packaging, the plastic punnet, but I should probably confess that they do, on occasion, use plastic bags. But it's not an absolute disaster because Riverford recycles them. Therefore, I don’t count them as plastic entering my home because I know it’s only on a temporary basis. They never go anywhere near my bin: I simply send them back with the empty box. I’m always wondering how much of the plastic that goes out with my recycling actually gets recycled, but by sending these bags back to their source, I feel confident that they really are.